Alan Cheuse reviews Camilla Gibb‘s Sweetness in the Belly, about a British-born Muslim woman’s life in both London, England, and Harar, Ethiopia. (Morocco also serves as the backdrop of a section in the book.) Of course I’m already intrigued.
Another good review for Wole Soyinka’s memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, this time from the Christian Science Monitor.
It was a time, Soyinka tells us, when “the gods were still only in a state of hibernation.” As the recipient of a Rockefeller fellowship, Soyinka was given the means to travel throughout Nigeria, studying traditional festivals and forms of drama. Soon, however, he tells us, political tyranny (along with increasing Westernization) began to threaten what he cherished about his homeland.
Most of this book, in fact, is about Soyinka’s struggle to preserve the land and culture that he loves. “You Must Set Forth at Dawn” does not so much tell the tale of Soyinka the playwright and Nobel laureate, or even that of Soyinka as the adult extension of the child in “Aké” (although the humor, charm, and curiosity of the young boy do recur throughout the narrative). Rather this is the story of Soyinka as a Nigerian, a descendent of the Yoruba people, an African, and a world citizen – a man for whom public events overshadow the private.
Read the rest of Marjorie Kehe’s review here.
I hadn’t heard about Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, but it certainly seems as though the people now beating the drums of war could use a book like this. Here’s a snippet from Kelly McEvers’ review in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The book is more than just a retelling of American intervention abroad: rogue diplomats and covert agents, a malleable press, ignorance of local cultures, the influence of multinational corporations, the rhetoric of American righteousness. What’s new here is how adeptly Kinzer draws the dotted line from each story to the next.
The result is that while it may seem as if a new foreign-policy doctrine fueled the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, justifications for American-sponsored “regime change” date back more than 100 years. Each of the book’s cautionary tales — set in the Pacific, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East — repeat the same suspect themes and in some cases the same suspect characters.
Kinzer begins his indictment in 1893, when American diplomats, missionaries and sugar planters orchestrated the overthrow of Hawaii’s monarchy and installed as president Sanford Dole, who later helped build a family fruit empire. It was the beginning of America’s expansionist-imperialist age, an age “propelled largely by the search for resources, markets, and commercial opportunities” and the “missionary instinct” to improve the lives of faraway people.
More here.
Writing in the Washington Post, Ron Charles praises David Mitchell’s new novel, Black Swan Green:
Mitchell’s previous work has shown how much language matters to him, and now he’s created a character who lives and dies on the battlefield of words. Jason speaks with a heavy stammer — the kind of disability, he realizes, that people still feel comfortable mocking, long after they’ve given up making fun of “cripples” and “spastics.” (“It’s easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname,” he notes.) Every utterance offers the fresh danger of humiliation among a group of boys on the lookout for any sign of weakness or difference: “My billion problems kept bobbing up like corpses in a flooded city.” Speaking is always an elaborate contest with the “hangman” in his mind, the demon who colonizes the alphabet, grabbing the letter “s” and then “n.” Jason races ahead of each sentence, scanning for forbidden words and making quick substitutions before he gets snared in a contorted pause. “Reading dictionaries like I do helps you do these ducks and dives, but you have to remember who you’re talking to. (If I was speaking to another thirteen-year-old and said the word melancholy to avoid stammering on sad, for example, I’d be a laughingstock ’cause kids aren’t s’posed to use adult words like melancholy.”)
Oh, I want to read this book.
This week, a live performance of work by some excellent writers opens in San Francisco. HAZE is based on stories, novels, essays and other writings by Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Denis Johnson and Vendela Vida.
HAZE
Directed by Sean San Jose
April 13 – April 29, 2006
Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 PM – $9-$20
All Thursdays are pay-what-you-can
Special benefit evening: Sunday, April 16, 7 PM, $25
Performance, post-show reading, and reception with authors Junot Diaz & Vendela Vida
Reserve by calling 415.626.3311
I wish that I could be there! If you go, send me a review and I’ll post it here.
Paul Gray gives Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française a rave review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Suite was discovered in the 1990s by the author’s daughter, and turned out to be a novel of the Holocaust written during the horror that was unfolding.
The date of Némirovsky’s death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of “Suite Française” almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done. In his astute cultural history, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell describes the invariable progression — from the hastily reactive to the serenely reflective — of writings about catastrophes: “The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as ‘diary’ or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible.”
Read the rest here.