Book 239: Falkland Islands (English) – Little Black Lies (Sharon BOLTON)

The islands are transformed by the setting of the sun. As the colours fade to monochrome, as the fine contours of the landscape melt into shadow, so the sounds and scents and textures of the land wake up. People who live in the populated parts of the world talk about the quiet, the stillness, of night. Here, when the sparse population goes to its rest, the opposite happens. Here, night-time means an endless cacophony of noise. The nesting birds that Bee and I ride past chuckle and gossip, in a constant, squabbling carpet of sound. Overhead, avian teenagers carouse in high-pitched revelry, drunk on flight and freedom. Hawks sing, penguins on the nearby shore bray at the howling of the wind, while the clifftop albatross colony might be discussing politics, so varied and intelligent seem their conversations. Beneath it all is the endless grumble and roar of the ocean.

This one is a bit of a placeholder. Sharon Bolton isn’t from the Falkland Islands and I couldn’t find mention anywhere that she had even visited. (Though the descriptions ‘feel’ seem so realistic that that’s hard to believe). But since I was unable to find a single novel written by a Kelper – or by a long-term visitor – this one will have to do until one appears. And, frankly, this thriller is so good that I couldn’t pass it over.

The Falklands would appear in reality to be one of those island countries where everybody knows everybody (although there is a visiting cruise ship in this story to throw in a wild card); crime doesn’t happen and in fact nothing normally happens (apart from the little matter of the Argentine invasion and its legacies, such as PTSD and minefields). (“Margaret Thatcher, who’s practically become the patron saint of the islands after her handling of the invasion, talks about society being redundant, of the individual being king. If she truly knew and understood this place, she’d never spout such a load of old bollocks”). Indeed there’s no privacy even for the police – I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them!

When suddenly one child after another goes missing, even suspects have to get involved in the search. Three of the chief suspects are the prickly, troubled Catrin (who had already lost her own children), Rachel (the best friend from her childhood) and ex-soldier Callum, Catrin’s former lover – all of them flawed, are stalking each other, and all of them get to tell a third of the story from their point of view in turn. Whose version can you trust, if any of them? All of them have suffered losses, are damaged and suspicious, have darkness in their souls, and have secrets to be revealed. You can’t help wondering, if something like this happened to you, whether fate might tear you asunder from even your best friend as well.

The main characters are brilliantly drawn and believable (or should I say plausible), the setting is very atmospheric (a major character in itself), and the plot is not unbelievable but is fast and intricate and keeps you guessing right till the end.

For me the most devastating part was the pilot whale stranding, failed rescue and subsequent killing carried out by Catrin – even if in a good humanitarian cause, it showed that she was capable of killing!

The references to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to represent the unbearable burden that must be borne by Rachel for past actions that are sewn into the text were brilliant.

The ending is very clever and unexpected, although perhaps the author should have provided more information so that it would be possible to spot the miscreant ourselves (I was brought up on the Agatha Christie fair play rules!) Sour grapes since I didn’t guess the correct culprit, right? It also seemed a bit strange that Catrin and Callum hadn’t discussed the long-ago fate of their children Ned and Kit until the point in the story when they do. The pacing of the story was masterful. I totally recommend this one for thriller lovers, or anyone who’d like a quick trip to the Falklands.

Bolton, Sharon (1960 – ), Little Black Lies, London, Corgi, 2015, ISBN 978-0-552-16639-3

Book 204: French Guiana (French) – Papillon (Henri CHARRIÈRE)

We didn’t heave [the warders] into the ward: we went straight off with the three rifles. Clousiot first, then the kid, then me: down the stairs, half-lit by a lantern. Clousiot had dropped his iron; I still had mine in my left hand, and in my right the rifle. At the bottom of the stairs, nothing. Ink-black night all round us. We had to look hard to make out the wall over on the river side. We hurried towards it. Once we were there, I bent down. Clousiot climbed up, straddled the top, hauled Maturette up and then me. We let ourselves drop into the darkness on the far side. Clousiot fell badly into a hole, twisting his foot. Maturette and I landed properly. We two got up: we had left the rifles before we went over. Clousiot tried to get to his feet but couldn’t: he said his leg was broken. I left Maturette with Clousiot and ran towards the corner of the wall, feeling it all the way with my hand. It was so dark that when I got to the end of the wall I didn’t know it, and with my hand reaching out into emptiness I fell flat on my face. Over on the river side I heard a voice saying, ‘Is that you?’  

From one country where a small island (Príncipe) was used as a cruel prison to another…

Sadly, French Guiana is one of the few countries in South America that I haven’t visited. From Porsche’s take on Cayenne, I assume that the capital has very bad roads on which the locals drive very fast…

I’m sure that Papillon (Charrière) would have loved to have a Porsche Cayenne. It would have helped him on his escape attempts, of which there were so many that I lost count!

In reading all the independent nations of the world, I stuck to novels. Although I’ll still try to preference novels when reading the non-independent ones, I might occasionally be a bit more liberal. In Papillon, Charrière claims to be telling the true story of his life. Though it is substantially true, it subsequently turned out that he had fictionalised it somewhat (or quite a lot), which is why I’ve included it here – apart from the fact that it’s one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. (Wikipedia describes it as an ‘autobiographical novel’ and discusses its authenticity). Papillon spent a total of 13 years in prison (between 1931 and 1945), in Colombia and Venezuela as well as in France and French Guiana (including on Devil’s Island), and they all seem to have been brutally inhumane. What kept him going (when so many others died), apart from the help of his friends, was his burning desire for revenge, and yet, once free, he gives that up and is determined to prove his goodness by living as a model citizen.

If we can believe what he tells of himself, Papillon comes across as an honest and honourable man, towards his fellow prisoners, the outsiders, and even his jailers. He passes over his life before his sentencing, but he admits (at the end) that he was part of the Paris underworld and a criminal, though he always insisted that he was innocent of the murder for which he was convicted and transported to French Guiana.

When I read Papillon, it was a bit of a jolt to realise that France was still transporting convicts to its colony until 1945 (Britain sent its last convicts to Australia in 1868), and that the European Space Agency spaceport in Kourou was then one of the prison camps – the description of it here was fascinating.

I did feel that some of the reported conversations were slightly unbelievable (sometimes a bit too moralising). But they must surely be reconstructed rather than remembered verbatim.

Papillon comes across as a man almost addicted to escaping. Even when there is nothing to escape from, he has to get away – most stupidly, to my mind, from the paradisaical sojourn with the Guajiro American Indians in Colombia with two lovers (sisters), one of whom is pregnant with his children (did he ever meet them?) Again, we don’t know whether life among them is truly as idyllic as he portrays – it feels like part of the long French tradition of admiring the ‘noble savages’ and contrasting them with the corruption of Western society, which goes back to Rousseau. But I have no reason to doubt it. In any case, he abandons them with barely a thought, as he does later to his equally lovely (Asian) Indian wife – not to mention the wife he already had in France. Still escaping.

Papillon’s lauding of his adopted homeland Venezuela seems a bit at odds with what he witnessed there (and was it really so much better than Colombia, for example?) I couldn’t help feeling that he was trying to ingratiate himself with his new countrymen. I would have thought that he would have learnt good Spanish while living in Venezuela, but there are still lots of mistakes in his reported Spanish conversations from the escape attempts.

I won’t spoil the tale by repeating any more of what happens, you have to read the story for yourself if you haven’t already. (By the way, the plots of the two movies are quite different from what Papillon relates). Charrière is a great writer and story-teller, and unlike most prisoner memoirs his book counts as great literature too. It is enthralling. (I’m now reading the sequel, Banco).

Charrière, Henri (1906 – 1973), Papillon, Paris, Pocket, 2002, ISBN 9782266118354

(originally published 1969)

English translation:

Papillon, translated from French by Patrick O’Brian, London, Panther, 1970

Book 187: Suriname (English) – Hoe duur was de Suiker = The Cost of Sugar (Cynthia McLeod)

All this time Rutger had said nothing. He could only look at the hand on the crusher, at the man on the ground and all that blood. Only one thought went through his mind: all this for sugar, and a pound of sugar cost five cents! Five cents for a pound of sugar, and how many hands, arms, legs and human lives were sacrificed for this! He looked towards Mr Vredelings, for whom such a thing was apparently completely normal, for as soon as the victim had been removed from the building he called another slave to the crusher, saying roughly, “And take more care, you.”

 

Sadly this is the last country in South America (although French Guiana is yet to come) – I love the literature from this continent and wish there were more countries to read!

The Cost of Sugar is set in the 1700s among the wealthy Jewish sugarcane plantation owners of Dutch-ruled Suriname. I was surprised (but perhaps I shouldn’t have been) that even here there was racism against the Jews from other Dutch plantation owners, despite them having been instrumental in the establishment of the colony. But even this was nothing compared to what the slaves suffered. The two main characters are the sensible Elza and her more daring step-sister and best friend (although not for long), Sarith. Sarith is a flirt, even with her friend’s husband – she tries to steal him. She marries Elza’s boring but relatively liberal spouse Rutger while Elza is in Europe.

There is also the inevitable (then, at least) power imbalance between men who are allowed to act and their women who are supposed to be decorative and put up with their sleeping around and keeping a powerless black concubine.

This is a colony where the sugar economy is everything. Even the price of everything was expressed in a pound of sugar. It is nothing for the slaves to lose hands – and lives – in the sugar mills. The overseers are brutal and callous. The fluctuations in the sugar price are matters of life and death.

The plantation owners have personal black slaves. (The masters and concubines are mulattos). The slaves as usual are at the mercy of their masters’ merest whims, as when Ashana is whipped to death for telling the truth about Sarith.

Eventually, the slaves decide to fight against their ill-treatment and increasing numbers flee. At the end, Elza belatedly realises that the whole society was totally dependent on slavery. By themselves, the whites were helpless; they were dependent on the slaves, but not vice versa (as evidenced by the way the Maroons had flourished in the jungle – and the slave owners are terrified by the example they set, more than by anything they do).

I really enjoyed this historical novel which taught me so much about the story of Suriname, which was both similar to and different from other slave societies. There was much to think about, and it’s not all in the past – even if formal slavery has mostly vanished, how much do we think about what people go through so that we can enjoy ‘reasonably priced’ chocolate and coffee? Cynthia McLeod is the wife of Suriname’s first president, Dr. Johan Ferrier.

 

McLeod, Cynthia (1936 – ), The Cost of Sugar, translated from Dutch by Gerald R. Mettam, London, 2013, ISBN 978 1 908446 27 5 HopeRoad, 1987, 2013

 

Book 181: Guyana (English) – Palace of the Peacock (Wilson HARRIS)

The solid wall of trees was filled with ancient blocks of shadow and with gleaming hinges of light. Wind rustled the leafy curtains through which masks of living beard dangled as low as the water and the sun. My living eye was stunned by inversions of the brilliancy and the gloom of the forest in a deception and hollow and socket. We had armed ourselves with prospecting knives and were clearing a line as near to the river as we could.

I’m afraid that this novel left me fairly mystified as to what it was actually about, so I’m afraid this review won’t be much use. There doesn’t seem to be much plot and it was difficult to understand what was happening. But the overgrown prose, like the Amazon jungle, is often exquisite, so perhaps the best way to tackle it, if you feel so inclined, is to simply enjoy the words and sentences for their own sake without worrying about plot. The characterisation also seemed nebulous.

It reminded me a little of Heart of Darkness. Donne, a childhood friend of the narrator, has ‘devastated’ the savannas where he governed, exploiting the indigenous people, and had abused his mistress Mariella until she finally killed him. We are on a haunted voyage (of seven days, like the Creation) as the doomed crew beat their way upriver through the jungle. Are the expeditioners in fact ghosts? How many times can you die, and yet still ‘live’ alongside the living? Like the bird and animal noises you hear in the jungle but can’t see, or even recognise, the book is apparently replete with symbolism which sadly passed me by. Does Mariella, also the name of the mission to which they are heading, represent the land Donne had raped? Does the multiracial crew represent the whole population of Guyana?

Harris revisited the locations and themes of Palace of the Peacock in his later novels, and perhaps it is necessary to read all of them to properly understand his outlook. And maybe you need to read this one several times (I read it twice – it is quite short). In the end, I was happy to enjoy the beautiful writing for its own sake.

Harris, Wilson (1921 – ), Palace of the Peacock, London, Faber and Faber, 2010 (first published 1960), ISBN 978-0-571-26051-5

Book 149: Uruguay (Spanish): Tierra de nadie = No Man’s Land (Juan Carlos ONETTI)

She went into the night with Krum. The steps on the earth distanced themselves from the headlight, raising the voices of isolated syllables, alluding to things that they did not name, absent and unknown, some old secrets that showed the voices like symbols.

A depressed, disillusioned group of intellectuals from Buenos Aires flees their city for a lost Polynesian island (Faruru) in order to get ‘off the map’.

Not much seemed to happen in the story, and it was difficult to follow the plot. There was too much time spent describing the characters’ postures and actions. I couldn’t really connect with the pretentious and unsympathetic characters. I also found the Spanish difficult to follow. For example, Spanish usually leaves out personal pronouns, which can sometimes be confusing for me (as to who is acting), but even more so in this novel. Onetti is one of the most celebrated Latin American authors, and was imprisoned in 1974 (like so many other intellectuals) by the ugly military dictatorship which punctuated Uruguay’s long and proud record of democracy. Sadly, considering that Uruguay is one of my favourite countries, I didn’t enjoy this one (too much hard work for too little reward), but as usual with such a respected author, I feel he deserves another attempt on my part…

Onetti, Juan Carlos (1909 – 1994), Tierra de nadie, Barcelona, Debolsillo, 2016, ISBN 9788466334297

(first published 1941)

Book 93: Bolivia (Spanish) – Palacio Quemado = Burnt Palace (Edmundo Paz Soldán)

The years were passing. Sometimes I remembered how my re-encounter with La Paz had been, when, at the end of the eighties, I came to study history at San Andrés. I was struck by the colour of the heights, between ochre and reddish, a limestone conformation that hinted that we were in a place little given to the somnolent manifestations of routine, and the snowy majesty of Illimani dominating the city from the distance…

 

[my translation]

Sometimes this project, at least the reading in the original language, seems like a struggle between encouragement and discouragement. Yet again, after the disillusionment with my Spanish when struggling to read Tres Tristes Tigres (for Cuba), comes an easy and enjoyable novel from Bolivia which restores my faith in my language ability. The same happened not long ago when Guinea followed Chad in French. It makes me hope that maybe it’s not me, it’s the books.
Oscar is obsessed with the presidential palace. As a boy he frequented the Palacio Quemado (the Burnt Palace), a labyrinthine, disorienting building, the symbol of the country’s lost governments, which received its strange name from being almost totally destroyed in an 1875 revolt. His brother Felipe had died there, giving him another level of mystery to penetrate.
His father worked in the Palacio Quemado as dictator Banzer’s Information Minister, and he himself ends up in the press office concocting inspiring speeches that he doesn’t believe in for the president. It is a moot point what he does believe in, if anything. For him the speeches are virtually only works of art, not something that represents life and death to the people. Nevertheless he seems to think that if only his speeches were true, Bolivia would be saved. The compassionate speech that he writes for the president doesn’t match Canedo’s body language, its failure is all down to him. Oscar turns out to be out of sync with both Canedo (who is a lame duck less than a year into his presidency) on the one hand and the people on the other (who are in a tax revolt).
His relation with Natalia, who also works in the government, is ambiguous, like the one he has with the government itself. She tries to open his eyes to how corrupt political life really is. When he goes into a slum the people there intimidate him for his supposed support of the government. Oscar’s own sister is on the opposite side of politics.
Palacio Quemado is a great look inside the unfortunate side of Bolivian politics, and highly recommended. Unfortunately I don’t think it has been translated into English.

 

PAZ SOLDAN, Edmundo (1967 – ), Edmundo, Palacio Quemado, Miami, Alfaguara, 2006, ISBN 978-1-59820-546-3

Book 49: Venezuela (Spanish) – Doña Bárbara (Rómulo GALLEGOS)

Arid lands, riven by ravines and cut by cracks. Thin cattle, with downcast eyes, were here and there, with a barely believable desperation, licking at the slopes and wastelands of this sad spot. On the ground the skeletons of those that had already succumbed were bleaching, sacrifices of the saltpeter earth which had seized them until starvation, forgetting food; and great flocks of turkey vultures hovered over the stench of the carrion.

[my translation]

 

This is the classic novel of the Venezuelan Llanos (plains, prairies, steppes). It is one of those novels where the landscape seems to be the main character. But the grasslands are peopled by several memorable characters (even if their names seem a bit TOO obvious to contemporary ears) – the saintly would-be moderniser Dr. Santos, his nemesis the barbarous Doña Bárbara, the evil cardboard-cutout gringo with the unlikely moniker of Mr. Danger, and the ’child of nature’ Marisela, on whom Santos performs an Eliza Doolittle-like transformation into a polished lady. The setting is the lawless (yes, that includes the judges and lawyers) cattle country where rustling is a way of life, sanctioned by tradition and ubiquity. There is a Machiavellian power struggle between the great landowners, especially the cousins Dr. Santos and Doña Bárbara, by fair means and foul (and fowl!) Santos’ plan to fence off the llanos is inevitable but will see the llaneros’ way of life fade into history.
Doña Bárbara is an alpha female who dabbles in magic. No doubt if it was written today we would find a more sympathetic portrayal of the women (and city folk). We shouldn’t fall into the trap of extracting a work from the time when it was written. Nevertheless, both of the women are powerful (Doña Bárbara as much so as any of the men) in what must have been a man’s world.
While Gallegos sees the inevitability of progress, he is deeply nostalgic for the disappearing way of life of which he has a profound understanding. His attitude towards the burghers of Caracas reminded me of “Clancy of the Overflow” by the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson:

 

“…And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall…”

 

While I think it would be wrong to see this as an early work of magical realism – there is plenty of magic, as practised by Doña Bárbara, in an overwhelmingly superstitions cultural world – the fact that this seminal work is so largely ignored by English readers is a tragedy that leaves a big hole in their knowledge of Latin American literature. The plot is not at all unrealistic.
The author himself is a fascinating character who became President of Venezuela.

 

GALLEGOS, Rómulo (1884 – 1969), Doña Bárbara, Madrid: Cátedra, 2014 [originally published 1929], ISBN 978-83-376-1539-4