Jude Dibia Unbridled

Unbridled (2007) is the Nigerian writer Jude Dibia's second novel. His first novel Walking With Shadows (2005;I have not read it) garnered attention as perhaps the first Nigerian novel to have an openly gay male protagonist. Dibia has since built up a reputation as one of a new generation of African novelists who write about traditionally "taboo" topics. He told an interviewer that he wanted to tell stories that "people are not bold enough to tell."

Unbridled won the 2007 Ken Saro-Wiwa Award and I probably noticed it on a list of contemporary Nigerian novels somewhere. On the back cover of my Jacana Media edition (it was originally published by Blacksands Books) it mentions that Dibia writes about gay relationships, so when I started reading this novel about an ill-used and long-suffering young Nigerian woman I anticipated a coming-out story, but no, this time the protagonist is not gay. She is an incest victim who is passed off to uncaring relatives and escapes to England only to find that her internet suitor, a white Englishman, is also abusive. She must reach down deep and find the resources to achieve autonomy.

Another surprise, for me, came about halfway through the book when I was checking to see how many pages it had and noticed in the "about the author" note that Dibia is male. I had assumed, reading the first half, that the author was a woman. Ngozi/Erika is entirely convincing, and the unflinching insight into how a certain amount of violence and exploitation is, apparently, essential to male nature is conveyed in language that is recognizable as the bitter tone of ill-used women.

Dibia writes about people, how they behave around each other and the conversations that they have. He can depict friendship and malice with equal deftness. He is not, at this point in his writing career, a writer of any great elegance or beauty, but his story is absorbing and the pace does not flag. An impressive accomplishment from a young Nigerian writer of great promise.

Other examples of books by the new generation of Nigerian writers that have been the subjects of posts on this blog are Chris Abanis' Graceland (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003), which deals with very similar issues as Unbridled, and El-Nukoya's Nine Lives (2007).

Roddy Doyle Plays That Thing

It's a surprise to realize just now that I read the first of Roddy Doyle's Henry Smart trilogy, A Star Called Henry (1999), back before I started this blog. (Doyle has called the trilogy "The Last Roundup.") That book, with its historically accurate and realistic account of the Irish "Easter Rising" of 1916 from the point of view of an Irish republican combatant, is quite vivid in my mind. The seizure and subsequent siege of the General Post Office in Dublin was memorably depicted. I think that that novel ranks with two other novels of historical and social realism that I've posted about here, James Plunkett's Strumpet City (1969), an account of the earlier dockworker's strike, and Thomas Flanagan's excellent The Year of the French (1979), a novelization of the ill-fated revolt of 1798.

In this second installment, Oh, Play That Thing! (2004), Doyle takes his project in a different direction. The project here is not so much historical fictionalization as it is a popular invocation of the spirit of a time and place, in this case the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Historical characters are freely woven into the story and the choice is made to pursue an epic story over any pretense to believability. Henry Smart is run out of New York by the local gangsters and almost run out of Chicago as well before he catches the eye of a young Louis Armstrong, who can use a white companion as he struggles with the racial barriers of the early 1920s pop music scene. Later on Smart is again saved, this time by Henry Fonda on location in Monument Valley: think E. L. Doctorow or T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Doyle has been criticized for trivializing the Henry Smart story in this way, but I think that his choices are defensible (although I don't think that Oh, Play That Thing! is as good a novel as A Star Called Henry). First, Henry Smart becomes, as Doyle widens his canvas, more of a symbolic character, a kind of embodiment of Irish toughness as a contribution to America. He's a caricature for sure, tough and rough and irresistible to women, a magnet for jealous mobsters, and pursued by shadowy Irish assassins who are (for somewhat under-motivated reasons) intent on hunting him down to the ends of the Earth. As to that, and secondly, Doyle finds Jazz Age America an intoxicating, phantasmagorical, you-can't-make-it-up kind of place, which it is, and so he decides to just let it rip. There's a little too much tough-guy masochism, and maybe one run too many at evoking the delerium of the hopping jazz club. Not Doyle's best but worth reading, I will certainly go on and read The Dead Republic (2010), the last of the trilogy.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Previous posts on the blog have discussed (in the order that I read them of course) Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile (1998), The Savage Detectives (2000), and 2666 (2000). Knowing those books made for a deeper appreciation of Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). The student of Bolano sees first that he has recurrent themes and interests (poetry and the Nazis being the most prominent if improbable combination). Then it emerges that there are connections among the texts (a young police recruit in 2666, for example, is the bastard son of one of the protagonists of The Savage Detectives). Finally with Nazi Literature in the Americas the scope of Bolano's ambition becomes clear: he has created a parallel world, a fictional history, and interwoven that world with his and ours. The effect is to heighten the power of the fictional world and the ideas that have generated it: as it bleeds over into reality, Bolano's vision seems to establish a greater claim than most fiction does to being an authentic part of reality, an actuality. It is an unsettling effect; there is more moral urgency in Bolano than in almost any other contemporary writer of fiction I can think of.

Ironically the writer than one inevitably thinks of when reading this book is Jorge Luis Borges, that most detached and cerebral constructor of puzzles and games. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a compendium of potted biographies, some only a page or two long, some upwards of twenty pages, of fictional American (North and South) writers and their works. Some are completely obscure (literary obscurity is a strong fetish for Bolano), others are prominent and widely read. Some are poets, some are prose writers, some are genre writers and some are polemicists. The word "Nazi" is construed loosely: there are white supremacists and supporters of military dictatorship but also some whose "Nazism" is little more than conservative Christianity or reactionary nationalism.

Borges delighted in this sort of thing, inventing bibliographies and non-existent essayists and mixing them in with real people and books. Bolano does it throughout his works, The Savage Detectives has pages-long lists of poets and "journals" so obscure that only one mimeographed copy might exist, and 2666 mingles Bolano's invented incidents with the real history of the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. While fictive scholarly apparatus is a "post-modern" trope it actually traces back in Spanish literature to Cervantes, with Don Quixote's displacement into the fantasy world of the picaresque and his glimpse of the printing press setting up the book in which he lives.

The endless appetite for reading, at times almost a mania for literate closure, that is pervasive in Bolano is also portrayed in Borges (for example in "The Library of Babylon" or "Funes the Memorious").

As an estadounidense reader I was impressed by the depth and breadth of Bolano's erudition for USA literature: he obviously loves the genre writing of the tough guy detectives but also the inventiveness of science fiction and he has apparently read everything from Gertrude Stein and Eudora Welty to Wallace Stevens and Wallace Stegner: about what one could reasonably expect of a typical English lit professor at a North American university (who was hip, of course, to poetry and the Beats).

Meanwhile there is The Theory, or at least my theory of The Theory. Bolano, I think, sees World War II and particularly the Nazis as an epochal upwelling of violent evil that then washes across the globe and the decades like a great wave. He seeks to explicate the violent history of Latin America, from the Cold War military governments of the 70s through the Central American political viciousness of the 80s up to the culture of homicide in contemporary Mexico as manifestations, aftershocks or tsunamis, of this great evil. Part of the message of Nazi Literature in the Americas is that this evil energy persists among us, close by and banal, nearer to eruption than we think.

Fardorougha the Miser

William Carleton (1794-1896) was an Irish Catholic who converted to Protestantism, a middle-class man who presented himself as of Irish peasant stock. This contradictory character came to fame in 1830 with the publication of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. With several other writers of the pre-famine early 19th century such as John Banim (1798-1842) and Gerald Griffin (1803-1840) he is part of what is sometimes called the "Pre-Yeats Revival," as these writers were, like their mostly Anglo-Irish counterparts a century later, concerned to develop a distinctly Irish literature (although they wrote for the most part in English). In my view they are interesting as a window onto an Ireland that disappeared during the horrific 1840s.

Carleton is an Irish version of a character who frequently turns up in African and African-American literature, and who I encounter here in Puerto Rico. He is loyal to his country and its people but he is deeply conflicted. He has taken pains to "civilize" himself (I read the novel before researching him and I would have guessed he was Anglo-Irish), taking on the burden of the colonizer's education and language. He wants to contribute to moral uplift, but in practice this means condemnation of the self-destructive mores of the poor and oppressed people he aims to reform. Like members of the later Irish Revival such as Synge he was criticized for being too rough on the Irish. I recognized some of my colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico who are much rougher on the students than we extranjeros.

In the present novel we have two moral teachings. First there is the tragedy of the title character Fardorougha O'Donovan, who brings terrible suffering and near-destruction on his beloved son through his pathological relationship with money. Second there is some acute commentary on the moral decadence of the "ribbonmen" or "white boys," members of secret societies that evolved to enforce Irish notions of justice in the face of English legal oppression and then devolved, as such groups tend to do, into vehicles for gangsterish violence. Even in his discussion of these groups and their loss of moral bearings Carleton makes points that have universal application.

The novel is also fine for dialogue rendered in the period patois with lots of Irish phrases woven in and even occasional footnote translations. Apparently Carleton wrote an essay on Irish cursing and I am certainly going to try to get a copy of that. He has the love for the language that we expect from the Irish writer even though his own narrative voice is a somewhat overbearing faux-elevated English.

Other books related to this period of Irish history that have been subjects of previous posts here are Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French and Seamus Martin's Duggan's Destiny.

Malone Dies

Just about a year ago I posted here about Samuel Beckett's Molloy (1951), the first of the "Trilogy" that continues with Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). Then I put my Grove Press omnibus edition back in the Stack, and when I'm done writing this today I'll put it back in for another cycle. It's been very satisfying to reread these intense and excellently-written novels. Molloy made a bigger impression on me than Malone Dies, but the writing of Malone Dies entranced me after a while. I read someone somewhere saying that these books are best read in short bursts, but I found that Malone Dies gained structural cohesion when I read it fast (of course Beckett is challenging our conventional notions about structure and narrative: that's a big part of his exercise). I thought, reading this one, that these books are a great illustration of the fact that an artist needs a great deal of formal mastery before they can then break with traditional forms, that being one of the keys to modern poetry and to Modernists such as Joyce and Picasso.

As with Joyce, Beckett's Irish identity and sense of the Irish relationship to the English language makes him an inherently subversive writer; the subversiveness of the Irish Modernist is striking as an act of cultural subversion above all, and one that bears little similarity to typical cultural nationalism. Beckett's entire career, certainly including his plays, can be understood as a sustained interrogation (to use a litcrit phrase) of the idea of the narrator. The narrator is often simultaneously obliterated and globalized as the boundary between narrator and narration is blurred out through the technique of submerging the story in the subject (or something).

In the Trilogy this is achieved by a not-quite stream of consciousness depiction of the thoughts of destitute, deranged, and in the present case dying men, or one man who is variously represented by characters with Irish names starting in "M." Malone, who tells us he is dying on the first page, roams around a great deal of mental territory as he slips in and out of lucidity, and as his situation deteriorates. Sometimes it seems as if he is telling us about everything but himself and his condition, but this seems true to life as a depiction of the consciousness of someone in his condition. Beckett uses pathology as a device to open up dark and universal elements of soul, a technique that makes for difficult but rewarding reading.

Arrow of God

Chinua Achebe's first three novels are sometimes called "The African Trilogy." They are Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer At Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). I read Things Fall Apart (probably the most widely read African novel) some time ago, I have not read No Longer At Ease. Most of Achebe's writing (and he has published a great deal of work) deals with the impact of the British colonization of the Igbo lands of northern Nigeria on traditional culture there and particularly with the loss of authority of African priests under pressure both political and religious. Both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God present tragic protagonists who embody this authority, and in both books the human weaknesses and character failings of these men are presented as important elements contributing to societal collapse. This discussion of African weaknesses in confronting colonization, always in microcosm, is key to Achebe's success in illuminating the catastrophic 20th century history of the region: it is intellectually fruitful, provocative, and gives Achebe moral authority both in Nigeria and in the outside world (I was surprised to discover that Achebe, 81 this year, continues working as a member of the faculty at Brown University).

Arrow of God is denser with detail than Things Fall Apart, with a good deal more technical discussion of the rituals and concepts underlying Igbo religious customs and with a larger and more fleshed-out cast of characters. Ezeulu, priest of Ulu, the titular deity of a small and remote group of villages, nobly resists cooptation by the heavy-handed and not particularly competent British authorities. He is secure in his own identity and standing, a believer in his own authority and function. This gives him the instincts needed to resist usurpation but also clouds his ability to recognize that his tradition is under genuine threat. He commits two errors, first by sending one of his sons, Oduche, to become a Christian (Ezeulu sees this move as essentially strategic) and second by refusing to perform the ceremony needed to authorize the yam harvest while he is detained by the British, two overreaches that have disastrous consequences.

Achebe, who never patronizes his own culture, shows how rival priests (each with their own deity) function as political agents (what appear to be religious contests of magic have roots in disputes over farmland), and have shallower roots than their rhetoric implies (the religious disposition of Ulu goes back, not to the beginning of time, but to organizing against African slavers decades before). A cultural system, like an ecosystem, is deceptively fragile. Thus Achebe wields a double-edged sword: Britain is called to account for its immensely destructive imperial policies, but Africans are confronted with their own guilt for failing to criticize themselves and adapt to modern challenges.

Two contemporary Nigerian novels that each, in different ways, continue Achebe's examination of cultural erosion and that have been the subjects of posts here are Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003).

Boubacar Boris Diop's Book of Bones

As it happened I was attracted to the title of Boubacar Boris Diop's 2000 novel Murambi, The Book of Bones, and the high tone of that title (Murambi, le livre des ossements; translated into English by Fiona Mc Laughlin 2006 and published by Indiana University Press) is maintained throughout this excellent short novel. It is the best entry yet in a young genre of novels and memoirs that document the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when, following patterns of ethnic violence that emerged in Rwanda in the 1950s, elements from the poorer, majority Hutu group systematically killed somewhere around 800,000 of the socioeconomically dominant Tutsis.

G. and I had recently been really engaged by the 2004 movie "Hotel Rwanda," directed by Terry George and starring Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered hundreds of Tutsis during the genocide. That movie led to us getting a copy of Shake Hands With the Devil, the 2003 memoir by Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, UN commander in Rwanda in 1993-4 (and the basis for the character played by Nick Nolte in the film). Before that I had noticed (again because of the title) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, an actual fax message and the title of Philip Gourevitch's 1999 anthology of oral histories (and where the world first heard the story of Paul Rusesabagina).

Meanwhile in 1998 Fest'Africa, an African cultural festival based in France, organized a trip for ten established African writers to go to Rwanda with the expressed purpose of documenting and memorializing the genocide in African literature. Monique Ilboudo of Burkina Faso, Tierno Monenembo of Guinea, and Veronique Tadjo of Ivory Coast are members of "the expedition" who have subsequently published books, as well as this one from Diop.

The Book of Bones explores the possibility and responsibility of literature in the face of evil and suffering. The narrator, Cornelius, was an expatriot on Djibouti during the genocide and returns four years later. His own assurance about who and what he is, and his attitudes towards his country and what has happened, are tested as he finally confronts his own family's history. Diop also devotes the last quarter or so of this 181-page book to a discussion of French policies, which he not surprisingly depicts as cynical in the extreme.

A very good book, I recommend it if you are interested in this difficult subject matter.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Nigeria, the daughter of Igbo academics. She moved to the United States in 1996. Thirty-three years old today she is the author of two very well-received novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). She was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008.

Purple Hibiscus is an accomplished first novel, expertly put together and well-written. It also hits quite a few of the tropes of contemporary African literature. I've been reading African (largely Nigerian) novels of the 60s and 70s over the past couple of years, many from Chinua Achebi's African Writers Series. In fact my novel before last was Onwora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys which has strikingly similar themes. It's interesting to see how much is the same and what has changed. The potential for cruelty inherent in a paternalistic society stands out as a motif of the West African novel from the 50s through today (Adichie is evoking Achebe's own seminal novel Things Fall Apart, 1958). The Nigerian novelist has also consistently tried to expose the role of the Christian church in the cultural excesses of colonialism (this theme is shared with the Irish writer). On the other hand the increasing menace of a strong national government, corrupt and militarized, is characteristic of more recent novels (Chris Abani, El-Nukoya).

Purple Hibiscus is structurally the coming-of-age story of narrator Kambili, a 15-year-old girl surviving through a time of family crisis, but at its core the book is a study of "Papa" Eugene, Kambili's father. He is a wealthy, self-made businessman, fanatically Catholic and dangerously conflicted. His religious righteousness has led him to cut off his own father and others. Out of the village, he rejects his own roots completely. He is motivated by powerful feelings of anger, guilt and shame. Eventually this evolves into monstrous behavior. It is impressive how well filled-in a metaphor for the modern Nigerian nation Papa is while still serving as a convincing portrayal of one man's pathology. The book is unabashedly vascular: everything is a symbol of everything else.

Durrell's Sicilian Carousel

Lawrence Durrell spent a good part of his life in the eastern Mediterranean, and most of his best work is set there: The Aexandria Quartet, of course, and one of my personal favorites, Reflections on a Marine Venus, also his most accomplished political work, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, the novels Tunc and Nunquam, and more. I naturally had high expectations for his book on Sicily. It was a bit disconcerting to start reading it and discover that he had never visited Sicily before the visit that is the occasion of this book, published in 1977 when Durrell was 65. He has been living alone in Provence since the death of his wife, and the passing of another old (female) friend, long resident of Sicily and long-entreating Durrell to visit, inspires him to leave his country house and go, too late to see his old friend Martine. Durrell is one of my very favorite writers and I open any of his books confident that the experience will be rich and pleasing, but still the realization that he has signed up for the "Sicilian Carousel," a guided group bus tour, comes as a bit of a shock: Durrell on a tour?

But the master, old, is still a master, and disarmingly humble at the same time. He does not pretend to be anything other than an older gentleman, alone now, and traveling with a group (he is recognized by several people along the way). He cannily fictionalizes the trip, which gives him liberty to send up some of his companions; the odious character is made more odious (and is the subject of a probably fantastic yarn at the end), the widowed, retired British officer with whom he buddies up is affectionately caricatured (he pores over the cricket scores at breakfast), the inevitable comely young German woman is sexed up a bit for some disruptive fun and the English, French and Italians are regarded in all their stereotypical glory.

Durrell has also studied, presumably for the trip although he doesn't say so, the classical history of the island and particularly the Hellenistic period (his love of Greece is deep and broad and he sees Greece everywhere in Italy). The tour concentrates on classical ruins, about which Durrell knows a good bit more than the guides although he is generous in giving credit when credit is due. Some of his expositions about the temple sites are the best passages in the book. He has some interesting remarks about the hybrid character of Sicilian architecture (a sensitivity to architecture runs through all of Durrell's work).

The book is late and slight. Recommended for Durrell completists and also not a bad background book for someone planning an archeological trip to the island. There is no deep insight into Sicilian society or any real attempt to develop Sicilian characters.

Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys

Onuora Nzekwu is an Igbo intellectual from Kafanchan in northern Nigeria. He published several novels in the 1960s, the early post-colonial period and a time of great cultural ferment in Nigeria and other West African countries (the glory days of Chinua Achebe's African Writer's Series, including the present novel).

This period of Nigerian literature is preoccupied with cultural, social and religious themes. The urgent issue of the time is the construction of a new African identity, one that reestablishes traditional African mores and values while recognizing the importance and influence of the much larger world into which post-colonial Africa is thrust. It is a didactic literature with one eye on the edification of the youth and another on the image of Africa in the outside world. These novels have a certain innocence even as they typically portray lives of poverty and hardship; there is a deep sense of community and family that is no longer such a strong motif. They are also often philosophical, as young protagonists must make existential choices: the old ways or the new, the village or the city, Africa or "the West."

I've read quite a few of these fascinating documents now, and Blade Among the Boys is a very high-quality example of the genre. It is well-written and complex, artfully ambiguous and, like the best African writing of the time, a cautionary tale about character as destiny (I think this quality of moral parable has deeper roots in the rich African tradition of folktales and maxims). Patrick Ikenga, also from Kafanchan, is in line to inherit the post of ceremonial religious leader of his extended family, but his immediate family are also Catholic converts and he dreams of becoming the first Igbo priest. He does not realize the starkness of this choice. Indeed he shows curiosity and enthusiasm for the traditional rites even as he keeps alive his ambition for the priesthood. A talented young man, Patrick even appears to have a chance to bridge his two worlds.

Subtle flaws in Patrick's character, combined with the after all unbridgeable dilemma of two religious traditions, one native and one imposed, warp the life of this smart and competent person until his loss is total. Patrick likes the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism. He is vain. He is also selfish and not particularly a paragon of virtue, but he doesn't realize this. Even with these flaws he could have had everything he wanted if only he chose the traditional path. Fatherless, he lacks real guidance and is subject to the caprices of his paternal uncles who have more authority over his life than his long-suffering mother.

A particularly good aspect of the novel is the way the author weaves together the issue of cultural identity with the issue of sexuality. In turning away from traditional marriage and disregarding his mother's need for a son who is a father he causes grievous harm to himself and to people who he loves. In the end he is cast out of both worlds, literally walking out the door into a life unknown. It is a classic ending for a novel.

Related novels discussed in this blog are Francis Selormey's Narrow Path; Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure; Nkem Nwankwo's Danda; Asare Konadu's A Woman in Her Prime; Chukuemeka Ike's The Potter's Wheel; Cameron Duodu's The Gab Boys.

Marlon James' Book of Night Women

This blog is a reader's journal, going back now for four years' worth of novels. I only read books that I want to read. Usually they're either African novels, Irish novels, or novels that are getting good press or awards and that look like they're up my alley. The point is they're pretty much all novels that I enjoy (ones that are to my taste), and they're also mostly quite good, since they passed through a least a filter or two to get read by me and posted about here. Every now and then, though, a novel comes along that shows what a really good book is like. It stands out all the more from standing out in this group of good, personally-selected books. Marlon James' The Book of Night Women (2009, Riverhead Books) is one of these standouts.

This is an excellent novel that anyone with any interest in African-American literature or in the literature of Atlantic slavery must read. Set on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the late 1700s it tells the story of Lilith, a young slave whose green eyes are a legacy of her father, a white overseer. It is a coming of age story as Lilith must learn what it is to be a woman, a black, a slave and a half-caste. She learns all of these things over the course of several years when she becomes a "big house" slave, learns about her family history, and lives through a bloody slave revolt. The story is riveting and I will resist the temptation to go over much of it here. I would much prefer that you buy the book and enjoy it for yourself.

Over the past several decades a great deal of research on the slave trade and on the communities of slaves and slave-owners has opened up this lost world to historians and novelists alike. Toni Morrison and Maryse Conde are two novelists who have pioneered reconstructive and reimagined work with this material, and they also happen to be two of the best writers working in North America today. Now Marlon James indisputably joins their company with his passionate dedication to getting it as right as possible. (Edward P. Jones' The Known World was the subject of an earlier post here, there is also a post on the period piece Sab by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda.)

James has written this book using a seemingly omniscient narrator whose identity is revealed at the end of the book. This narrator uses an impressive reconstruction of the black Caribbean patois of the time. Reading the first page I thought I was in for a murky Faulkneresque experiment but in fact James pulls off the ambitious linguistic job ably. His research is most impressive, from African vodun to the structure of plantations and even the sailor brogues of the lowly white slavedrivers sounds startlingly authentic.

He also avoids, apparently without effort although in fact the effort must have been intense, sentimentalizing the blacks or presenting two-dimensional whites. Miss Isobel, the brilliant, psychotic Creole mistress, is one of the most memorable characters I've read in a long time, and the relationship between Lilith and Robert Quinn the Irish overseer captures expertly the hopelessness of both "lovers," stumbled in to an impossible love.

Really don't miss this one.

Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds

I don't remember how I came to put Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds (2009) into the Stack, probably on the strength of a glowing notice somewhere. It is her first book, a fictional memoir of a woman in her twenties who spends five rather desolate years in Berlin from 2002 to 2007. It is full of observations of the city and of Germans, but the real topic is the ennui of an intelligent young woman who is solitary, who appreciates melancholy, who is content to drift but not so content as to have no self-doubts. She works for an elderly historian who does Walter Benjamin-like explorations of the city's forgotten spaces, and she has a brief relationship with a meteorologist who speaks eloquently about clouds. She is chronically disengaged, however, and her experiences are taken in as observations even when they are personally challenging (getting lost in the dark underground, making love).

This detachment is expressed in a cool, elegant, matter-of-fact prose. This is a book written "in the zone," the author maintains an atmosphere, channeling style from the emotional portrait of the low-affect narrator. It is a good, fast read even as it evokes a slow pace of life. Aridjis and her narrator both grew up in Mexico City and there is a Latin sense of the surreal that is nicely understated; she tends to think people are in disguise. I hope that her critical success with this book inspires her to write something more substantial because she does write very well.

Synge Travels in Ireland

I enjoyed the Irish Revival playwright J. M. Synge's The Aran Islands, the subject of an earlier post, enough to follow-up with Serif Press's very nice 2005 edition of In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, originally published in 1911. The book includes engravings done by Jack Yeats, son of the painter J. B. Yeats and brother of W. B. Yeats, to accompany the original.

A good playwright must have the very finest ear for dialogue and it is this talent that makes Synge's Irish travel writings so good. In the first part of the book he is traveling in the Wicklow Mountains northwest of Dublin and paying particular attention to the local patois. Synge was accused of troweling things on a bit, for example with this alleged quote from a Wicklow village woman: "Glory be to His Holy Name, not a one of the childer was ever a day ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it. It's small right we have to complain at all." The author of The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots at its premier for its searing caricature of marginalized Irish, is a legitimate object of suspicion, but I doubt he is distilling his material in a misleading way. In any event the flavor of the speech is clearly authentic and very charming to read.

The members of the Irish Revival were upper class people in a poor country, and most, like Synge, were Anglo-Irish. They were taken seriously as the gentry tend to be and the last section on Connemara was originally published as dispatches in the Manchester Guardian. Here we meet Synge the social reformer, getting in to quite detailed work on suggestions for the economic development of the "congested districts," meaning areas (mostly western, Irish-speaking areas) where there was not enough employment for the population. Synge is impressively perceptive and criticizes the governments' attempts to introduce new industries while ignoring some traditional ones (such as gathering kelp), showing how the Dublin bureaucrats had simply failed to think of the local industries as possibly worthwhile. He also criticizes the exploitation of poor workers and urges more economic justice as a necessary part of economic development. A worthy document that stands the test of time.

Colum McCann's Great World Spins

Let the Great World Spin (2009)is the third novel by Colum McCann, an Irishman who teaches at Hunter College and is a long-time New York City resident. He has the great idea to write a novel about various NYC denizens, their lives intertwining, on or about August 7th 1974, the day that Philippe Petit walked between the still-unfinished twin towers of the World Trade Center, two days before the resignation of Richard Nixon and eight months before the fall of Saigon. McCann has written a novel of social realism in the grand style, focused on a mother-daughter team of prostitutes in the Bronx, an Irishman who befriends them as part of his mission as a socially-active monk, his brother, and a group of women who have lost sons in the war in Vietnam. It is a novel of straightforward depiction; there is no mystery, no murder, no farcical or ingenious plot tying the novel together. 9/11 is left alone to resonate by itself, which it surely does.

This is a very ambitious book, and it reads well. I didn't leave it alone much until I was through with it. There is a ferocious focus on race mostly through the development of the stories of Tillie and Jazzlyn, multiple generations of the chronic underclass. The toll of the war, fought by conscripted soldiers, on families apolitical and otherwise is also a major theme. The novel belies the fashionable idea that modern novelists are lost in postmodernist, meta-narrative games; here we have nothing but earnest engagement.

Having said all that, I have my hesitations with this novel. The prose is good enough and one would not want to overwrite with this kind of material but the canvas is so large and ambitious that at times McCann can be heard grinding the damn thing out, executing the concept. Also the book is not quite the "novel of the city" that it purports to be: McCann is interested in human actions and responses and the reader looking for lyrical cityscapes will be disappointed. NYC is not quite one of the characters, seldom rising to more than stage and background. Nonetheless I do recommend this novel as an excellent example of latter-day social realism.

Francis Selormey's Narrow Path

The Narrow Path (1966) is #27 in Heinemann's African Writer's Series. It appears to be straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the misadventures of Kofi (meaning he who was born on Friday) as he attends a series of Catholic schools in coastal Ghana in the 1930s and 40s, following his itinerant headmaster father, a loving but hardworking and strict man; also the childhood story of the book's author Francis Selormey (1927-1983). It serves as a document of life in rural Ghana at the time, without much commentary on larger issues or indeed much reflection. It is typical of the genre, recounting a strict regime that included corporal punishment and at times dire consequences for youthful transgressions, neither of which seemed to extinguish the protagonist's penchant for mischief, of which there is plenty.

The themes are: coming to terms with a strict father whose excesses reflect the hardships of earlier times; life as the headmaster's son and the new kid on the block; coming of age and attendant crises with honesty, school, money and romance; and the tensions that define the life of a young African student in the post-colonial era, caught as he is between traditional life and the brave new world opening up before him. Subjects of previous posts here that are relevantly similar are the much more philosophical (and Muslim) Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure (1962), the very similar but more intense Chukwuemeka Ike's The Potter's Wheel (1973), and the more recent and far more edgy El-Nukoya's Nine Lives (2007). For more of the persistent theme (also ubiquitous in Asian fiction) of the youth who is caught up (in this case) in the contingencies of rural west African culture check out Nkem Nwanko's Danda (1964), Buchi Emecheta's The Slave Girl (1977) and the excellent Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991). The Narrow Path is worth reading for some local color and for impressive verisimilitude but a slight volume in the context of the AWS.

O'Hanlon's Irish Antibildungsroman

Ardal O'Hanlon's 1998 novel Knick Knack Paddy Whack (the American title of his novel; the original title is The Talk of the Town, which was thought to have too many resonances, I'm guessing, with The New Yorker magazine for yanks), is that very rare book that didn't have to make it through my Stack. I was on vacation in Elk Rapids, Michigan, and finished the books I'd brought along when I spotted it at a book sale in the very beautiful little public library in that very beautiful little town.

O'Hanlon is a stand-up comedian and a television actor who is best known for his role as Father Dougal McGuire in the situation comedy Father Ted (I've never seen it). There are the usual glowing blurbs on the jacket but the book appears to be very little-known. It is written well enough (it's good but not great), but I think it is too squarely in the same ecological niche as too many other contemporary Irish novels to stand out. Of course that's what makes it interesting to the aficianado.

That niche is the Irish antibildungsroman. Boy meets girl, boy gets drunk and falls down, boy alienates/batters/loses/murders girl. There are violent political undertones, grinding poverty, kamikazee alcoholism, small-town gossip that ruins lives, and a titanic psychological war with Catholicism. The Irish, damaged beyond repair by the English, are now their own worst enemies.

All of these elements are present here. The protagonist Patrick Scully is in his late teens and experiencing that most painful phase when the lucky ones go to college and other worlds and in the process turn away from their old mates, now revealed as losers. Things are bad for him but not as bad as he thinks; his own hopelessness is what knocks him down. Maybe: the ultimate facts are kept ambiguous, to good effect. What is clear is that Patrick has lots of talent but through a combination of bad luck and his own internalized crookedness he is doomed. He compares unfavorably to his father, his brother, and his best friend, and in the claustrophobic world of small-town Ireland that is poison for an ambitious young man.

The book got me thinking about the antibildungsroman and how many of these books I've posted about here. O'Hanlon had a role in a movie production of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992), and although this is just speculation on my part I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he had thought of the book (his first and only, so far as I know) as a result of that experience. The basic trajectory is very similar. It also brings to mind Eamonn Sweeney's underrated Waiting for the Healer (1997) and is, in both its ideology and plotting, similar to Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home (1990). Sean O'Reilly's The Swing of Things (2005) tackles similar issues. Ken Bruen's 2004 The Guards is in some ways most similar of all as both writers are eager to share their impressions of popular Irish youth culture.

Synge's Aran Islands Journal

J. M. Synge was primarily a playwright, best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World, and one of the leading lights of the "Irish Revival" movement of the late 1800s-early 1900s. The Revival fixed on the Aran Islands as representing the pure, Irish-speaking world it sought to revive, and Synge, an Anglo-Irishman whose uncle had served as the Protestant clergyman to the islands almost fifty years before, went to Aran off and on during the years 1898-1902 to study the Irish language (his Irish is good). He was also an assiduous collector of stories, poems and other folklore, an activity greatly respected and eagerly supported by the islanders. He published The Aran Islands in 1907, the same year that Playboy was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

It is a fine little book, 136 pages filled with stories, both Synge's stories of his experiences and many stories told to him by islanders. There is no politics, no irony, no discussion of Synge's life before or after his time there, nothing about the Irish Revival. There is a great deal of discussion of the Irish language and much trenchant observation of the hard life on the islands, the dangers of putting to sea in the curaghs (large rowing boats), and vivid scenes of island life abound. The islanders are fascinated by Synge and expect him to entertain them, while he is quick to record everything he can about the "fairies," but it is clear that he achieved a measure of intimacy with these very rough people that few if any other outsiders have ever accomplished. An ancient stone lookout seat high on Inishmaan (an anglicization of Inis Meain, "middle island") is to this day known as Synge's Seat.

A nice little gem of a book, very little known. My Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics 1992 paperback edition has excellent footnotes and an extensive introduction by Tim Robinson (I always read the text before the introduction of any book, but in the case of non-fiction maybe that's not quite so important; in any event Robinson's apparatus is worth reading). Synge scholars can also identify sources here for several of the plays. Indispensable for the Irish literature enthusiast and certainly one of the best popular sources on the Arans.

The Deposition of Father McGreevy

I really had no idea about either Brian O'Doherty or about his 1999 novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy. I'm pretty sure the book was on one of those "customers who liked this book might like these other books" advertising sidebars on Amazon. As I got into it it was so far into the "Poor Mouth" aesthetic that I thought it might have been deliberately self-parodic, but cover blurbs by Frank Conroy, Jim Harrison and James McCourt confirmed that this is an earnest exercise in the more gothic (as in "Southern Gothic") mode of Irish literature - a melancholy terrain even at its sunniest, let alone frozen in the dark as it is here. (See earlier posts on Hard-Boiled and Crazy Irish.)

In this case we have an unnamed, Irish-speaking village, somewhere above a town in the mountains above the Kerry Peninsula, that is slowly dwindling to an end. The year is 1939. Father McGreevy faces the closing of his parish after 30 years among the villagers. He is well-intentioned but conservative and obtuse enough to fail them when they can no longer withstand the pressure of the outside world. He bears more responsibility for the calamities he recounts than he knows. Innocent people, as so often happens in Irish literature, are condemned to the worst kind of disgrace, lives thrown away, families destroyed.

So, of course, I liked it. Plowed on through once I got hooked. I enjoyed the occasional footnotes, mostly biographies of Irish notables who are glancingly mentioned in the text (although including them was kind of an odd decision). The writing is generally good, in the tough-guy realist style. The atmosphere is satisfyingly oppressive for the Irish literature enthusiast. It is, though, somewhat over the top and I recommend it for readers who are already enthusiasts of the Irish novel and/or hard-bitten tough-guy stuff. Don't hand this one over to Grandma until you've checked it out for yourself.

It was also a pleasure to learn more about Brian O'Doherty. O'Doherty, Roscommon-born, has had several distinguished careers, both as a sculptor and conceptual artist and as an executive in the USA for the National Endowment for the Arts and other organizations. In 1972 he changed his name to Patrick Ireland to protest the "bloody Sunday" killings in Derry that year, and worked under that name until the peace accords of 2008. He comes to novel-writing late, but this one was nominated for the Booker. Very interesting and talented person.

Aravind Adiga's White Tiger

I'm trying not to be influenced by the blurbs (seven pages of them?) festooning my Free Press trade paperback first edition copy, complete with "Reading Group Guide," of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, winner of the 2008 Booker Prize. The book, a first novel by an Indian-born writer who has lived in Australia, Britain and the US, was predictably hyped to the stars. (I still take the Booker seriously and I always check out the books. Sad to say I pay no attention to the Nobel. The Booker is also politicized, not to mention parochial, but neither of those flaws necessarily means the books aren't good.) The comparison to Russian literature is inevitable, the blurbs mention Dostoevsky, Gogol and Gorky but Gary Shteyngart's excellent Absurdistan, the subject of an earlier post, came to my mind. Both books illuminate the extravagant excesses of globalization in Asia with the kind of black comedy that comes from righteous rage. Then I noticed that Shteyngart wrote one of the blurbs on the back cover - so did I think of Shteyngart on my own?

In an interview published at the end of the book Adiga mentions the excoriating, sulphorous African-American novels of the mid-20th century: Ellison, Baldwin and Wright. Going with that I would mention contemporary African fiction as one of the most active venues of the alienated man. Another post here discusses the Nigerian El Nukoya's Nine Lives, a book with close similarities to this one.

Anyway, news flash, the book is really good. It is indeed "compulsively readable." It's angry and funny - "satire" is the technical term. It's a fast read and part of its spell is the way Adiga puts everything out on the surface as we fast-forward along through the life story of Balram Halwai, the twisted and unreliable narrator. He has asserted his humanity through transgression, which is a fine old existential theme in itself, but the real game (as in the 19th century Russian novel) is to persuade the reader that the societal pressures (notably the economic and political ones) on the anti-protagonist make his transgressions understandable, and to at least entertain the idea that they may be, as the antihero himself believes, justifiable.

In this case the target is the surreal disparity of wealth in turn-of-the-century India. The workers building luxurious condominiums live in fetid slums next door. Justice is for sale and the rich not only flout the law but openly pawn the lives of their servants, who fear not only for themselves but their families; to be a servant even to the well-meaning rich is to be held hostage mafia-style. To top the situation off, this clearly untenable circumstance is directly tied to the identification of the wealthy professional class with the West, very conspicuously the English-speaking West. Demagogic populists, meanwhile, are winning elections. "Someday the brown-skinned and yellow-skinned people will be in charge," fulminates the murderously angry narrator, "and then heaven help the rest of you." The message is made more pointed by the writer's lucid and sardonic understanding that the beast within is the same as the beast without.

But it's also really funny. If it wasn't it wouldn't work. It's a book that may even be around for the long term, so masterful is the blending of real provocation with fine black humor.

Babylon Down Under

David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993) is the first novel I've read by this Australian writer, but it won't be the last (there is quite a buzz around his latest, The Great World, so that will go in the Stack). Malouf, who has published eight novels, is also a working poet and his prose is interesting, original and stylish without feeling overwritten. For a reader already impressed with the quality of contemporary Australian literature discovering Malouf is not a revelation, just a confirmation of the great vitality of the Australian literary stage. He is certainly squarely in this tradition, focused on the confrontation with nature and the Other, and on the experience of displacement and violence, that are instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with Australian literature and cinema.

Remembering Babylon is the story of Gemmy Fairley, the lowest of the low of London street urchins, accidentally set to sea and then marooned at the age of thirteen to spend sixteen years living with the aborigines whose language and way of life he adopts. The novel concentrates on his experience after stumbling out of the bush and taking up life with Scottish settlers in a remote highland area of Queensland. Gemmy is something of an idiot savant, damaged from a life of suffering but possessed of rare knowledge, kind and gentle but an inevitably disruptive presence.

In fact Malouf's real interest is in the Scottish settlers and their responses to Gemmy as a symbol, or really an incarnation, of the outback. The tension builds as settlers polarize into those who would launch genocidal attacks on the "blacks" and those who, to say as much as can be said, wouldn't. The situation is a familiar one and the reader is engaged by the drift towards a violent climax, but Malouf is a serious artist and artfully defies the expectations he has invited.

I should mention the treatment of the bee dance as analogy: the apiary-keepers know that the bees must communicate information somehow, but they don't know how the bees do it. Aborigines (excuse me, I have no personal experience of Australia and confess I don't know if "aborigine" is a term in acceptable political form) have ancient systems for learning about places, a product of long history traversing large areas (there is a good discussion of this in Bruce Chatwin's Songlines). Gemmy has some insight into aboriginal sense of place, but it is so alien to the Scottish, who come from an urban environment of coal mines and tenements, as to be quite literally invisible to them (just as Gemmy makes them disappear, for him, by ignoring them). I liked the way Malouf revealed just enough of this: like a blues guitarist who only plays a few, well-expressed notes.

Malouf is a first-class writer and I look forward to reading more of his work.

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.