Girls of Riyadh

#196
Title: Girls of Riyadh
Author: Rajaa Alsanea
Publisher:
Year: 2005/2007
Country: Saudi Arabia
296 pages

Touted as a breakthrough, this epistolary novel needs to be understood in its cultural context in order to be something other than not-very-engaging chick lit. Within that cultural context, this novel-in-one-sided-e-mails is discrepant, jarring, and revolutionary (at least within the domestic sphere of the rich). However, even from this perspective, I had trouble with what felt like a self-conscious effort to mimic "Sex in the City." The characters' cattiness and meanspirited comments about other women's looks didn't make me like or respect them. Unlike the real women of RAWA and other revolutionaries, these self-preoccupied characters inspire no admiration. While the premise could work, the book suffers from telling, not showing, and is more like a gloss of the story than the story itself. The narrative itself just dribbles away and does not actually follow through on some of the promises the narrator makes to the reader-as-e-mail-recipient. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't stand as a work of literature without its political and historical frame. This is not your mother's feminism, and not in a good way. For a more nuanced perspecive, try Satrapi's  Complete Persepolis.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

#195
Title: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Riverhead
Year: 2008
Country: Ethiopia
228 pages

Some have said that this is a slow novel in which little happens. While I think these comments are true, they are not negative, and stopping there misses the point. Nor is it simply a story of the erosion of the immigrant's dream. Sepha Stephanos is not just an immigrant from Ethiopia who fled the war and didn't get the girl. The story is more subtle than that. Stephanos is paralyzed by memory and guilt. This guilt isn't just because of what he did and didn't do in Ethiopia or the U.S.; it is the guilt of a survivor, the guilt that makes simply being alive an almost unbearable burden. The circles of Washington, D.C.'s roads are the circles of Dante's hell (alluded to in the title). As in The Ministry of Pain, what nostalgia the immigrant can muster is impaired and tainted by the memories of war. Stephanos's flat guardedness is the point of his story, and perhaps his downfall as well.

Good Morning Comrades

#194
Title: Good Morning Comrades
Author: Ondjaki
Publisher: Biblioasis
Year: 2001/2008 (tr.)
Country: Angola
127 pages

A terrific, deceptively simple, and artful tale of fear in Angola. The story centers on a schoolboy. Through his interactions with his visiting aunt, his apparently straightforward and uncritical view of life in Luanda is called into question, both for the reader and, ultimately for him. His casual and matter-of-fact narrative transforms as events both real and imagined break through his facade. This description doesn't do justice to Ondjaki's economical and precise prose. I highly recommend Good Morning Comrades for both historical and literary reasons.

The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy

#193
Title: The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy
Author: Camara Laye
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Year: 1954/1994
Country: Guinea (French Guinea)
188 pages

According to some sources, this is not a memoir but a novel, or "literature," though the protagonist has the same name as the author. I will approach it as a fictionalized memoir; it is better as an autobiography than it is as a novel. This tale from 1954 fits in the "leaving for school" rather than the "leaving due to war" subgenre. For this reason, and because it stops short of Laye's experiences in France, it is more romantic and, despite the author's inner turmoil about leaving, less conflicted than many of its ilk. It tells an interesting enough story of growing to manhood, including initiation rites and adolescent circumcision that make it interesting to read in conjunction with Somé's Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman and Fadumo Korn's Born in  the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. However, the unanswered question lingering at the edges of this narrative involves the larger changes in the author's community (and his view of it) due to his maturation and coming of age and to the changes in African colonialism and self-governance. I would like to know how his understanding of his village changed even after a few years studying in the capitol, whether he in fact returned from France, as his mother wished, and if so, what he found. The author foreshadows this question less than halfway in: "But the world rolls on, the world changes, perhaps more rapidly than anyone else's.... and the proof of it is that my own totem--I too have my totem--is still unknown to me" (p. 75). This memoir would have been better had he illustrated this statement (and others like it) rather than leaving it as a loose end.

Shade's Children

#192
Title: Shade's Children
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: HarperTrophy
Year: 1997/98
351 pages

I haven't yet had a chance to get Nix's Superior Saturday (Keys to the Kingdom #6), so I picked up Shade's Children for a break from heavier reading. It isn't a stellar example of what Nix can do, though it is sufficiently entertaining to carry itself. Compared to his other stand-alone novels, the concept is less-well thought through and rendered. The premise is promising: Aliens have made everyone over 14 disappear and now keep children corralled in dormitories until their "Sad Birthday," when they're taken away for parts. Most runaways are caught, but a few survive, including a group lead by Shade, a computer intelligence. As is always the case, Nix creates his environment well, dropping succulent hints and unusual details. The plot, however, has more holes and inexplicable events than is typical for this author. The wrap-up seems abrupt and would have benefited by 20-30 more pages focused on Shade before and during the climactic events. Read this one for the worldbuilding, not the story.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

#191
Title: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Author: Brock Clarke
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Year: 2007
311 pages

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is best read as a spoof of fictionalized memoirs. Some reviewers haven't liked this novel; my guess is that they are reading it straight rather than as a parody of the genre. Of course the protagonist acts stupidly. Of course the characters are either flat or larger-than-life (My Friend Leonard, anyone?). It's meant to be absurd, and it means to draw attention repeatedly to its own artifice. In this sense, though it's written in a pretty straightforward narrative style, it is really better classified as postmodern than as classically-organized fiction.

Here's a reading strategy: First read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, published as memoir but now widely accepted to be self-aggrandizing fiction. Then read (not watch) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest for a narrator who's having trouble grasping what's happening in his life because his internal chatter is so pronounced. Finally, read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time for a narrator who knows less than the reader does as he struggles to solve a mystery. Now read An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, the putative memoir of Sam Pulsifer, who as a teenager accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House, killing two people and setting in motion the events of the rest of his life.

Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe

#190
Title: Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe
Author: Doreen Baingana
Publisher: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books
Year: 2005
Country: Uganda
200 pages

This short story collection is comprised of stories about and narrated by three Ugandan sisters. It focuses on the youngest (and presumably most autobiographical), Christine, and various aspects of her coming of age. Themes of family strife, beliefs, and place in the world are set against the lightly sketched but very present backdrop of Idi Amin's regime. Most affecting is "A Thank-You Note," in which the harsh realities of AIDS are juxtaposed with the joy and freedom of sexuality, neither negating the other. "Questions of Home," like many other narratives of travel and culture, nicely illustrates both culture shock and the reverse culture shock of return.