Category: Reading

Time traveling serial killer! In South African writer Lauren Beukes’s thriller, a drifter from 1930s Chicago discovers a house with a murderous agenda. (That aspect reminded me of David Mitchell’s Slade House.) Beukes takes us back and forth in time, narrating from the perspective of Harper, the killer, and his various victims. Some of them don’t go quietly. The ending includes delightful ambiguity. Along the way, we can see ourselves in the characters’ exchanges.

“I’m scared, Mom.”

“We all are,” Rachel says. … “Shhh. It’s okay, honey. It’s all right. That’s the big secret, don’t you know? Everyone is. All the time.”

This was a quick, exciting read, based on enormous research about the city of Chicago, as Beukes lays out in her note at the end.

Bits and pieces:

• As another entry of economists in popular culture, one of the victims is studying economics as Northwestern University and police find “Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics” in her backpack. Remember that Rachel Chu of Crazy Rich Asians also studied economics at Northwestern. I wonder if they knew each other?
• “The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.”

Here is what a few other reviewers had to say:

• Alan Cheuse, NPR: “Beukes has done tremendous research about the long span of Chicago time in which her story occurs, and carefully constructed the eccentric and brilliant plot.”
• Ben Hamilton, The Guardian: “The killing is so brutal and pitiless that it threatens to overwhelm the rest of the novel… This is an entertaining novel that will be read with keen attention, but the reader may end up slightly confused by the meaning of it all.”
• Janet Maslin, New York Times (and this is a great review overall): “Once Ms. Beukes gets her chronological tricks working at full blast, Harper’s [the killer’s] methods become maddeningly effective.”
• Publishers Weekly: “Beukes is particularly good at garnering sympathy for Harper’s female victims, creating deep characterizations in only a few pages, so that they come across as more than just fodder for a psychopath’s mission.”

This is book #7 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes — a historical novel — recounts a conflict in the closing days of a major African empire. In the late 19th century in what is now Mozambique, the empire (called the “state of Gaza”) resists the rule of the Portuguese. Imani, the novel’s protagonist, is a fifteen-year-old girl who acts as interpreter for the Portuguese military representative as conflict is imminent. Her family is torn, as one of her brothers fights for the Portuguese and the other for the African empire and as her . This is the first book in a trilogy: the second book is already out in Portuguese. David Brookshaw produced the English translation of Woman of the Ashes. I listened to the audiobook (narrated by Bahni Turpin and Joel Richards) and sometimes got a little lost in the plot, but the prose was gorgeous. Here are a few lines that stood out:

• “Before long our nation will be a jumble of scars, a map forged by so many blows that we shall be more proud of the wounds than of the unblemished body we may yet save.”
• “The difference between war and peace is as follows: in war, the poor are the first to be killed; in peace, the poor are the first to die. For us women, there’s another difference too: in war, we get raped by those we do not know.”
• Men “are scared when women talk, and even more scared when women stay silent.”
• “To describe the decrepit building as a ‘barracks’ can only stem from some huge distortion that fails to distinguish between fact and desire.”
• “My father was a tuner of the infinite marimba that is the world.”
• “Some of us humans share the same fate: we die inside, and are only held together by our similarity to the living we once were.”
• “Wars never begin. When we awaken to them, we realize they started long ago.”
• “War is a midwife: from the insides of the world, it causes another world to emerge.”
• “Dark memories are like an abyss: no one should lean too far over them.”

• Publishers Weekly: “a fascinating, intricate story”
• Sheila Glaser, New York Times: “Couto conjures what he has described as the ‘many and small stories’ out of which history is made, offering a profound meditation on war, the fragility of empire and the ways in which language shapes us.”
• Kirkus Review: “A rich historical tale thick with allegory and imagery that recalls Marquez and Achebe.”
• Daniel Bokemper, World Literature Today: “A beautiful and grotesque force interweaving history with myth.”
• Luísa Gadelha, Diario Centro do Mundo: “A leitura vale a pena tanto pelo prazer literário quanto pelo resgate histórico de Moçambique.”
• Caíque Gomez, Poltrona Vip: “Mia Couto mistura história, mito e magia para narrar os horrores da guerra com uma linguagem muito poética, característica marcada do autor, como se ele quisesse nos reconfortar de alguma maneira, como se dentro desses horrores, ele nos devolvesse o humano.”
• More reviews in English

In this memoir, a young man in Malawi has to drop out of secondary school for lack of funds. But with his interest in electronics, access to a modest library, and incredible tenacity, he builds a windmill to generate electricity for his family. The story is inspiring, and it’s not surprising that a movie is coming out soon:

Over the course of the memoir, Kamkwamba gives insight to a range of issues that he and those he loves have faced: surviving a famine, adolescent marriage, getting sent away from school for not having a uniform, having to reduce meals in times of food insecurity, and the HIV crisis (documented in Kim Yi Dionne’s book Doomed Interventions).

I have a couple of quibbles with the book, which necessarily entail spoilers. So if you don’t want those, stop reading now! None of them mean that you shouldn’t read the book. But if you have read the book, I’d be interested in your take.

First, after Kamkwamba builds his windmill and continues to innovate, he ultimately gets “discovered,” first by local media and later by tech types from the U.S. These Westerners sponsor Kamkwamba so that he is able to provide a more stable life for his family and pay the school fees of several of his friends. Kamkwamba goes on to study at elite schools. I’m very happy for him, and I enjoyed hearing about his adventures. But I’m personally less interested in these tales that ultimately hinge on Western charity. (Again, this isn’t a critique of Kamkwamba’s story! It’s just a comment on the kinds of stories I’m most excited to read.)

Second, in the final pages of the book, Kamkwamba calls his fellow Africans to courage: “My fellow students and I talk about creating a new kind of Africa, a place of leaders instead of victims, a home of innovation rather than charity. I hope this story finds its way to our brothers and sisters out there who are trying to elevate themselves and their communities, but who may feel discouraged by their poor situation.” Kamkwamba showed amazing ingenuity and tenacity, but ultimately what pulled him out of poverty was charity. The Western donors weren’t investing in his windmill; they wanted to help out an inspiring kid. I’m glad they did! The story tells us a lot about hard work, but I’m not sure what it tells us about elevating oneself and “innovation rather than charity” (emphasis added).

The audiobook is well read by Chike Johnson. In the ebook — but not the audiobook — there’s a nice epilogue (“about the book”) in which Kamkwamba describes what has happened in his life since the book was published. It seems like he’s doing lots of great work in Malawi and beyond.

This is book #5 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.

Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut collection of short stories is a revelation. I first listened to the audiobook  — beautifully narrated by Adjoa Andoh — a year ago, and I’ve just re-listened to it. The stories take place in Nigeria, in the U.S., in both. If I had to pick a theme, I’d pick loss, and Arimah explores every cave and crevice extending from that starting point.

Here are a few lines that struck me:

• The U.S., a “country that rewards her brand of boldness, in her black of body, with an incredulous fascination that makes her put it away” (from the story “Light”).
• A father and his daughter: “He does not yet wonder where she gets this, this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at bay and he must never let it die out” (in “Light”).
• “Joy had become a finite meal she begrudged seeing anyone but herself consume” (in “Glory”).
• Turning 50, from the perspective of a child: “Mrs. Ajayi was very old, creeping on that age when life begins to lose all meaning, fifty, I think” (in “Redemption”).

Here is the effusive review that I wrote when I first listened to the book:

A breathtaking collection of stories. The prose is beautiful; it made other books I read or listened to at the same time seem pedestrian. Some of the stories are realistic, others incorporate magical realism. Some take place in Nigeria, others in the U.S., other in both. I’d read a novel by Arimah on any of these stories. One woman observes about her boyfriend: “He didn’t seem to mind how joy had become a finite meal she begrudged seeing anyone but herself consume.” Or a father comments on his daughter: “He should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed.” As Marina Warner wrote in the New York Times, “It would be wrong not to hail Arimah’s exhilarating originality: She is conducting adventures in narrative on her own terms, keeping her streak of light, that bright ember, burning fiercely, undimmed.”

At the time of this writing, the ebook on Kindle is available for US$1.99, which is wildly high literary value-for-money.

This was book #3 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country.

This year I plan to read a book by an author from every country across Africa. That’s 54 countries. I’ll blog and tweet about it under the hashtag #ReadAfricanWriters. You can also follow my progress on this map.

And here’s my first entry for the year, a memoir by an author from Rwanda!

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil.

Here’s my quick take:

Wow. Clemantine Wamariya was just six when the Rwandan genocide took place. Separated from the rest of her middle class family, she and her teenage sister Claire traverse several countries, in and out of refugee camps. Eventually they make it to the USA. The book gives a devastating portrait of how conflict and being a refugee can affect a child, and how a young woman seeks to make sense of her experience, including through literature, from Elie Wiesel to W.G. Sebald. Beautiful and gripping and thoughtful. Highly recommended.

Here’s how the publisher describes the book:

Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.

The book also made it onto the Washington Post’s list of notable books for 2018.