A retired agent of the secret police decides to write a novel. After all, “a poor Rwandan cobbler composed a novel about the interethnic civil war in his poor African country,” and “a reformed prostitute in Saigon also wrote two brilliant novels: one about her former life when she was nobody in a dark alley, and the other about her new life after she founded a small factory that makes mint candy. Now her novels have been translated into every language, and readers are dazzled by them.” So begins Sudanese born and raised writer Amir Tag Elsir’s delightful novel, The Grub Hunter (translated by William Hutchins), which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2011. The narrator soon finds that writing a novel isn’t easy, but he starts by hanging out at a cafe with an accomplished novelist (called AT — almost all character names are abbreviated, likely a holdover from the narrators days writing secret police reports). “I was very close to the world of writing now.” (Maybe he’ll learn writing by osmosis, who knows?)One member of AT’s inner circle publishes a romance novel, a genre the narrator dismisses for dubious reasons: “My novel certainly won’t be a love story… This type of story no longer impresses anyone, because love has now become a daily routine practised even by beggars and homeless people.” Then again, who can blame him, when the romance comes with prose like this? “Within your eyes, desire lies dormant; rouse it from its torpor. Awaken it, I entrust you … I want it awake and stupid; I love stupidity.”
AT does give the narrator some advice on writing rituals: “My writing rituals differ from one text to the next. I write some novels while elegantly attired and seated in the lobby of a swank hotel or the departure lounge of some airport. Some texts I compose naked in a closed room with the drapes drawn and not a breath of air. Some texts won’t come unless I wander the streets and alleyways, begging from passers-by. When I wrote my novel before last… I stole a wallet from the pocket of a livestock dealer…and spent an entire month in jail, where I finished the text… I’ll tell you about a novel I wrote in a public latrine reserved for conscripts while I was performing my military service. That’s one of my best.”
It’s all ridiculously fun. Beyond the narrator’s story, we encounter a story within the story, when the narrator reads one of AT’s novels about an amateur and yet already failed filmmaker in Moscow. And wait, there’s more! The narrator of the story within the story paraphrases a novel HE reads about a village girl in eighteenth century Russia, so we’re three layers down and it just gets better. “The novel was a page-turner from the get-go.” I agree!
You can read an excerpt of the novel here.
This is book #32 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.
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