Book 171: Estonia – The Czar’s Madman = Keisri Hull (Jaan KROSS)

So, back to the first question: should I support him in his madness or in his sanity?

            That would seem to depend on whether he is, in fact, mad or sane. I can’t tell – I don’t even know what I consider him to be. Is it possible to recover from such a state, in such circumstances? I believe (while being aware of my deep ignorance, I still have to voice an opinion) – I believe that such a recovery may well be rare but not impossible.

Timo has been released from prison into house arrest but is still in danger from police informers. He is generally considered to be insane (if you criticise the tsar, not to mention if you are a noble who marries a peasant woman, ipso facto you are mad), and it was his madness that got him out of prison. He has written a dangerous critical memorandum to the then Tsar (Alexander I) – posing a dilemma for the narrator, the brother of his wife (Eeva), who has discovered it in its hiding place and has to decide what to do (most of all, whether he really is mad, or just pretending to be for his protection). And what is the secret link between Timo and the tsar?

The narrator, Jakob, keeps an equally dangerous secret diary over the decades, which is this novel, supposedly found long after the events.

The characters in the novel are great, especially the enigmatic Timo, who has the enormous courage, morality, brainpower and luck – in short, ‘character’ – needed by the dissident. He is ‘guarded’ by the clever, beautiful Eeva (who is nevertheless not a comfortable fit in her newfound nobility), then also by the much less sympathetic Peter Mannteufel (whose surname aptly means “man devil” in German).

Kross is one of Estonia’s best writers, who was himself imprisoned by the Russians (under the USSR), and this novel, written during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, carries clever criticism of Russian authoritarianism, though it is far more than that. He, and his novel (one of the best historical novels I’ve read, though you might like to brush up on your Russian history of the period before starting – it’s based on a true story), deserve a much wider audience abroad.

Kross, Jaan (1920 – 2007), The Czar’s Madman, translated by Anselm Hollo, London, Harvill Press, 2003, ISBN 9781860465796

(first published in Estonian 1978 as Keisri Hull)

Book 170: Trinidad and Tobago (English) – A House for Mr Biswas (VS NAIPAUL)

In all Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that at the end they could be comprehended in one glance. But he had aged. The lines which he had encouraged at first, to give him an older look, had come; they were not the decisive lines he had hoped for that would give a commanding air to a frown; they were faint, fussy, disappointing. His cheeks began to fall; his cheekbones, in a proper light, jutted slightly; and he had developed a double chin of pure skin which he could pull down so that it hung like the stiff beard on an Egyptian statue. The skin loosened over his arms and legs. His stomach was now perpetually distended, not fat; it was his indigestion, for that affliction had come to stay, and bottles of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder became as much part of Shama’s purchases as bags of rice or flour.

Mr Biswas is hapless and I thought not very likeable (even though we see through his eyes), but he is a great character. He accidentally kills his father and finds himself married to a beautiful woman that he had only intended to flirt with. And dominated by his ‘enemies’, her family, who he is dependent on but always trying to escape and with whom he has a Ramayana-scale fight. His wife Shama is equanimous, and cleverer than he thinks (or than he is).

He graduates from being a signwriter, by chance again, to a journalist – not a very good one. (Some of the homeless people he interviews live better than him.) As you might have guessed, he is obsessed throughout with acquiring (and keeping) a house that is worthy of him. He is very house-proud, especially of his Slumberking bed! He is continually thwarted by poverty, attacks by nature, and attacks by unhappy neighbours. He is quixotic but not as loveable as the Man from La Mancha. Life seems to conspire against him. Though I didn’t find Mr Biswas (as he was called from birth) a particularly likeable character, he is fascinating and has some admirable qualities, especially his doggedness. (The same goes for the other characters – mostly his family members).

Sometimes it is very funny, such as the “insuranburn” scam –

Seth sighed. “So what are we going to do with the shop?”

Mr Biswas shrugged.

“Insure-and-burn?” Seth said, making it one word: Insuranburn.

Mr Biswas felt that talk like this belonged to the realms of high finance.

(Were you expecting ‘belonged to the realms of criminality?’)

It is long and don’t look for excitement, and it is not for everyone, but if you can give it time you will find an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary man with no control over his destiny. VS Naipaul won a well-deserved Nobel Prize.

Naipaul, V.S. [Sir Vidiadhar Srajprasad] (1932 – 2018), A House for Mr Biswas, London, Picador Classic, 2016, ISBN 978-1-5098-0350-7

(First published 1961)

 

Book 169: Goa (English): Saudade (Suneeta PERES DA COSTA)

 

My mother told me that the dead walk backward; she said, they try to walk forward but can only walk backward. When she told me that, I was sitting on the step that led from the kitchen to the compound, my hand cupped on her kneecap. A draught of shadows from the pink guava tree splayed on the concrete when the sunlight pierced the clouds overhead. That was our first house; the one in which I was born in Benguela, and I can still see it in my mind’s eye, close and shimmering like a still life, although it probably has like so much else now gone…

 

This novella is actually set almost entirely in Angola. Young narrator Maria Cristina, from a family of Goan immigrants, grows up under Portuguese rule there during its excruciating independence struggle (which doesn’t seem to have much effect on the colonialist families in the cities, until the end). She is haunted by a fear of the spirits of the dead – with their reversed feet. Her relationship with her mother is beautifully described. Only right at the end does she go to India – in a dream. (She gives herself the name Saudade, which the author translates as ‘lostness’ – as good an interpretation as any for this untranslatable, iconic Portuguese word). For Portugal was going to lose Angola, and its whole empire. It was interesting to see the close ties between the various constituents of the Lussophone world – apart from Angola, Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Goa, Madeira, Cape Verde and the Azores all put in cameo appearances. In Luanda and other cities, the street names are of Portuguese heroes – renamed since independence – which seems to underline the sense of impending loss.

I wish that some of the blank pages had been used for a glossary – almost none of the Angolan, Indian or Portuguese words are explained. The political situation in Angola (for example, the differences between the contending groups of freedom fighters) is also left as a mystery to most people nowadays.

Although we follow her life as she matures, not a great deal happens, and I wish it were longer. The author admits that she discovered some errors of fact after the event. But don’t let that put you off – the descriptive writing is really beautiful and I really enjoyed reading it.

 

Peres da Costa, Suneeta, Saudade, Oakland, Transit, 2019, ISBN 9781945492280

(first published Australia 2018)

 

Book 168: Bahrain (English) – Yummah (Sarah A. AL SHAFEI)

 

 

Dana was the one who killed me the most. She loved her freedom and liberty and had a very strong personality, very different than her quiet self when she was much younger. She wanted much more than what she had, and her ambition and enthusiasm always got her what she wanted. Even when her father left, she had chosen to look forwards rather to than [sic] think of the loss like the rest of us; “Baba wanted another life and so he went to look for it. I also want a better life and will prove to Baba some day that we were better off without him anyway,” she told me once. And maybe she was right.

 

At first I was a bit disappointed with Yummah. But I came to love it. The plot is not all that exciting – and in any case some spoilsport put effectively all of it into the back page blurb – and the writing is also not thrilling, or literary, which is not to say that there is anything wrong with it at all. But I had no problem keeping reading the story of Khadeeja and her family down through the generations.

As a 12-year-old, she is torn away from her doll and forced into an arranged marriage to a much older man. Her mother dies soon after, leaving her with two unknown brothers and a husband, though she does come to know and love the latter and have a happy life. She then comes to lose both a child and her husband, struggles to raise her huge family without him, and suffers more tragedies before the dénouement.

For me, it was heartbreaking to see her still speaking to her doll even when she has had nine children and two miscarriages, and when she has to sell her hair in order to pay for a hajj.

So, not the greatest novel ever written and I couldn’t help thinking, “not another novel about the unjust and/or hard life of Islamic women”, but well worth reading.

 

Al Shafei, Sarah A., Yummah, London, Athena Press, 2005, ISBN 1 84401 368 5

Book 167: Hawai’i (English) – House of Many Gods (Kiana DAVENPORT)

Lightning season came, the air so electric the fillings in their teeth hummed. Everything they touched just sparked. There were flash floods, the seas gave off a yellow glow. For days, lightning zigzagged up the valley. It hit a wild pig that rolled into their yard completely roasted. One night, herringbones of ions, lightning striking everywhere. no one saw Ava leave the house. But they heard her awful scream, and found Ben standing over her, his hair electrified a gaseous blue.

Some books prove hard to find a single good quote (which doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad). Not this one – it was hard to choose!

It is set in Hawai’i and Russia – at first blush it is hard to imagine two lands more different, but the parallels soon become obvious – destruction by respective militaries, horrible consequences of the nuclear cycle, and poverty. (Even so, while both this part of Hawai’i and Russia are poor and polluted I can’t help thinking Hawai’i must be a much nicer place to live, for its climate and natural beauty if nothing else.)

Both suffer environmental degradation and nuclear pollution and sickness from rampant militaries. The beautiful island (home to some of the world’s most unique and endangered creatures) is used for target practice.

Sadly Hawai’i is no longer among the ranks of independent countries. It was deceitfully taken over by a kleptocracy of greedy American businessmen, and handed over to the USA (few Americans seem to be aware of this shameful episode in their history). Since then, the Hawai’ians’ tradition of aloha was taken advantage of by the US military and the Polynesians have been overrun by immigrants and tourists, so that they are only a small minority in their own country now.

The story is set mainly on the poverty-stricken Wai’anae coast of O’ahu. Ana was abandoned when she was a child by her mother Anahola and feels extremely resentful because of this. She meets Nikolai, a Russian who makes films about ecological catastrophes in his home country and in the Pacific, and they come to share common feelings. Having let him go, she heads to Russia to try to track him down.

Meanwhile her mother has thrown herself into the horrible trauma of working in ER departments, and tries fruitlessly to reconnect with her daughter, dying of cancer.

One thing I’d take issue with – having lived through the time of Chernobyl and its aftermath, I don’t remember individual Russians being blamed for it in the West. We saw them as being victims of the system. And another thing – Kazakhstan is not in Russia.

If I can have a little personal rant against American “spell checkers” on behalf of so many non-English writers: Here both the Hawai’ian and Russian languages have fallen victim. In the Polynesian (and Scandinavian) languages ‘i’ means “in”, in the Slavic languages it means “and”. In Polynesian, “a” is a possessive (”of”). Of course, such words shouldn’t be capitalised in the middle of a sentence. But smarty-pants programs like Word assume that they are English words and capitalise them. So despite typing correctly, you have to go back and correct them. Several phrases in both Hawai’ian and Russian have fallen foul of this in this book. Down with cultural imperialism!

This is an amazing novel. Much of the writing is very sensual but there is a lot of volcanic anger seething beneath the surface and often erupting. One that I can’t recommend too highly.

Davenport, Kiana, House of Many Gods, NY, Ballantine, 2006, ISBN 978-0-345-48151-1

Book 166: Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese) – A última tragédia = The Ultimate Tragedy (Abdulai SILA)

 

Where exactly was this hope?

Those who knew her earlier would easily understand, it wouldn’t take many words. For the others, it would take patience to explain. She said that it went with her everywhere, ever. Sometimes, it even appeared in dreams, when she was about to fall asleep. It filled her heart with happiness and her head with ideas. New ideas and dreams, and others recussitated, that had been born in her adolescence and had died at some uncertain date in her youth. It was everywhere, even in Obem’s smile, which was also one of her [or: its] fruits. Hope was in everything she did, by day or by night, standing up or lying down. Anyone who didn’t want to believe it must be completely blind or very jealous. Or else someone who had never lost hope…

 

[my translation]

 

As Guinea-Bissau heads towards independence from Portugal, village girl Ndani nervously heads to Bissau to work for a Portuguese family as a maid. She is unlucky and seems not very intelligent; she starts with no knowledge of the world of the ‘brancos’ (’Whites’).

Like so many colonies, Guinea-Bissau ended up with colonists who were mostly poor fishers or peasants back home, and who hope the locals won’t know (the housemistress Linda can barely read).

Linda discovers religion and makes Ndani go to church. But her husband rapes house-girls.

Ndani is expelled and returns to her village; the chief force-marries her (his sixth wife), and builds a big house for her, but he abandons her when he finds she’s no longer a virgin. Régulo is also not very intelligent but does get good advice. The chief thinks about thinking all the time (the brancos’ secret) but he doesn’t really think.

She finally finds love with the school teacher and has a child with him. But all is not destined to end well, as he gets unwillingly caught up in the rivalry between Régulo and the colonial Administrator.

I learnt a lot about local attitudes, for example that ‘White’ medicine is thought to work on ‘Blacks’ but not vice versa… Another very enjoyable African novel.

This Portuguese language edition has a vocabulary full of great words (which the English translation apparently doesn’t have).

 

Sila, Abdulai (1958 – ), A última tragédia, Rio de Janeiro, Pallas, 2011, ISBN 978-85-347-0398-7

(First published in Guinea-Bissau 1995)

Translated as: The Ultimate Tragedy by Jethro Soutar, Sawtry, Dedalus, 2017