Humorous, clever, memoirish novel, covering the coming-of-age exploits of a woman and her friends from Lagos Nigeria; some of whom emigrate to the US,Humorous, clever, memoirish novel, covering the coming-of-age exploits of a woman and her friends from Lagos Nigeria; some of whom emigrate to the US, some of whom stay and try their luck in Lagos. Loved all of the cultural geography that gets travelled here, the extremes of race and custom, the misunderstandings and concordances between Nigerian and American.
Best single image: Band-aids, why aren't they ever the skin color of Africans..?
Author Adichie has a deft and natural way with quick characterization, she can sketch out a cocktail party's worth of characters with a few swings of the pen. All in all a bit too romance-y for this reader, but we can't expect things in novels to go disastrously wrong all the time, can we? If you're exhausted by too many epic unhappy endings, this is for you....more
She would not have lived in a place partly furnished by strangers. The curtains would have been taken down, the carpets rolled and tied with string anShe would not have lived in a place partly furnished by strangers. The curtains would have been taken down, the carpets rolled and tied with string and put in the basement for moths to feed on. Here you built a life around other people's leavings--your family's, or people you had never seen but whose traces you might find in provincial museums. You built around a past of glass cases, shabby lighting, a foul-smelling guardian saying, "It is forbidden."
What begins as a whirling, Joycean immersion into the bohemian world of a Canadian expat woman living in Paris-- never really finds its pattern or frame. Author Gallant gives us five or six opening chapters that threaten to orchestrate an all-in-a-day sort of novel, a tour of the hours of one counter-mythic Shirley Norrington. Although brimming with expository detail, never stopping to linger, no time to take an extra breath... We are after all in the nouvelle-vague-ish uproar and flashpoint setting of 1963, where everything is clashingly contrary and about to go bang with the sixties... but.
Against that chaotic background we're stuck with thoughtful, quiet, just-regular Shirley, never very assertive, always willing to take in a stray dog, and the novel goes, well, kind of diagonal. No longer with the heroine of an odysseus-for-a-day structure, the reader is led on a winding series of distractions and confounding contradictions; the central part of the book is more a lonely-hearts tour, on a budget, of the astringent delights of postwar Paris.
He and I can't see each other again because of collusion. I meant to ask him why he had married me, so that I could tell other people. But perhaps no one will ask me that any more now. I wanted to tell him that I was not sure why he had left me. I haven't behaved in any way that was not predictable from our first conversation. Well, I said nothing. I'm about as I always was, so please don't worry.
Our heroine's world isn't grounded, she's not getting to the cafes where Baldwin and Richard Wright weathered the Parisian flux. This bohemian business seemed a lot more exotic at the outset. There is an undertow of near-hysteria, the vertigo of being in complete charge of a project that is noticeably out of control.
Shirley falls in love, thinks about it, falls out, walks out, walks back in, falls apart. And then picks up and goes again. As in any complicated life, people will be unpredictable, events will upset or right the applecart just when you don't expect them to. What begins as epic has long ago disintegrated, and can most kindly be described as sporadic, episodic. Ports of call in a storm that Cervantes would recognize. Lovely.
Author Anderson's book covers several angles of the now-familiar story of T.E. Lawrence. Most of which centrally concentrate on Lawrence's evolving viAuthor Anderson's book covers several angles of the now-familiar story of T.E. Lawrence. Most of which centrally concentrate on Lawrence's evolving view of the emerging Middle East, in all its eternal wrinkles, and the limitations of the concept of Empire, something very much on the mind of the thoughtful English historian of the day.
After Lawrence, the other characters here are Faisal ibn Hussein, an Arab prince of some consequence; A. Aaronsohn, a Zionist agent and activist living in Palestine; W. Yale, an undercover American who represents both State Dept and Standard Oil a little too interchangeably for comfort; one Herr Prüfer, a agent of the Kaiser who finds his way deep into British Egypt and environs, but manages to slip away at the slightest rustle of the leaves of change. Representing Constantinople, Ahmed Djemal Pasha completes the circle of intrigue & deception.
Quickly establishing his main players, Anderson proceeds to keeping regular tabs on the six men whose destinies are intertwined with the saga at hand, each of whom will play ongoing parts. What he's after is telling the extravagant drama of the First World War from the perspective of Palestine and Syria, but within the historical context of the dissolution of Empires-- Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and British, to different extents.
Our outer circle includes the expected array of period dignitaries and poobahs, Lord Kitchener, Clemenceau, Kaiser Wilhelm, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Lord Balfour, the famous Picot & Sykes, and a limitless entourage of handlebar-mustached British Intelligence men, all using the word "rather" a little too often.
While this is a fairly shopworn approach these days-- think of any Ken Burns documentary that warms the audience to it's five or six central players and spends the next seven episodes bouncing from diary entry to memoirs those characters have left behind-- it still must be said to be fairly effective. There is way too much complicated territory here: geo-politics, treaties & alliances, grudges and broken promises, to try to just unpack it and spread it around. What Anderson has with his round-robin of character narratives makes the outline so much clearer and easier to absorb; it may be history-lite in the eyes of hardcore historians, but it must certainly help the newcomer to this material.
Another of the regular devices of this kind of story-- we watch the hero develop the unconventional-warfare concept as he studies his enemy's arrogance and vulnerabilities-- is on full display here, but again, effectively.
Early on, we are alerted to the way T.E. Lawrence eschews the trench-onslaught of the European theater in his vision :
..continuing through his years at Oxford, Lawrence had obsessively focused on one very particular field of scholarship--medieval military history--and warfare in early twentieth-century Arabia bore striking similarities to that in fourteenth-century Europe. Those similarities extended from how a fighting force was recruited, to its leadership structure--trade out sheikhs and emirs for lords and thanes and princes--to how that fighting force maneuvered in the field. In 1916 Hejaz, much like 1356 France, an army on the move was wholly dependent on satisfying its most elemental needs--water, the availability of draft animals, forage--and this dictated where it went, whom it fought, and when. Lawrence found many of the features of the Arabian battlefield instantly recognizable...
Author Anderson weaves this pattern-recognition into the realization, for Lawrence {here from his "Seven Pillars Of Wisdom"} that the most effective weapon for the Arab Revolt will be asymmetric warfare:
" .. And how would the Turks defend all that ? No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were -- (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back ? ... We were to contain the enemy, by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked ..."
(I don't think it needs to be said that Lawrence fancied himself a kind of romantic desert poet in those memoirs, written in England, long after the fact.)
The case can be made, and I think Anderson's "Lawrence In Arabia" makes it with room to spare, that much of what is tearing the world apart even today can be traced to the last gasp-and-grasp actions of the Empires that were dying in 1918. And a similar case can be made that the new entities just being born-- our present Middle East-- were to suffer deformities due to the atmosphere of their birthing in that greedy, bloody maelstrom.
The occasional departure from this onslaught comes as a welcome relief; here Lawrence, again from "Seven Pillars", describes their strangely magical time hiding out in a semi-abandoned citadel as the winter rains began:
".. It was icy cold as we hid there, motionless, from murky daylight until dark, our minds seemed suspended within these massive walls, through whose every shot-window the piercing mist streamed like a white pennant. Past and future flowed over us like an uneddying river. We dreamed ourselves into the spirit of the place; sieges and feastings, raids, murders, love singing in the night ... "
All in a thousand and one desert nights; a fantastic read, and recommended.
(Unsurprisingly, the character of T.E. Lawrence gets away, without being fully understood by reader or author. Somehow a few of the casual portraits of the side-players are easier to grasp; notably one French Colonel Édouard Bremond, wounded hero of the Somme sent to the backwaters of Suez to convalesce... But we never get Lawrence, fully, and probably shouldn't expect to; there's no room for certainty, after all, with a myth of this truly grand scope.) ...more
Methodical, ruminative coming-of-age tract played out against the backdrop of the developing world and its colonial counterparts. Kane looks at the waMethodical, ruminative coming-of-age tract played out against the backdrop of the developing world and its colonial counterparts. Kane looks at the way that colonized Africa has managed to wager its soul in the ongoing conflicts with the West, told here by a young Islamic scholar.
Standard culture-clash, but really heartfelt and ready to delve into the most vulnerable areas of the dilemma. A couple of different frames are being placed around the simple narrative ---promising village boy deemed equal to an education in the West, goes abroad, risks everything in the encounter-- as Kane attempts to fit the young man into a broader context.
The African side of the story, framed by Islam, is presented as visceral, immediate, and profoundly spiritual. In this frame each character is a semi-mythic persona, comprising a commedia dell'arte group of types, who dispense one sort of wisdom or another: we have the Knight, the Royal Lady, the Teacher, the Fool, etc.
One of the most predominant ongoing frames is that of Philosophy, and indeed it is that which the protagonist will study when sent to France. Complicating the evolving observations, the deep cultural divide, and the general uproar of Youth is the presence, in study form, at least, of voices like Pascal, Descartes, Nietzsche and others from the Western canon. (And who go a long way toward creating havoc in the Faith-versus-Reason column, as if our hero hadn't got enough to absorb...)
In the end, an incredibly wide-ranging set of themes to pull together, and in this translation, at least, no such thing ever happens. This should have been some troubling mash-up of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Camus' The Stranger and The Catcher In The Rye but --it wasn't to be.
(For me, I loved the title, first and foremost. And the truth is, I imagined some kind of French-Senegalese co-production, crisply photographed in black & white, and dating from the nouvelle vague years. Instead, back to fucking René Descartes, the man who, in the course of a paragraph, a sentence, even, launched a million undergraduate naps ...)
All isn't lost, though. The prose has a calm, righteous density that slows down the conclusion-jumping modern reader, and a quality and tempo that invites reflection ... These aren't trivial matters. This is a boy who is nearly a man, a believer who is nearly an apostate, and an exile who goes abroad only to find conflict with himself :
" .. I am not a distinct country of the Diallobe facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it, and what I must leave with it, by way of counter-balance. I have become the two. There is not a clear mind deciding between the two factors of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress over not being two.”...more
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