My reading group reads books from developing countries, and after Purple Hibiscus (Nigerian novel dealing with domestic violence) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (takes place in Afghanistan, again with lots of domestic violence), everyone is desperate for something upbeat.
Can anyone recommend any upbeat development fiction? (Besides the Ladies’ No 1 Detective Agency?)
Sarah over at Sarah’s Pensieve is the first to complete her first review for the Africa Reading Challenge: Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter.
I’ve been pushing on my first two, but it’s been a bit of a downer (well-written downers, but still): a non-fiction account of British atrocities in Kenya in the 1950s and a novel about domestic abuse in Nigeria. (Yesterday I picked up a bit of Cuban science fiction to try and balance my psyche.)
Early last year I read an academic paper extolling the value of fictional narratives in illuminating the social dynamics of developing countries [1]. That launched me into a mélange of narratives in the course of the year, taking me from Kenya to Afghanistan to India to Cuba. The best of these books combined compelling prose, true characters, and insights into some of the world’s most desperately struggling populations.
Half of a Yellow Sun follows the lives of two adult sisters during the Biafran war of independence from Nigeria (Biafra didn’t stay independent; that’s why you may not have heard of it). I read this while in Nigeria for work and was completely absorbed. I remember finishing it in the wee hours of the morning (with a day of work ahead of me) and neither being able to sleep nor to pick up another book. Adichie really seems to capture the spirit of the time and illuminates ethnic conflicts that continue to flare up all over the world (most recently in Kenya).
What Is the What jumps back and forth in the life of a young male Sudanese refugee to the United States. Eggers, the author, novelizes the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, introducing fictional events and characters to capture experiences outside of those lived by Deng alone. Eggers reminds us of the pleasures people find even in terrible situations. He doesn’t shy away from the manifold tragedies of modern Sudan, but somehow he still manages to leave us with hope.
My reading carried me from African-authored classics (So Long a Letter from Senegal and Petals of Blood from Kenya) to Western-authored thrillers (The Darling and The Mission Song), from fluffy (the Ladies’ No 1 Detective Agency books) to deeply sobering (The Inheritance of Loss). Several powerful, engaging books focused on the struggles of women, whether polygamous wives (A Thousand Splendid Suns and So Long a Letter) or prostitutes (Man, Woman, and Hunger and Instead of Cursing You).
I learned so much, and I didn’t even have to crack open an ethnography or a history book.
[1] David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and Michael Woolcock, “The Fiction of Development: Knowledge, Authority, and Representation,” Development Studies Institute Working Paper 05-61, September 2005. [link]
Here’s the whole list (with links to my reviews):
• 1 World Manga, by Roman (unnamed poor countries)
• Cause Celeb, by Fielding (unnamed African country)
• The Darling, by Banks (Liberia)
• En Vez de Maldecirte [Instead of Cursing You], by Moreno (Mexico)
• The Full Cupboard of Life, by Smith (Botswana)
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Adichie (Nigeria)
• El Hombre, La Hembra, y El Hambre [Man, Woman, and Hunger], by Chaviano (Cuba)
• The Inheritance of Loss, by Desai (India)
• The Kalahari Typing School for Men, by Smith (Botswana)
• The Mission Song, by le Carre (unnamed African country)
• The Namesake, by Lahiri (India – United States)
• A Passage to India, by Forster (India)
• Petals of Blood, by Thiong’o (Kenya)
• So Long a Letter, by Ba (Senegal)
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Hosseini (Afghanistan)
• What Is the What, by Eggers (Sudan)
I read a lot of modern writing: out of 45 books read in 2007, a total of two were published over 100 years ago (Much Ado About Nothing and – a religious text – The Book of Mormon). But I have a friend who loves the old stuff, and this quote from Charles Lamb – published in 1825 – captures something of that:
Rather than follow in the train of this insatiable monster of modern reading, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, shell peas, or do whatever ignoble diversion you shall put me to. Alas! I am hurried on in the vortex. I die of new books, or the everlasting talk about them. . . . I will go and retrieve myself with a page of honest John Bunyan, or Tom Brown. Tom anybody will do, so long as they are not of this whiffling century.
Mr Lamb, I am a slave to the insatiable monster and am loving it! His “insatiable monster” makes me think of the spirit No Face in the film Spirited Away, who becomes a giant black blob, gobbling up everything in its wake. Somebody shovel a few more audiobooks into my brain, please.
* The quote is proximately from Anne Fadiman’s book of essays At Large and At Small.
Conseguí este libro en forma de audiolibro de la biblioteca y me gustó bastante. Aqui es lo que escribí para Amazon:
ilustración absorbente de la vida en la Habana hoy: la intensa privación yuxtapuesta con el amor por una ciudad maravillosa
En este libro, Daíno Chaviano narra de una forma absorbente la búsqueda desesperada para la comida en la Habana de hoy. (Bueno, se escribió hace diez años así que es la Habana de aquel entonces, pero no me imagino que la situación se ha mejorado mucho.)
La protagonista del cuento es la mujer Claudia, una estudiante de la historia del arte que deja su trabajo en un museo nacional cuando ve que los artefactos históricos de la patria se están vendiendo del museo a cualquier que tiene la plata. De allí Claudia pasa por varias relaciones románticas: una relación de amor apasionado, otra de conveniencia (o sea, un hombre que le da carne para su hijo en cambio a su compañía), y – por fin – se vuelve jinetera (la palabra cubana para una prostituta) para los turistas extranjeros. La degeneración en la vida de Claudia refleja la degeneración de la vida en la Habana a través de los años.
Si eso no fuera suficiente, a la mitad del libro aprendemos que Claudia puede ver a varios espíritus y comienza a viajar a través del tiempo a ver la Habana antigua. Cada viaje se vuelve más al pasado y Claudia ve cómo la Habana se ha surgido de la selva. En describir la Habana del pasado y del presente, Chaviano presenta una carta amorosa a una ciudad que obviamente le encanta pero que se ha vuelto duro y difícil.
Hasta el momento final del libro, Claudio tiene que hacer decisiones muy difíciles para poder proveer comida a sí misma y a su hijo: estas decisiones son un símbolo para la gran decisión entre quedarse con una ciudad que le queda muy cerca al corazón o dejar su ciudad materna para buscar la comida en otro país.
El lenguaje del libro es bello y es particularmente eficaz cuando Chaviano lo usa para describir la comida deliciosa que Claudia desea pero que se encuentra tan elusiva, tanto para ella que para sus compañeros cubanos. Este libro me impresionó tanto que pienso ahora leer los otros tres libros en el serie de libros «La Habana Oculta»: Gata encerrada, Casa de juegos, y La isla del amor infinito.
Escuché el audiolibro producido por RecordedBooks y narrado por Tatiana Vecino and Raul Duran. Los dos son buenos lectores.
[Una nota con respecto al contenido: El libro en parte describe la vida de una prostituta y – aunque no sea extremadamente explícito – tampoco dora la píldora, así que vemos algo de sexo.]
A friend gave me this for my birthday some months ago, and I read it (mostly) during our Christmas vacation in Florida. (It – inexplicably – edged out my non-fiction tome describing horrific tortures carried out by British imperialists in Kenya in the 1950s.)
good thriller (gathers momentum from okay to exciting) with an inspired twist and a satisfying finish
The backbone of this story is Vida Winter, the best-selling, captivating, masterful novelist of her generation, telling the secret story of her life to her chosen biographer, a reclusive bibliophile and occasional biographer Margaret Lea. The principal challenge for an author with writing a book in which a masterful (captivating, eloquent, powerful) storyteller tells her story is that you expect the story within the story to be, well, masterful. And when it isn’t, you’re disappointed. (It’s kind of like the old Tom Hanks-Sally Field movie Punchline where Hanks plays an excellent stand-up comic, but the stand-up comedy in the film isn’t that funny.)
This novel starts out that way. The storytelling isn’t masterful, and Ms Winter – as she tells her story – displays the annoying habit of describing all sorts of feelings and exchanges that she would have no way of knowing about. She describes the dialogues and sentiments of members of her household that took place before she was born or when she was just a baby (without providing a plausible way for her to have learned of them). Maybe other stories make this mistake, but it stands out here, perhaps because Ms Winter is telling her story TO A BIOGRAPHER who realistically would not unquestioningly accept this kind of speculation. At other times, when other characters are telling their stories, the author takes explicit pains to explain why the narrative seems smoother or more omniscient than it should. Those explicit cases (sometimes a little over-explained) make Ms Winter’s inappropriate omniscience stand out even more.
Although this is no The Shadow of the Wind [1], the plot picks up with twists and turns and red herrings, and finally the author adds a clever plot twist worthy of the film The Sixth Sense, a twist that allows the reader to turn back and re-interpret the entire story. Crafting a credible twist of that nature is no small feat, and Setterfield does it well.
I also enjoyed the ending. The author clearly subscribes to the adage: Give the audience what it wants. She ties up the loose strings and lets us know what happens to all the key characters with a wink and a nudge to her audience, indicating that she knows she is stepping beyond the immediate scope of the story but that she also knows we’re interested in the next step of the characters’ stories.
Well done. Not perfect, but well done.
[Note on content: The book has a few non-explicit references to sexual violence (no descriptions).]
[1] I actually read the original Spanish version of The Shadow of the Wind, La Sombra Del Viento (by Carlos Ruiz Zafon), and adored it. I have heard many rave reviews of the English translation. By no means should you listen to the English audiobook, which I tried to listen to but couldn’t for its over-the-top music and accents.
My wife and I were reading aloud The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times on a recent road trip, and I was interested to see the role that economists have played.
First off,
the economist Adam Smith took on board the doctors’ discovery that meat was a superfluous luxury and this provided an important cog in the taxation system of his seminal treatise on the free market. (p. xxiv)
More interestingly,
As environmental degradation and population growth became serious problems in Europe, economists turned to the pressing question of limited natural resources. Many realised that producing meat was a hugely inefficient process in which nine-tenths of the resources pumped into the animal were wastefully transformed into feces. (p. xxv)
And this has nothing to do with economists (be grateful), but
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley joined an eccentric network of nudist vegetarians who were agitating for social revolution. (p. xxv)
Any connection to his wife’s writing of Frankenstein, I wonder?
I’ve decided to participate in one more reading challenge over the coming months, the Expanding Horizons Challenge, hosted by Book Nut. By the end of April, you either read six books from six different cultures or four books from one culture which is not your own. (Here are the details.)
I’m enjoying El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre (Man, woman, and hunger), by Cuban writer Daína Chaviano (who can resist a writer who looks this intense). It’s part of a series called The Occult Side of Havana, so I’ll try and read the other three books in the series, plus one book in English (Julia Alvarez writes in English even though she started her life in the Dominican Republic).
So here’s my list:
I’m excited to read several books by the same author in Spanish. And Julia, well, she had me at In the time of the butterflies.
The other day a friend told me he was considering doing the Russian Reading Challenge for next year, in which you commit to read several Russian novels and you share them with a community of readers. As I poked around on-line, I found many reading challenges (mostly linked from the Ex Libris blog). But despite searching, I could find no reading challenges focused on African literature or books dealing with Africa issues.
So I’m hosting one. The guidelines are at the Africa Reading Challenge page, where I’ll be hosting a list of participants and links to their comments on their books.
Here is my preliminary list for the challenge:
This list may change and I may add to it, but it’s a start.
A friend asked me for recommendations of books she could read to learn about Africa but not to feel like she’s learning (i.e., not hard reading). So last night I looked over every book I’ve read either taking place in Africa or written by an African or dealing with Africa over the last five years. (Here is the complete list, with a capsule review and a rating.)
Here are a few of my favorites among those that are not slow-reading non-fiction (i.e., they’re either fiction or they’re easy – not necessarily light – reading non-fiction):
If you look at the list, you might notice that Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (my review) – a novel about child soldiers in West Africa – is also highly rated. This book really moved me as I read it, but a friend who does lots of research with issues faced by child soldiers soured me on it a bit.
David Evans' personal blog 