Michio Takeyama's Harp of Burma

My Charles Tuttle edition of Howard Hibbett's 1966 translation of Michio Takeyama's Harp of Burma (1946) was in a box of books that Tony Hunt gave me when he moved a few years ago, I think. I had no idea what it was, but I put it in the Stack after reading J. G. Farrell's The Singapore Grip (1978), the last novel in Farrell's "Empire Trilogy." It occurred to me that this book was about Japanese soldiers fighting the British in Burma, and therefore in the same army that captures Singapore in 1939, the event at the center of The Singapore Grip. So I queued it up.

A charming and thoughtful book, written originally for children, by a Japanese specialist in German literature who publicly warned against the Nazis and who wrote this book in the countryside of occupied Japan, his Tokyo house having been destroyed in air raids. It is short, 132 pages organized around three sections, basically three overlapping stories. Captain Inoye, the young commanding officer, is a music teacher and choirmaster, and he develops the esprit de corps of his unit by teaching the men to sing. These soldiers are in dire circumstances, slogging through mountain jungle far from home punctuated by deadly combat skirmishes against usually superior British forces, culminating in their surrender after the surrender of Japan and their transport to a prisoner of war camp in Malaysia. In 1956 the director Kon Ichikawa had a popular hit with his film version The Burmese Harp.

Their music helps them in all sorts of ways, even at one point to avoid a major battle that would certainly have killed most of them. Above all they have high morale as the music has taught them to function as a group. A pivotal character is Private Mizushima, the company harpist and a wily and courageous infantryman who is already a hero when he sets off to try to help talk down another group of Japanese soldiers who are entrenched on a rocky peak and refuse to surrender. One appealing point here is the discussion of surrender, it's clear that most units surrendered when they were convinced that Japan had done so, and the infamous holdouts were much fewer in number.

The book also spends a good deal of time with Burmese Buddhism, a variant of the conservative Therevada tradition, and a community that is under great siege from the villainous generals who rule "Myanmar" today. This is intertwined with a discussion of moral obligation for Japanese soldiers, with a number of characters openly wondering if imperial Japan lost its spiritual bearings. An antiwar message delivered with modesty and charming color.

Nina Vida's Texicans

I was flattered when Nina Vida, the author of seven well-regarded novels, sent me a copy of The Texicans last year. Subsequently we became facebook friends and I added her blog to my blogroll. Now her revisionist Western, set in 1840s Texas, has finally made it through the Stack. Of course I don't know what to expect with submitted novels. Most of the books that get into the Stack are chosen by me, not the other way around. But I'm definitely open to suggestion, I add books that people mention to me, that are on lists of various kinds, that sound from a description like they might be up my alley and so on. That someone else thought that I might like a book is as rigorous a filter as any, really.

And I did like The Texicans. It is a didactic, revisionist Western that makes sure to keep the reader entertained, written for story, and wearing what is clearly a good deal of research lightly. She presents European settlers as such, not as homogenized American cowboys, and she does not shy away from either the negative aspects of the Europeans nor the violent circumstances they encounter, notably violent and sadistic Comanche Indians. The Texas Rangers have deteriorated, following the end of the Mexican-American War and Texas's annexation by the US, into paramilitary bands that lynch blacks, hunt Indians and persecute Mexicans: right-wing vigilantes. There are slave-holding settlers from the South, and well-to-do Mexicans as well as poor Mexicans live in the same communities, more or less, as the whites.

The protagonist, Joseph Kimmel, is Jewish, and a curious character. He is intensely moral, brave, hardworking. He is also something of a masochist and a pushover. Like many people with personal boundary problems, he doesn't really like people too much; they inevitably inflict pain, it seems. But once involved he is ferociously loyal. His sense of duty prevents him from following his own desires, especially his desire for Aurelia, a Mexican woman with traditional herbalist knowledge who has been cast to the winds by a cholera epidemic. He remains with Katrin, an Alsatian refugee who he initially marries to save from a Comanche chieftain.

A master at this sort of thing is Annie Proulx, another contemporary is Louis Erdrich. They are bounded on one hand by the new revisionist Westerns (the avatar is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, but the genre's purest expression is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian), and on the other by the vibrant post-colonial North American woman's novel (For example Toni Morrison, one of the continent's greatest living writers, and Barbara Kingsolver, whose influence surpasses her fame).

Nina Vida's technique is very much to show rather than to tell, and the psychology of her characters comes to us only through their actions. All are virtuous, but none are entirely sympathetic. They are used to rough justice and suffering and don't expect much from one another. It is not a character-based novel, it is a story. Readers of historical novels, students of the West, and enthusiasts for the contemporary American novel will find much to admire.

2666

When G. bought me Farrar, Straus and Giroux's edition of Natasha Wimmer's 2008 English translation of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, I hesitated to dive into it. Not because I didn't want to read it, but the opposite: it was a book that I wanted to read with care (Bolaño's last work and his self-described magnum opus), and it is gargantuan: this very nice, even loving, edition comes as three volumes in a box, and runs to 893 pages. But G. knew how much I'd loved By Night in Chile (2000) and The Savage Detectives (1998) and asked what was I waiting for? Then I thought that I'd read it one volume at a time, putting the next volume in the Stack as I finished the first one (like I'm doing with Beckett's Trilogy right now). But when I finished the first volume I just kept going, actually I couldn't put it down until I had devoured the whole thing, and I think that that is the right way to read it and probably the way Bolaño would have wanted it to be read. Certainly each section is meant to be appreciated in relation to the others, and above all to the central section about the (actual and ongoing) murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, which Bolaño here calls Santa Teresa.

Saint Theresa of Avila is a 15th century Spanish Catholic mystic who writes about her ecstatic experiences of being penetrated by Jesus's shafts of light. Bolaño gives us the endless litany of murders of women, mostly young (as young as 10 and 12 in fact), mostly workers in the maquiladoras (factories) run by multinationals in and around Ciudad Juarez, located near the US border in the Sonora Desert. They are usually raped. They are very often strangled, and there are patterns of mutilation that suggest a serial killer, but the serial killer or killers is mixed in among a larger group of murderers, including the usual run of homicidally possessive boyfriends, violent gangs of narcotraficantes, etc. The police detectives occasionally pick off the perpetrator without much trouble, at other times they hang murder charges on suspects in order to appear to be making progress (they beat suspects for days during "interrogations"). Even so half or more of the hundreds of murders go unsolved.

Obscene violence of this magnitude must indicate, Bolaño thinks, "the secret of the universe." Perhaps better to say the secret of our moral and spiritual condition. The meaning of our lives, or at least the potential for our lives to have meaning, confronts us in the form of our in-"humanity." Bolaño wants to limn the connection between ordinary citizens and those who actually transgress the farthest boundaries of compassion. The man raping, torturing and murdering a 12-year-old girl (or anyone) approaches the meaning of life at the other extreme, and the victims, like Saint Theresa, can also be seen to be experiencing the extremity of being. The writer too can pursue true being (true meaningfulness) as a writer by going to this place. The only possible absolution can only be real action resulting from recognition of collective guilt.

This gets to Bolaño's obsession with the Nazis and the Holocaust. This preoccupation of his can seem almost quaint 65 years after WWII, in these anti-American days, and I am only speculating about the psychological dynamic Bolaño had with the Nazis. But I think he identified Hitler's National Socialist movement, more than colonialism's feral capitalism, with the right-wing ideology he saw in Latin America: totalizing and yet nihilistic, a vehicle for impunity, something driven more by passion than expediency. Bolaño suggests that the violence in Ciudad Juarez is the identical wave of violence surging through the world as the one that swamped Europe in the 1940s, still sloshing across Mexico now by way of the guerras sucias in Patagonia in the 1970s and the escuadrillas de muerte of Central America in the 1980s.

The devil, for Bolaño, comes from within. He presents a straightforward diagnosis of the Ciudad Juarez murders: endemically corrupt local police and politicians work for money, and the wealthy and the dangerous are protected by an attitude that accepts no responsibility for actually confronting injustice. The situation is to be maintained. In fact, the murdered women are part of the "raw material" of the place: they are used by the maquiladoras and then used by local predators and even the police, lawyers, journalists and others make a living to some degree from their victimization. A homicidal system, in short.

The novel is also Bolaño's ultimate statement about the role of the writer in society, another of his grand obsessions. For one thing, he rejects the ideal of the writer as a kind of little god, setting up a self-contained world with a definite "message," and he challenges the conventional reader who expects this tidily finished product. Maybe, after all, there is no god, and maybe the world doesn't make sense. The most valuable insight of existentialist philosophy (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) is that true morality is only possible against the background of a purely amoral universe, with its profusion of coincidence, absurdity, randomness and, yes, cruelty and heartlessness. Everything in Bolaños's universe ties together, but in the most capricious, absurd, tragic and really funny ways. One of the things I like most about Bolaño is his insistence on showing us the universe as it really is. Bless me if the son of a bitch isn't bringing the Enlightenment to Latin American literature, an achievement that puts him in league with Borges (no one is in league with Cervantes).

Which brings me to the title, 2666. It is a date, a year. A year when things will happen, things as outrageous as what is happening now (there are characters in Bolaño's writings who don't care to stay up drinking all night, who aren't potentially available for sex. It's just that Bolaño has no interest in such people). The mind boggles and can't place a value on this date, 656 years from my writing these words, imagine the world of 1354, some of you can do that better than others: what significance does it have for us? Bolaño is addressing the beat of the butterfly's wings that ultimately causes a universe to disintegrate. Yes, there is causation, yes, there is holism: but the cosmic joke is that it is all well outside of control, and wisdom is the realization that that is a source of humor, and a further level of wisdom is that that does not divest anything of its moral significance. Quite the contrary. When I die and go to the gates of heaven Saint Peter is going to let me in, and you know why? Because I think it's funny! I think that all of that suffering is funny - that is, I can see the humor in it. So God thinks that she might have a beer with me. And that is it. That's the secret of existence.

There is a young detective in 2666, Lalo Cura (la locura: the crazy thing, the craziness, the crazy circumstance). A boy of 19 or 20, chosen by the chief of the bottomlessly corrupt police by virtue of the toughness of his origins, he reads textbooks on police forensics and wants to know what has really happened, unlike most of his colleagues. If you blink you might miss the fact that he is the bastard son of one of the two protagonists of The Savage Detectives (almost certainly Arturo Belano, Belaño's alter ego). The Savage Detectives is to 2666 what V. is to Gravity's Rainbow, an experiment and exploration. The other similarity between the two writers is a paranoia, or a priceless evocation of paranoia, that is supremely provocative by virtue of being burlesque.

The great writer, like the great detective, is the person who can confront the sordid reality of our condition, protected by no god, absent of any justice in the metaphysical sense, and bring the facts back from an impossibly difficult expedition and lay them before us. Thus we are presented with the opportunity for our own redemption.

One last observation: Bolaño achieves his cosmopolitan texture honestly. Mexico, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the US: his evocation of place appears effortless but is the opposite. With just a word or two about a street or a quick meal he somehow summons whole cultures, great depths of variety evoked with tiny details. In The Savage Detectives there was a sense that his persuasive conveying of place was a result of his own vagabondage, and I think that's true; in 2666 we can see that a tremendous amount of research went into the production of the manuscript. This is yet another expression of Bolaño's humility in the face of reality: reality, something a thousand times more bizarre, compelling, obscene and important than anything that anyone could make up. This is the lesson of history.

What a blessing to have this funny earnest writer who gives and gives and gives.

Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure

Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambigue (1961; Grand Prix Litterature d'Afrique Noire, 1962) is another volume from Heinemann's historic African Writers Series. It is Kane's first novel and his most significant work (he spent much of his later life as an administrator for the Senegalese government), written while he was a philosophy student in Paris in the 1950s. It is autobiographical at a deep level, as the protagonist Samba Diallo is born of a high-status family (the "Diallobe"; Kane is of a Fulani political family), receives a traditional Koranic education (i.e. memorizing the Koran) as a child and is then sent to receive a "Western" education in Paris for the anticipated benefit of his society: all in common with Kane himself.

The novel is highly didactic, consisting mostly of dialogues between Samba Diallo and his elders, teachers, and a family of African acquaintances in Paris. The language is elevated and elegant (my Heineman edition is an English translation by Katherine Woods), and the movement from childhood through college and final return to Africa is artfully handled with a sometimes dream-like atmosphere and some nice descriptions of the African sky. Having said that, it is patently a vehicle for a sustained discussion of the relationship of the materialist "West" and traditional religious philosophy. In this case that religion is Islam, which makes the book timely for contemporary readers but also separates it from much of the African literature of the time in that it lacks some of the specificity of place (and ethnicity) one finds in other period works.

There is a psychological undercurrent here that I have not seen mentioned in any of the few scanty discussions of the book I can find by Googling around: the fact that the young man is sent by his elders to a faraway place where he loses his cultural bearings must have been a source of resentment. This after years at the Koranic school where his beloved teacher is very free with corporal punishment which here as in other African novels is presented in graphic detail but not obviously censured. Thus the reader must wonder if some of the internal conflict which is the subject of the book is displaced anger about the denial of self-determination experienced by a tribal scion. I note too that the narrative is coolly controlled and there is never any direct expression of anger, even as the book ends with the young protagonist's apparent death.

Meanwhile the overt message is that the loss of godliness, both in terms of religious dogma and personal spirituality, is too high a price to pay for the worldly advances of Western technological materialism. Of course this is an entirely conservative message. It is also a problem specific to sophisticated, educated elites in the post-colonial world - it is the problem of the college student. Thus the novel does not appear, from my attenuated, strange perspective, as progressive as it must have to African and French readers of the 50s and 60s.

If the status of religion in modern society is a serious interest, this book is an intelligent discussion of that. It also is written at a fine, elegant level. But it is ultimately an evangelical tract and a bit idiosyncratic compared to most of the novels in the African Writers Series.

Undead Beckett, Pt. I

Samuel Beckett has long been one of my "culture gods" (as my poetry professor A. McA. Miller used to say), but it's been years since I read him, so I added the Grove Press omnibus edition of the Trilogy (Molloy, 1951; Malone Dies, 1951; The Unnamable, 1954) to the Stack. Beckett would appreciate that after all these years I don't remember if I actually ever read The Unnamable, and I've definitely got the whole thing mixed up with Watt (1954). I'm rotating the three novels through, so as to consider each on its own, and I'll add Watt to the Stack after I've done with The Unnamable.

In my memory there was a desperately marginalized man shuffling down the mean streets to his doom. And that's not far off from what I find reading Molloy. Sometimes rereading is deflationary, but in this case I find myself thrilled, at the end of the first novel, to be reading Beckett again. He's a marvelous writer, fearless and soulful, technically brilliant. His obsession (and one can see this of course in his plays) is narration. Narration is the structural point where the integrity or lack thereof of the writer is displayed: it is both the linchpin of creativity and the insuperable block to artifice, at least spiritually. Beckett is a supreme artist who cannot bear the hypocrisy of artifice, even as he loses himself in it. Two interrelated effects that are at the center of Beckett's art are distance and unreliability.

There is a signature effect of distancing in the way Beckett presents his characters (narrators). They are presented to us as if totally unfiltered, internal, scatological monologues and all, but in their very perversity there is a license to step back from them, a dehumanizing that presents itself as pure subjectivity. In fact his characters dangle before us like marionettes, mercilessly pilloried like the sinners in Hieronymus Bosch. It is the Narrator, after all, who is our true companion; we accompany Satan, not Job. In this he brought to my mind Flann O'Brien; there is a kind of radical flatness to the world he creates, like a cartoon panel with a minimalist landscape.

At the same time Beckett is the master of the Unreliable Narrator. Not even: the reader is shown early and often that the narrator is perverse, wicked, the subject of the examination. Once this relationship is established there are no end of metanarrative tricks to be pulled - the principal fun of reading Beckett. I thought of James Hogg's incredible Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Which brings me to another point, I don't know what I thought of this thirty years ago reading Beckett as a student: this most modernist of postmoderns is in a major confrontation with Catholicism. I love the list of questions Moran is considering at the end of the book ("5. Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?"). And of course this gets to the contextual difference that I have now as a reader, which is this blog itself: with my focus on Irish literature, I come back to Beckett particularly vigilant about his Irish identity, which mattered little to me thirty years ago. And he is (notwithstanding his obligatory exile, and that he wrote these books in French and then translated them himself into English - not back into English)as Irish as they come. His minimalist landscape is in fact an Irish landscape; his pathetic characters are Molloy, Moran, Malone, Murphy - all one.

The question arises as to his relationship with Joyce. Joyce was a mentor and influence, there is no escaping the issue. It is fatuous at best to attempt a comparison (who was "better"?), but the tortured relationship with the English language is central to both writers. English must be pushed and pulled and violated, it is like the flesh pulling down the spirit. And like the body, eventually the language pulls one in entirely and makes of one a thing. For a brief erotic interlude at least. Ach, how dare I elevate my language? Ego is another big question with both Joyce and Beckett. And me and you. And so it is time to go (my mother said some of these posts are too long anyway). But I will be watching with satisfying anticipation Malone Dies' progress through the Stack.

Bloody Footnote: Thomas Flanagan's "The Year of the French"

I heard about Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French (1979) from some list or other of "100 Best Irish Novels." Turns out that Flanagan is an Irish-American, the Irish have a charming (I find) penchant for simply appropriating any American culture that is Irish enough to the mother country. Hey Ireland: feel free to appropriate me at any time!

Anyway, here we have a fictionalization of the French invasion of Ireland in 1798. A larger force tried to land in 1796 but was turned back by adverse winds. In 1798 Napoleon also was invading Egypt. Wolfe Tone and the French general Humbert extracted promises from the Directory that a larger force would follow if the first invasion achieved success with a popular uprising, but that never materialized. It's tempting to speculate about what might have happened if the French had managed to drive the English off of the island, but on reflection I doubt that the English would ever have given up the fight to retain colonial control over Ireland, or could ever have lost it.

It was a sideshow to the Napoleonic wars, and a pathetic one at that. The Irish had not, and perhaps could not have, achieved the level of military and political organization needed to drive off the English and keep them off. Humbert ended thinking that the Irish were a rabble who deserved the genocidal massacres that followed the rebellion (he and his French soldiers were repatriated under the "rules of honorable warfare"; the Irish peasant fighters were cut down unmercifully, and against the orders of the supreme English commander Cornwallis, their leaders tarred, hanged, and their bodies left on the gibbet to rot).

But Wolfe Tone and Jean-Joseph Humbert worked tirelessly to obtain a small army from the Directory to try to spread the revolution. Humbert gambled that with victory in Ireland he might show up the vainglorious Napoleon with his mad Egyptian adventure. It would be easy to dismiss this book as masculinist literature, with its fictionalization of desperate military campaigns written at the level of the technical maneuvers of field officers, but that would be an unjust error. One of the main points of the book is that professional officers, if they might survive the barrages of the field, had little in common with the peasant boys whom they swept up in their campaigns. Indeed, an honorable end to a campaign from an officer's point of view required a considerable sacrifice of men. The sensibility is reminiscent of Tolstoy's War and Peace (written almost a century after the events it immortalizes), another novel of intellectual learning and one where my standard jape has been "it's better at the war than at the peace."

When, after finishing the novel (never read an introduction before reading a novel!), I read Seamus Deane's introduction my New York Review Books paperback edition, I was taken aback to read that the novel was made into a TV-movie in the 1980s on the basis of its' supposed illustration of the violence and futility of Republican militancy. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a searing indictment of English rule, a stand-out in an immense genre that is obsessed with little else.

But this is far from a war novel alone. It is an immensely learned disquisition on the social and political circumstances of Ireland at the end of the 18th century. It is inevitably somewhat didactic - if you have no intrinsic interest in Irish history you ought not to be here - but it is rich in character and with a deep humanity that reflects years of immersion in the subject combined with a writer's detachment that few might sustain. There are quite a few representative characters - Protestant gentry, landed Catholics, clergymen, rebels, riffraff and heroes. An obvious favorite of the author is Owen McCarthy, Irish-language poet, itinerant teacher, womanizer, brawler and drunkard, famous throughout the Irish-speaking population for his verses but just another bog-trotting paddy to the English. It's good to see a character come to life and start to walk off with the author's book. And there are a good half-dozen other characters who are nearly as finely wrought.

Flanagan went on to add two more novels to make an historical trilogy, The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt(1994), on the strength of this one I'll try the next. Highly recommended, one of the best historical novels I've read. I have to add that while I was reading this G. threw me a bookmark from her extensive collection, this one from the "America's Disabled Veterans": "If you think you can't/ You really must/ In God and our soldiers/ Please keep the trust/...With luck and joy be/ With all who know/ That what you reap,/ Is what you sow." Incredible!

Let me also salute the series New York Review Books Classics, one of the best republishing efforts in the USA in the past 50 years.

El-Nukoya's "Nine Lives": The Ghost of Nigeria Present

I don't remember how I spotted El-Nukoya's novel Nine Lives (2006; ANA/Jacaranda Prize, 2007). I think I was looking at some Nigerian fiction at Amazon and it came up as a "customers who have bought x might like y" suggestion. It's very important for a serious reader to be willing to explore, to invest in chance suggestions, references and even books that just have covers that look interesting (a reason for bookstores in an age when one can get every book that one knows that one wants on-line).

"El-Nukoya" is a Yoruban/Arabic phrase meaning "to select," as in the right path of life, but the cover art promises noirish underground adventure and the novel delivers. It's a neat trick, and a classic one, that the author has here: in the end El-Nukoya's book is critical and moralistic, but I mean at the very end as in the last page or so of this 490-page page-turner. Are all the juicy bits just a vehicle for the underlying evangelism, or is the evangelist moral a useful justification for giving us hundreds of pages of juicy bits? Only El-Nukoya knows for sure. In any event this first novel also shrewdly aims for a middle-brow audience that likes the sort of action that one finds in genre novels (racy romance for the ladies, tough-guy stuff for the guys).

The inescapable trope of African fiction is the bildungsroman, as African characters must suffer and, if they are among those to prevail, learn to be tough. Here we have the story of Olupitan Ogunrinu, smart and talented but out of the village, and his treacherous and tortured, if relentless and fantastic, rise to the top of Nigerian society. At first I wasn't sure of this rough novel, with its' numerous typos and its' somewhat wooden prose, but I ended charmed by it, a real potboiler with lots of sex and intrigue including all sorts of misbehavior from the feckless and disloyal Olupitan. He is a soul in danger, and his devilish compacts seem to damn him. He squanders his poor father's money by flunking out of college and decamping to the US, abandoning his family for years, and even worse things; a bit of business with a religious totem is a grave enough transgression that I thought the whole story would eventually turn on it, but nothing, it seems, is beyond redemption if we turn to God.

An obvious comparison is with Chris Abani, whose Graceland (2004) is the subject of an earlier post here. Abani, the author of several novels, is more technically accomplished than El-Nukoya, but his subject is the corruption of modern Nigerian society. El-Nukoya is deeply involved with this reality as well, of course, but he is more turned inward, and the real issue is the confrontation of the protagonist with his own strengths and weaknesses. For Abani, who writes from exile in California (and who was a victim of political torture in his homeland), Nigeria is stigmatized; El-Nukoya (who also studied in the US) makes it very clear that from his point of view the US, say, or anywhere else is no more safe from sin than Nigeria.

Abani is interesting to an American reader because of his interest in the cultural intersection of the two worlds. El-Nukoya stays tightly focused on his hero's misadventures during the American section and we are not served up any real impressions of that country. This may reflect some prudence on the part of an author who is already dealing with a densely-plotted narrative that spans decades and has dozens of characters. On the other hand there is lots of texture and atmosphere in the Nigerian passages, particularly the ones set in the world of the urban college students.

The most accomplished aspect of Nine Lives, though, is the limning of the little-boy-lost character of Oliputan. He makes bad decisions based on worse judgements, caves in to many of his own most craven weaknesses, and does many good people wrong, but the reader never comes to see him as the bad guy. He forms an obsession of hatred for an upper-class rival and cultivates this resentment for years, but the moral is clear enough that the weight is his to give up. At the same time he is a fantasy character, improbably endowed with an irresistible attraction for women and with the talent to become one of the wealthiest men in the country, only on the condition that he transgress his dignity in the pursuit of the initial capital: your basic hip-hop story.

Anyway I'm glad I encountered this book, it has whet my appetite for some more recent Nigerian fiction. From some subsequent googling around I think I'll try the Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma's Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, the Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi Book of Bones, and the Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. A serious reader ought to be a sucker for a good title: another way to find something good.

Ciaran Carson's Tain

The Tain Bo Cuailnge (the "Cattle Raid of Cooley") is the most famous of a collection of interrelated Old Irish writings known collectively as the "Ulster Cycle," tales of the Uliad, a Celtic people who give modern Ulster its name. These are, alongside the writings of Patrick, the earliest written literature of Irish, apart of course from various Rune-like inscriptions that predate Roman times. The Tain we have today is a compilation from sources from the 12th through the 15th centuries, although the characters, notably Queen Medb of Connacht, and the rough story can be found in poems from the 7th century that themselves refer to the stories as "old knowledge." They are certainly transcriptions of oral histories of great age. Tradition places the action around the time of Christ, although the influence of Christian scribes and scholars makes any reference to Christian connections suspect. Better to say that they are "Iron Age" in provenance, that period in Ireland lasting from around 800BC until the Roman Conquest, which penetrated to the east coast of Ireland in the 2nd century AD but never reached the west coast, which is often considered "Iron Age" until around 500AD.

These tales provide a lot of information about a warrior culture where wealth was measured in cattle and warriors, equipped with elaborate armor, weapons and training, battled each other under strict ritual terms of engagement that are observed by the noble and transgressed by the base. Various deities and spirits are involved in explanations of events. In all of these ways these documents are similar to the Hindu epics such as the Mahabharata, the subject of a recent post here.

However it is clear that these orally-transmitted stories were meant primarily as entertainment, vehicles for local history (there is a pervasive obsession with place-names which purportedly reflect battles and other violent and magical events), and inspiration for young men. Storytellers would try to outdo each other with ever-more fantastic details of battles and the superhuman powers of the men who fought them. The reigning aesthetic is that of the teenager's comic book. Reading the Tain is, I think, a necessary exercise for the serious student of Irish literature (you won't make much sense of Flann O'Brien's famous parody At Swim-Two-Birds without it), but not necessarily for the connoisseur of high literature.

It is a lot of fun, though. The bad guys are the wicked Queen Medb and her husband Ailill and their ally Fergus Mac Roich, exiled former ruler of the Ulstermen. Jealous that her husband has one of the most potent of bulls, Finnbennach, Medb resolves to raid the Ulstermen for Donn Cuailnge, the most potent bull of all. (Fertility is a male virtue in this society where alliances were cemented by marrying the children of powerful families, and noble daughters were often offered as bribes and rewards, as was sex with the queen: Medb offers "her thighs" when expedient, and her daughter Finnabair is offered to seemingly everyone of consequence.) The Ulstermen, meanwhile, are under a curse (the "mesca ulaid") such that they cannot fight for nine days (another allegory of infertility). Thus the defense of Ulster falls to the youth Cu Chulainn.

Cu Chulainn is the legendary hero of Irish literature. He is the Superman of this comic book. He is stabbed and slashed and beaten and bloodied, but he is never defeated. He takes advantage of noble rules of engagement to insist that Medb's army fights him one by one, allowing for the narative of a series of battles. The ultimate contest is with his beloved friend and step-brother Fer Daid, who he kills after three days of fighting during which they hack off pieces of each other "the size of baby's heads." As in the Indian epics, the noble warriors here fight from duty, not from rage.

Such are the bare bones of the story. The reason for posting about it is that I've just read Ciaran Carson's 2007 translation, the first since Thomas Kinsella's breakthrough translation of 1969. Kinsella opened up a whole world of scholarship by making the Tain accessible to a public readership for the first time. Carson has achieved something different: he has taken this text, a patchwork from ancient sources in the first place, with centuries of accretions, in various languages and dialects, some parts in verse, others in vernacular, others in elevated language, and rendered it in beautiful, informal modern English. It is a work of technical brilliance and fearless panache and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Christine Dwyer Hickey's The Dancer

Christine Dwyer Hickey published The Dancer in 1995. It is the first novel in her "Dublin Trilogy," the others are The Gambler (1996) and The Gatemaker (2000). She has since published two more novels: Tatty (2005), which may be her most successful work, about a child of alcoholic parents, and Last Train From Liguria (2009), like her earlier work an historical novel with an Irish woman as protagonist but set in early fascist Italy.

Dwyer Hickey brings a lot to the table and from reading this first novel I suspect she is considerably underrated. She is an ambitious historical novelist who is unafraid of a very big canvas. Structurally she is character-driven, a technique that has earned her a reputation as a "women's writer" although I thought of Dickens and James Plunkett. It is true that this is very much a woman's novel in the sense that the plot has to do with marriage and Austen-like tensions between propriety and personal fulfillment, and it conveys the sexuality of several women from their own points of view. I particularly liked the treatment of Greta, the smart and talented servant who doesn't think that she has much use for men but who just can't seem to keep her skirts down.

I was surprised reading the opening passages to realize that another central character, Kate, had a cleft palate, quite a decision for an author to make especially as this was Dwyer Hickey's first novel, but she has not written a freak show and one comes to appreciate Kate's condition as just another fact of life. Dwyer Hickey is not too rough with her characters and the one true villain is kept at arm's length. It occurred to me that Kate and her siblings, her older sister Maude and her younger brother "the dancer," might comprise a loose allegory for Irishness, Maude as tradition, Kate as damage and the dancer as anti-rational spirit, but that might be stretching a bit. Dwyer Hickey does aim for historical observation and commentary but she tends to keep this element well in the background. She is technically fastidious and careful to always show and never tell.

As to that, she is somewhat uneven stylistically. Perhaps this is by design. The social realism illuminated with internal monologues at times gives way to a much murkier, atmospheric exercise which is, I think, quite a bit more difficult to do well. It may be that Dwyer Hickey is using this mode for deliberate ambiguity; both the beginning and the end of the book have a pea-soup ambiance that is in pretty sharp contrast to, say, the internal narration of the sharp-witted Greta walking down the street.

I enjoyed this novel, from what I've seen Googling around a little I think I'll read Tatty when I get back to Dwyer Hickey sometime. A hard-working, underrated writer who is much more than "chick lit" to be sure.

Nkem Nwankwo

Nkem Nwankwo (1936-2001) was a Nigerian writer (he spent the last part of his life in the US) who wrote three novels, Danda (1964), My Mercedes is Better Than Yours (1975) and The Scapegoat (1984). He also wrote short stories some of which are anthologized under the title Tales Out of School. I have just read Danda as part of my ongoing project of reading West African novels of the 50s and 60s.

This was a comparatively innocent (or a better word would be "optimistic") period when both the novels and the poetry tended to celebrate the positive aspects of traditional African life while also embracing the social responsibility of the artist. Leopold Senghor had edited the first anthology of French-language poetry from the region in 1948; he would go on to be the president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980 as well as a major theorist of post-colonial "negritude." Chinua Achebe (b.1930) published (after some difficulties with finding a publisher) Things Fall Apart in 1958, setting a high standard for regional social criticism that was as critical of traditional cultural injustice (notably injustice towards women) as it was of colonial rapine (I was surprised to learn on Wikipedia just now that he is apparently still with us and a literature professor at Columbia University in New York).

Later on the optimistic dreams of a progressive Africa governed by Africans would come up against harsh realities of entrenched tribalism and a seemingly endemic kleptocracy, particularly in Nigeria, and the relationship between African writers and their governments would become much more problematic. My Mercedes is Better Than Yours represents this harsher, later phase, as one would expect. Today Nigeria is both a huge, cosmopolitan nation and a theater of the worst kind of modern injustices, and many Nigerian intellectuals work in exile.

African novels from the 60s, then, are novels from a land in historical transition. The familiarity of the writer with traditional rural village life is personal and literal, a perspective taken for granted that is difficult to replicate today. There is a great deal of abiding humor, and a great deal of educational content about language and custom. These novels tend to be short and picaresque, and focused on character and family. Our historical perspective gives them a sharp poignancy, but for myself I enjoy visiting this circumscribed world of traditional village life for its own sake: for all the hardship and trouble that we find in the African novel of the 1960s it remains a comforting and humane world, where everyone treats everyone else, friend and foe, as fellow human beings.

This is certainly true of Danda. The title character is the perennial lovable rogue, an essential character in all traditions with deep folkloric roots (classical Chinese and native North American literature share this element, "monkey" and "coyote" respectively). The errant scamp can be simultaneously the bane of authority and the champion of ancient virtues. Danda's father Araba is aging and concerned to maintain his family as ozo, a high social rank among the Ibo. His promising son, Onuma, has long since left for the city and when he returns he does not stay long. Onuma has been Christianized to such an extent that he does not want to participate in traditional obi (village compound) life. The Christian evangelists are a source of conflict because they are at once a high-status group (one must wear nice clothes to the church!) and at the same time a culturally destructive force (imagine having only one wife!). He leaves again much to Araba's disappointment.

Meanwhile Danda is a musician and a layabout who wears bells on his robes, drinks too much palm wine and plays his flute for the workers instead of working himself (not that they mind this - he often helps get things moving). He causes scandals with his blithe seductions of girls and his seemingly irreverent ways (such as carrying a ngwu agelega, a ceremonial staff, when he has not attained the proper status to do so). Like all good "trickster" characters Danda's virtues and vices are difficult to sort out. His wife is angry that he has disappeared on a drunken toot for three days. She is visited by a spirit who stands outside her window excoriating her to be a good wife, but she points out that the voice sounded quite a bit like Danda's friend Nwafo.

This is a serious error on her part. To overtly state that the hovering spirits are in fact human masqueraders is a grave alu (a violation of taboo). It is she who is forced to apologize to the elders. This is a deliciously complicated sequence. The Christians have forbidden the agbogho mnonwu (the spirit masquerade), while the villagers consider denying it something akin to a four-year-old denying Santa Claus (for all the talk of "gravity" the penalties for these formal transgressions are often left unenforced). Dando's motives are strictly selfish - he cares nothing for his own social standing, let alone traditional propriety - and yet it is he who somehow comes to champion tradition. His father, obsessed with tradition, considers Dando to be a failure and a rascal, but Dando is the son who is living out a traditional village life.

It is agreed that if Dando will submit to ritual facial scarification (something he ran from as a child years ago) he may assume the family's traditional leadership role, and this is arranged, but as soon as the knife starts to carve Dando's face he leaps up and flees: another mortification for the long-suffering Araba, whose political enemies are now triumphant. Dando runs away, but some years later, at the death of Araba, Dando returns and takes possession of the obi after all. Does this represent the collapse of tradition, or is Dando in fact the authentic village man?

Nwankwo does not give us any easy answers to these questions. He shows a society in transition and does not pretend to know where it is going. What does come through is that the motives of most of the other characters, be it ambition, greed, modernism or reaction, are impure. It is Dando, who lives in the moment and seeks neither to preserve nor to destroy, who endures as the embodiment of the local life force.

Much of my African reading over the past couple of years has been of editions of the superb African Writers' Series, published by Heinemann, but this edition is from the Fontana African Novels series (that has no internet site that I can find). Many if not most of these books are out of print. I have grown increasingly convinced of the importance of the historical moment of the late 1950s-early 1960s for African literature. Who will step up to preserve this heritage? Most of these novels are less than 200 pages; omnibus editions are now badly needed.

Buck's Mahabharata

In 1955 22-year-old William Buck was in the state library at Carson City, Nevada one day when he came across an old illustrated edition of "The Sacred Song of the Lord, the Bhagavad-Gita of Lord Krishna." The enthusiastic young scholar followed his sources upstream. In the earlier, English-language phase, he started what would be a long involvement with Indian publishers when he helped one to complete a reissue of an eleven-volume translation of the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic in which the Bhagavad-Gita is embedded (more on the text in a moment). Somewhere along the line he came to believe that a new English version of the Hindu epics was needed, a vernacular rendering abridged for story.

Sanskrit studies came next, but Buck is an autodidact and there is no clear line between collations of English versions and collations of Sanskrit and Hindi editions. We may be sure that he eagerly examined each and every edition that passed through his hands, regardless. In his case the accomplishment is stark enough: after fifteen years of work, he died in 1970 at the age of 37. He left behind completed versions ("rewrites" was his own preferred term) of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and an uncompleted Harivamsa. There continue to be remarkably few alternatives to this text, and it is a fine work of literature that creates a persuasive, phantasmagoric atmosphere to convey the experience of beings who are half human, half god.

As to gods: these medieval Indian epics date back to the older, classical Vedic period (as early as 9th century BC). As the literature of the Hindu culture moved from the classical Vedic Sanskrit to the vernacular Hindu Sanskrit these epic stories became vehicles for transmitting information of historical, philosophical and religious importance. Upanishads were originally reflective commentaries attached to classical Vedas. Sometime during the centuries-long process of accretion and insertion someone took an upanishad and wove it into the Mahabharata as a conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, on the occasion of Arjuna's emotional turmoil on the eve of a battle in which he will face beloved cousins, uncles and even brothers.

It is an artful insertion and the one that first entranced him but William Buck in time left it behind. He found what all explorers of this sort of philological territory discover: the most important and authentic texts are also often the ones encrusted and encumbered with scholarly apparatus, annotations, translation issues, ritual technologies like repeated mantras, genealogies and lists of names. The Indian epics are doubly difficult this way as the text itself includes additions and commentaries. Buck wanted to dig a good story out of this Swiftian obscurity.

His cause was the story of the Kurukshetra War, a dynastic struggle between the related clans of Kauravas and Pandaras, that is the original scaffolding of the now densely-layered text. The Mahabharata is to Indian literature what Homer is to European literature. Both offer popular accounts of wars that probably have some basis in fact, although dates and geography have always been debated (both the Kurukshetra War and the Siege of Troy are reasonably dated as late Second Millennium). Both provided subsequent centuries with gods and heroes, who mix and intermarry (well interbreed at least) in both. Mythologized heroes are avatars (Sanskrit word) of various virtues and fatal flaws. There is a constant tension between the pull of worldly entanglements and the path of honor.

There is also to be found here a great deal of macho swagger and warrior virtue. The scenes of battle, with individual kings pushing into the battle under their own colorful banners and painted chariots and armor, are some of the best in the book. There is also a good sense of the interplay of magic and human causes. That enlightenment entails that one lose one's fear of death, in favor of embracing one's role in the larger process of passing away and coming to be, is basic Hindu ethos that comes ringing through during climactic battles when the higher beings fight each other to the death with comradely good humor and respect, earthly motives of revenge and ambition mixed in well throughout. That Buck was working during the golden age of the American cowboy genre doesn't feel coincidental.

The Journal of Jules Renard

This month is the third anniversary of my starting this blog, and so it's fitting that the book I'm discussing today (I'm not sure I actually "review" them) is the first book sent to me gratis by a publisher. I get offers for free books regularly these days, most of which I'm not interested in, but I don't have any rules about such things. I still read only those books that I think I would like. This one sounded interesting: a reissue, by Tin House Books, of a one-volume abridgement, translated into English, of the journal of Jules Renard, a novelist and playwright of fin de siecle France who has long enjoyed a strong reputation in France but who has never been well-known to English-speaking readers (this text was originally published in 1964 by George Braziller).

The Journal covers 23 years, from 1887 to the year of Renard's death in 1910 at the age of 47. Renard achieved fame in his early thirties with the publication of L'Ecornifleur (The Ear of Corn)) in 1892 and Poil de Carotte (Carrot-Top) in 1894, and had steady work as a popular playwright after that. He is very clear on what is probably true, that "genius" is mostly a product of hard work, but somewhere along the line he becomes most interested in writing his journal, which came to be regarded as his masterpiece after its publication in stages culminating in an edition of 1935 that was issued in a Pleiades edition in 1960. This choice to become a private memoirist parallels his choice to spend much of his life in his ancestral village of Chitry, where he succeeded his father as mayor. The best parts of the journal are reflections on village life. There are amusing stories of the bohemian scene in Paris in the early years of the journal, but in his forties he did not conceal his discomfort when in the city.

Renard shows no interest in either the Symbolist movement of the time or what would become known as Modernism, despite personal acquaintance with Andre Gide, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Auguste Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, J. K. Huysmans, Anatole France, Stephane Mallarme, and everyone else of note in literary Paris in the Gay Nineties. He reports feeling awkward when complimented by them, and for his own part he finds he has little to say (but don't miss his snarky take on the funeral of Verlaine). He spends quite a bit of time with Sarah Bernhardt, perhaps the biggest star of the age. She performs several of his plays and tries mightily to charm him into her entourage, but although he is in some awe of her charisma ("It looks as though she were standing still, while the staircase turns around her") he sees right through her schtick and ultimately finds her ordinary. Maurice Ravel composes an interpretive score for Renard's Histoires Naturelles and personally urges Renard to attend the premier; Renard sends his wife instead.

What makes this conservative country gentleman, who wears the ribbon of the Academie Francaise on his lapel every day of his life (much to the confusion of the locals at Chitry, who have no idea what the decoration denotes) significant for his time is in fact his realism, particularly his psychological realism, which is of a piece with his deeply autobiographical inspiration. His relationship with Chitry has everything to do with his conflicted relationship with his awful parents. His father, heartbroken after the death in childhood of his oldest child, a daughter, has little interest in his remaining two sons and daughter but worse refuses to speak to his wife for thirty years until finally he commits suicide in their home. Renard and a servant are the ones who find the body.

Meanwhile Renard hates his mother. His mother, according to him, is a histrionic actor devoid of any real feeling. It's impossible to know to what extent this is true, since her every display of emotion is written off as so much transparent manipulation. She dies some months before Renard himself passes away. She falls into a well, but Renard does not believe it is suicide. Quite a bit of his work revolves around the character of "Mme. Lepic," a transparent and unflattering caricature of his mother. This, after all, is what makes him a significant writer.

"Maman talking about 'sin'! 'I had my faults, I still have my faults, but I've always had the right to walk with my head held high.' Yes, but papa cuckolded might have been happier."

This edition is an attempt at an accessible version of the Journal. It is basically aphoristic, and one can only assume that the original is aphoristic as well, although that is unclear. He is not a bad aphorist, not a great one (I would recommend La Rochefoucauld). He has a good sense of politics: "The voter believes himself to be the master. There's a confusion there. Why, no, my good man! You must vote in order to do right by yourself, not by me. It is I who am doing you a favor." He is a Socratic defender of common sense: "Ah, what beautiful things we should write if we were without taste! But voila - taste is French literature entire."

This is a book of great interest to any student of the period, and it is not bad, as I said, for one who enjoys aphorisms. There is another attraction, one that is contrary to our stereotypes of French sensibilities: Renard is an optimist, a man with a great deal of inner peace, a bemused lover of humanity and an ecstatic lover of nature (he writes one-line descriptions of the moon regularly throughout his life). His preference for Chitry, and for the privacy of his journal, is the choice of a man who is too satisfied to rage with the heathens, who knows nature as so many tragically do not. "I, I, not an enthusiast? A few notes of music, the sound of flowing water, the wind in the leaves, and my poor heart runs over with tears, with real tears - yes, yes!"

Burgess's The Doctor is Sick

Anthony Burgess's 1960 novel The Doctor is Sick is relatively early and more autobiographical than most of his 30-odd novels. As Burgess told the story, his collapse while teaching in Brunei and subsequent diagnosis of a brain tumor, which led to his repatriation to England and further time in a neurological ward before the diagnosis was shown to be false, led him, at the age of 42, to concentrate full time on his dream of being a writer. At the time of his passing over 30 years later in 1993 the penniless orphan and itinerant teacher would be a millionaire celebrity author, a Monaco-based tax exile with a string of properties across Europe. Burgess dramatized this story a bit: he was already a published author as well as an accomplished composer when he collapsed.

Nonetheless Burgess's talents and output were prodigious. In addition to several dozen novels he composed hundreds of pieces of music, spoke many languages fluently including Malay, Urdu, Arabic and Russian (he debriefed Dutch refugees in Gibraltar during the war), published works on literary criticism (including two book-length studies of Joyce that are well-regarded to this day) and linguistics, translations, and travel writings, all the while lecturing and teaching at universities across the world. In fact he resented the success of A Clockwork Orange (1962), the novel that made him rich and famous, for obscuring the rest of his work and skewing his reputation, which it certainly did (he would pointedly refer to it as one of his "minor works"). He is one of my favorite authors (one of my "culture gods," as my college poetry professor A. McA. Miller would say) and at this point I'm not sure how many of his books I've read. Thankfully there is always more.

The Doctor is Sick is, as I said, autobiographical, being the story of Edwin Spindrift, professor of linguistics, who is repatriated from Burma after a collapse and admitted to a hospital in London where he is scheduled to undergo brain surgery after a series of excruciating tests. He is accompanied by his wife Sheila, who has been for some time enjoying the company of other men owing to Edwin's impotence, and who quickly stops visiting him in the hospital in favor of haunting nearby taverns (Burgess's first wife Lynne died of cirrhosis of the liver due to alcoholism in 1968, at which point Burgess married his mistress Liana and acknowledged their four-year-old son. One wonders what Lynne made of the present novel).

Doctor is a good example of my favorite Burgess mode, satirical farce. The best of his comic novels are the four Enderby novels, academic comedies following the misadventures of the hapless and sordid poet. Another favorite is Honey for the Bears (1963), a satire of the Soviet Union that, like A Clockwork Orange, reflects his love for the sound of the Russian language. All of these novels chronicle farcical drunken escapades where various characters meet up with each other and alternate between befriending and assisting each other and robbing and abusing each other. They have an obvious debt to Evelyn Waugh in that wicked satire and lampooning of human foibles is the sugar coating over a deeper strain of moralistic outrage at what society has come to (Spindrift passes through a pinball arcade where the goal of one game is the destruction of the Earth). In both Waugh and Burgess there is a surface of hedonism and ribaldry that is perfectly entertaining in itself, and an underlying moral space for those readers who care to look.

Burgess's fascination with language is also given free rein here through the vehicle of the desperate Spindrift, who, dreading and doubting his impending brain surgery, "escapes" from the hospital, penniless, head shaven and wearing his pajamas under a stolen jacket, and goes on a mock-epic search for Sheila. Both the residents of the hospital ward and the various London lowlifes he encounters display various accents; this is Burgess's London speech novel. Edwin also muses on etymologies, orthography, cognates and usage while trying to survive his desperate adventure.

A mock-moral of the tale is that Edwin, the otherworldly academic (his surgeon resents that Edwin insists on the honorific "doctor"), must actually learn to survive on the streets, and thus "finds himself," this consisting of a) realizing that he might not necessarily be desperate to find Sheila after all, b) finding that he rather likes petty theft, which he turns out to be good at and which opens the possibility of "living in the moment," and c) discovering and learning to act out on his own inner reservoirs of rage towards authority and hypocrisy. In the end he returns to his life as a linguist, but liberated (from Sheila, from Burma, from his job). A nice drunken romp through late 50s London. I recommend it.

Declan Kiberd

Declan Kiberd is one of the foremost contemporary Irish literary scholars. I have just read The Irish Writer and the World, a collection of essays published in 2005. This is a follow-up to the much larger anthology Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which was published in 1996 to wide acclaim. At 699 pages (35 essays), Inventing Ireland is a bit too big of a bite for me right now, although I have a copy and I will get back to Kiberd, maybe on a vacation sometime (my idea of beach reading!). At 320 pages (19 essays) The Irish Writer was itself a bit of an experiment for me; I'm a philosopher by trade and I read novels and keep this blog for pleasure. Once I got into it, though, I found that it was a pleasure to read - I wish I had time to read Inventing Ireland right now, I just don't.

Kiberd is a scholar of the Irish Literary Revival, also known as the Celtic Revival, of the late 19th-early 20th century. This was the literary and cultural vanguard of the renascent Irish nationalism that culminated in the establishment of the Free State in 1922. It was, among other things, a sustained attempt to rescue the Irish language and Celtic traditions in general from oblivion, in which it was to some extent successful (Kiberd informs us that there are about 400 books published annually in Irish today). Its leading lights were the poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and the folklorist Lady Gregory (1852-1932), who together established the Abbey Theatre that still mounts productions in downtown Dublin. Kiberd is perhaps the foremost expert on J. M. Synge (1871-1909), the playwright of The Playboy of the Western World (1907), which famously sparked riots during its premiere, and other plays that critically examined internalized Irish stereotypes and influenced Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) who produced many political plays including Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and Stars (1926).

Like his subjects, the protagonists of the Gaelic League, Kiberd is fluent in Irish, and the earlier essays here are interesting for their discussions of Irish-language novels and poems. However Kiberd is a dialectician by inclination and training (at one point he describes himself as a "radical") and he has not done his days' work if he does not deconstruct some set of preconceived notions about Irishness or the other. One theme I found refreshing was his work to break down the barrier between "Anglo-Irish" identity and literature and that of the "Catholic" (I suppose) Irish. This is important as many of the historical leading lights of Irish literature, from Swift to Wilde, have been members of the Anglo-Irish minority. Kiberd argues that the writers of the Irish Literary Revival and their successors developed a poetic style of English prose by writing English with Irish grammatical patterns and, more provocatively, that the Irish-language literature of the Revival and subsequently is deeply inflected by English. Irish cultural studies and literary criticism cannot Quixotically ignore the fact of deep Anglicization, in short. This is a striking example of the way Irish literature helps me understand cultural and social issues here in Puerto Rico where a defensive nationalism also sometimes leads to willful obtuseness about popular culture (lots of little jibarito tchotchkes in the tourist shops, lots of hip-hop fans in the classroom). Kiberd will have none of this.

This allows Kiberd to develop a broader compass of Irish literature, one that embraces Anglo-Irish writers like Wilde and Yeats and freely makes use of this resource in examining "native" Irish writers. Kiberd shows that the question of language is crucial for all Irish writers (and he is unafraid to weave an ongoing discussion of Joyce into his work). Kiberd is of the new generation of Irish artists and thinkers who want Irish letters to look forward, not backward, and he resists all attempts to manufacture Irishness. He is as much a political and social critic as a literary one, bringing to mind the contemporary Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter whose The Transformation of Ireland (2004) documents the transformation of Ireland into a modern European country in the 20th century.

Ferriter understands Kiberd to be framing the cultural identity issue as "posing the choice between nationality and cosmopolitanism," and it is true that Kiberd points up the apparent irony of the rise of Irish cultural nationalism in the form of the Revival at the same time as a generation of great Irish writers (Yeats, Joyce, Synge) writing in English. However, on Kiberd's view (I think) this is not an irony at all, rather we see two facets of one development, which is precisely Irish worldliness: the acceptance of a living presence of the Irish language and high aspirations for English-language Irish literature, rather than a self-defeating rejection of both. (Kiberd doesn't mention Ferriter, probably because Kiberd is the older man. Colm Toibin, inevitably, has blurbs on the jackets of both.)

Kiberd wants to foster a living Irish culture that is not self-conscious about drawing on both the Irish and the English elements when appropriate. He places Irish literature very persuasively in the larger context of modern-day Ireland, excoriating both the "designer Stalinists" (a recurring phrase) who would globalize Irish architecture and style out of existence, and those who would treat native culture as a kind of diorama to be preserved as an exhibit for the delectation of tourists (another problem common to Ireland and Latin America). He sees clearly that Ireland is at an historically defining crossroads, something he shares with contemporary novelists like Anne Enright and Dermot Bolger (Kiberd is disdainful of Bolger in earlier essays, warms up to him later. I agree Bolger is not a great novelist). Kiberd makes much of Ireland's modern prosperity, which he argues is another transforming element that renders past stereotypes worthless; reading essay 17, "The Celtic Tiger: a cultural history" (2003), I wonder what he has to say about Ireland after the economic downturn and real estate bubble that is causing such hardship today.

Asare Konadu's A Woman in her Prime

One of my ongoing projects with the Stack is to read through a shelf-full of novels in the African Writer's Series from roughly the 1960s, the combination of two departing colleagues' gifts of boxes of miscellaneous African literary stuff. The novels are mostly short, many but not all have been written in English. They are mostly West African, the literary constellation revolving around Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. It is not a big world, at least not on the internet: I received a nice e-mail from Cameron Duodo after I posted about his novel The Gab Boys (1967); I touched up (very slightly!) my post on Peter Abraham's A Wreath for Udomo (1956) when I realized that anyone Googling it on Earth was likely to have my post on their first page of links; and the best so far was having the Lagos magazine Farafina reprint my post on J. P. Clark's America, Their America (1963). I'm coming to appreciate some of the similarities among these "60s" African books, with their depictions of tough environments both rural and urban, their love of happy outcomes and celebration of life, and their Janus-faced didacticism, one half social criticism aimed at the national reader, the other cultural defense ("apology," in the classical Greek sense of that word) aimed at the Developed World, a much more well-defined entity in the post-colonial "sixties" than today in the post-modern "aughts."

This week I have discovered Samuel Asare Konadu (1932-1994), a Ghanian publisher and novelist who wrote many novels, at least nine by the 1971 publishing date of my Heinemann edition of A Woman in her Prime (1967). There is very little information, although I haven't done a long search. A Woman in her Prime was the 40th novel in the AWS, and his novel Ordained by the Oracle was the 55th.

Woman is a critical novel of village life with a progressive message that is modern but not reactionary. It deals with the problems of an African woman, Pokuwaa, who is in her 30s and has not had any children, considered a tragic condition by her society, not least by her mother. She has fired two husbands for this reason and her third, Kwadwo, is fearful of losing her. He loves her for her own sake: she has grown up to be a strong person and a good farmer. It is Kwadwo who provides the unconditional acceptance that helps her to resist the psychological pressure of her life (although the author understates this nicely).

Abetted by her obsessed mother Pokuwaa has been visiting various shamans and healers. But the omens are never good. When lightening strikes and burns an old tree near the village there is ominous talk of looking about for a witch. Pokuwaa's mother sees things the old way and is much alarmed. The last straw for Pokuwaa is when she comes across the body of a man near her farm. Out of fear, she doesn't say anything, letting the men go out and find the missing man themselves. A dire episode indeed.

But the last straw is a good thing for Pokuwaa. She gives up on the magic, on the theories of fate. She decides that she must just let life run its course. She gives up her burden. Ah, but this is a West African 60s novel, all 107 pages. So in no time at all she is pregnant and lives happily ever after. I think that Konadu wanted to make the point that a woman needn't have a child to be fulfilled (at least, no more than a man does): she comes to peace with herself first, gets pregnant after. But his view is that the traditional folkloric account that defined the emotional regime under which Pokuwaa lived was oppressing her, and perhaps contributing to her problems. That is, his target was not so much sexism as superstition, although he understood the negative social consequences for women of magical explanation.

In this way his novel is interesting to the western reader today. The western stereotype of the African novel is that it illuminates the positive side of Africa as a cultural soldier defending the homeland. But 60s African writers, like feminists, are often critics of traditions that have come to seem unenlightened and abusive. They did not have much international readership and thus were not as self-conscious as the modern African writer, who tends to criticize regimes more than societies. They thought that they were living through a transformative time, and they try to open doors to the future. They are gentle prophets of modernity, at times, and it is interesting to put their optimism up against the reality of modern Africa (I don't say that presumptuously, there are lots of ways that comparison could be played out). And there is the persistent theme that good character will out: that is a theme that links African and North American letters.

Related novels that are subjects of blog posts here include Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys; Francis Selormey's Narrow Path; Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure; Nkem Nwanko's Danda; Chukuemeka Ike's The Potter's Wheel; Cameron Duodu's The Gab Boys.

How the Irish Saved Civilization

Thomas Cahill's 1995 How the Irish saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe was an easy home run for its author, with its appealing premise that Celtic monks preserved the best of Roman-period high culture and literature during the "Dark Ages" following the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth at the beginning of the fifth century AD. Mr. Cahill has a remarkable fluency with the classics, an old-school education that is all too rare these days, combined with a storyteller's ability to tease a world and an epic out of dauntingly scanty and arcane folklore and archeaology. His comparison of the strong and orderly Roman culture abutting wild back-country tribes was compelling.

It is harder to get a grasp of the Pre-Christian Celtic people, but our author is nothing if not into the spirit of the thing. There is often a tendency to "Orientalize" the Irish, but one has to admit that Cahill (who is also obviously fiercely loyal to them) gives us a consistent account of a tough pagan way of life. The relatively quick conversion from warrior culture to monastic society recalls the conversion of Tibet to Buddhism and raises the same kinds of questions.

Cahill continues to impress as a scholar during the extended discussion of the Irish leaders who followed Patrick, about whom he knows a great deal. Of course the old Latin culture continued in the Mediterranean as well, mostly through the vehicle of the Church, but Mr. Cahill is pleasantly persuasive that there was a place under the brush, if you will, off to the side, where some precious endangered shoots of human culture survived for a time. At points there is too much rhetoric around, but part of the difficulty here is filling out a story based on, sometimes, very little.

I also recommend Philip Freeman's The Philosopher and the Druids for some nice imaginative attempts to visualize the ancient Celtic world without taking too much liberty with the known facts. Also there is quite a bit about Patrick including a short autobiography and that is a topic I recommend.