I backed this on Kickstarter. It's a graphic novel by a Nigerian artist who also does short animated features. YouNeek Studios also puts out an AfricaI backed this on Kickstarter. It's a graphic novel by a Nigerian artist who also does short animated features. YouNeek Studios also puts out an African-themed line of superhero titles, but Iyanu is a traditional young adult fantasy story.
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Iyanu is your basic "Chosen One," a mysterious orphan raised by a mysterious witchy woman who has taught her to fight the "Corrupt," beasts that have been infected by some sort of magical virus. Despite the two of them protecting the "Inners" who live inside a walled city, they are hated and feared and mistrusted - stop me if you've heard this one before.
The lack of originality is made up for by the beautiful full-color panels and the painstaking worldbuilding, creating a kingdom called "Yorubaland" which, while fictional, is very closely modeled on historical Yoruba culture and the Kingdom of Benin.
I enjoyed it a great deal, but unfortunately, this 112-page first volume is just the start, and YouNeek Studios is a tiny indie publisher so they've been promising volume 2 for a while now. It is definitely something I'd recommend to anyone with kids who like good old fashioned epic fantasy with an engaging tween protagonist, especially if you would like a non-European setting. There aren't a lot of African fantasies out there....more
Algeria, "France's Viet Nam," is a conflict most people outside of France and Algeria don't know much about. You've probably heard it was one of the lAlgeria, "France's Viet Nam," is a conflict most people outside of France and Algeria don't know much about. You've probably heard it was one of the last anti-colonialist wars, and that it pitted Muslims against Westerners, and that there were atrocities on both sides. But the details are fuzzy for most Americans after half a century. It was a conflict happening in a part of the world we didn't care much about at the time, and even during the Cold War, neither the US nor the USSR was heavily invested in it.
But, it brought down several French governments, almost led to more than one coup, did (at least indirectly) lead to France pulling out of NATO, and set the tone for French relations for decades. As well, the fate of Algerian Muslims who emigrated after independence echoes to this day in France - every time you hear about riots by "unemployed youths" in French urban areas, they are usually talking about the descendants of those refugees.
Alistair Horne's book, A Savage War of Peace, is considered pretty much the definitive book on the subject. It is comprehensive, and on audio it's difficult to keep all the names straight for an American reader - everyone, after all, is either French or Algerian, and the cast of characters is huge. Successive governments, movements, splinter groups, all tussling over a patch of North Africa for eight bloody years.
At its heart, the Algerian war was a war for independence. The Algerians wanted to be independent; France didn't want them to be. But it was different from some similar colonial struggles for several reasons. France did not consider Algeria to be a colony; Algeria was considered French soil. Therefore, giving up Algeria was akin to giving up Normandy.
While Muslims in Algeria did suffer from racism and a sort of apartheid which only grew worse during the war, the Pied-Noirs ("Black Feet"), or native French residents of Algeria, were another faction with interests that were not always aligned with those of their erstwhile countrymen back home. Some of them had been living in Algeria for generations. They had mixed and complicated views of their Muslim neighbors - often they were friends and colleagues, but always there was racism and European superiority. When the war broke out, as in the Middle East, or the Balkans, people who'd lived side by side peacefully for years would suddenly turn on each other with incredible savagery.
The Question
The war brought out incredible savagery on all sides. The FLN (National Liberation Front) and MNA (National Algerian Movement) operated like guerrilla/terrorist groups always do, butchering men, women, and children. The French Army, in response, began to make systematic use of torture, a scar that France has not yet healed from. "The Question," as it was called in France, was controversial even at the time, with some defending it with the familiar "ticking time bomb" defense, while at least one French officer, faced with the prospect of a literal time bomb, elected not to use torture and hope the bomb wouldn't go off (it didn't).
The issue of torture is of course one Horne covers heavily in the book. He examines whether it really was necessary and/or effective, and argues that it was not, while also admitting that in fact the French army would not have been able to roll up the FLN the way it did without its extensive intelligence network backed by torture. He also describes how French bureaucrats and military officers debated the nuances of what did or did not qualify as "torture," in the same sort of arid, legalistic language we have heard US officials more recently use to defend waterboarding. It's not the only thing in the book that clearly resonates today. (In fact, in one of his afterwords, the author says he sent a copy of his book to the Bush White House, hoping to impress upon them the importance of not going down that path. He never received a response.)
The Algerian War was unquestionably a brutal one, and the catalog of atrocities committed by both sides is horrific. Dismemberments, rape, prolonged torture, dashing babies' skulls against walls, carving out brains and guts and scattering them on the street, as well as the usual bombs left in cafes, drive-by shootings, and frequent assassinations, were constant for eight years, right up to the end when the MNA was trying to derail peace talks.
Ideology
Today we'd describe this as a struggle against Islamists, but while Algerian independence was clearly a Muslim movement, it wasn't that simple. Some Muslims were loyal to France; many French were sympathetic or even outright supportive of the FLN, and the Pied-Noirs themselves were divided over the great question of Algerian independence. In fact, Islam was hardly a factor in the war at all, other than one side being predominantly Muslim. Communism was probably a stronger guiding principle for the resistance, and even communism was more of a unifying ideology than an actual motivation.
De Gaulle
Algeria brought Charles De Gaulle to power, and almost cost him his life. The great irascible statesman, formerly a French Freedom Fighter during Nazi occupation, seemed perpetually playing both sides in the conflict between leftists who wanted to give the Algerians their independence and right-wingers who wanted Algeria to remain French.
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Ultimately, De Gaulle would be responsible for cutting Algeria loose, but to this day, the author can't say for certainty what De Gaulle's intention had been from the beginning, and when or where or whether he changed his mind. But De Gaulle himself is an interesting character worthy of his own book, and his maneuvering, his tantrums, his diplomacy, and his leadership are all an intrinsic part of the Algerian War and its resolution.
The author includes several afterwords following the original publication of this book in 1973. One was in the 1980s, after he'd been able to interview many more people who were involved in the war who he hadn't had access to when he was first writing the book. Another is post-9/11, in which he describes Algeria today (well, early 2000s), and how the unrest in the Middle East, the Palestine/Israel question, and all those other issues that have riven the Muslim world have played a part in also affecting a relatively separated and not-so-Muslim Algeria.
For all that, the book is almost entirely about a conflict that happened half a century ago and is of mostly historical interest now. There are certainly things to reflect upon, in the way they have affected France and Algeria in the modern day, but that was a different world. But it is valuable history and a bloody, savage war that merits this sort of close examination. I recommend it to anyone who'd like greater understanding of some of the factors that still affect French life and politics, as well as an early look at the sort of Western/Muslim conflicts that would come to dominate the 20th and 21st centuries....more
This novelette was right up my alley - I have a great interest in the idea of writing and how it actually affects the mind, and Chiang does this here This novelette was right up my alley - I have a great interest in the idea of writing and how it actually affects the mind, and Chiang does this here by juxtaposing two unconnected stories. The first is about a new technology, "Remem," a sort of futuristic cloud app that will allow everyone to call up memories of everything they have ever experienced, at any time. The author explores how this will affect people's entire life experiences when their memories are now subject to constant auditing, internal and external, when veracity becomes much less subjective, when you can no longer "forget" things or, as the main character discovers, remember them the wrong way.
The second story, running in parallel, is about a West African tribe, the Tiv, and their adaptation to the coming of Europeans, who bring with them writing and literacy. The protagonist of the second story is a boy named Jijingi who is taught to read and write by a European priest. Initially excited by the idea that he can "relive" anything through the medium of paper, then disappointed and then skeptical at its utility, Jijingi becomes seduced by the power of incontrovertible written words, until he finds them in conflict with his loyalties to his Tiv tribe.
In both cases, we learn that even with "objective" recordings of "the truth," humans are fickle and unreliable creatures, and that truth must be leavened with discernment for what's right.
Both stories had solid climaxes in which the punchline is delivered, and though they never connect directly, the parallels are obvious. This was an intelligent, thoroughly readable story in the tradition of good thought-provoking SF....more
I quite liked The Good Terrorist, so was prepared to sink into some more litfic by the renowned Doris Lessing. I'd heard that Children of Violence is I quite liked The Good Terrorist, so was prepared to sink into some more litfic by the renowned Doris Lessing. I'd heard that Children of Violence is one of those covert speculative fiction forays that litfic authors sometimes indulge in.
If so, it's certainly not in evidence here. (From reading reviews of the subsequent books, it appears the only "speculative" element comes at the very end of the last book.) Martha Quest is basically a bildungsroman about a young Englishwoman in South Africa in the 30s. Intelligent, observant, and full of herself like most young people, Martha despises her conventional parents who've rather failed at this colonial farming venture, and likewise despises pretty much all of her friends, from the unfortunate Dutch Afrikaans family who befriends the Quests despite the seething resentments still lingering over the Boer War, to the Jewish boys who run the general store in town.
Martha eschews racism and classism and considers herself a proper leftist, but she's young and not really firm in her convictions. She leaves home to go work in the big city, and soon falls into a life of partying and debauchery. At first she's the hot new flavor in town, but as she goes through a series of boyfriends, none of whom he really likes, she becomes increasingly disillusioned and disgruntled. The book ends with her getting married to the most decent fellow she's met so far, but already there is disgruntlement in the air.
So, why two stars?
Lessing is a great writer. Her writing, even in this early novel, practically drips with Nobel Prize-winning refinement and delicacy of prose. It's a character novel focused in minute detail on Martha and her environment, with subtexts of colonialism, antisemitism, classism, sexism, dysfunctional families, and the yearnings of womanhood.
Holy crap, I just wrote "the yearnings of womanhood." Which pretty much sums up why this novel only gets two stars and why I'm not going to continue the series without a very, very compelling reason. I mean, yes, it's well-written but it booooored me. Now look, I can read "women's fiction" that's all about getting properly situated in a constrained marriage market - I love Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte and George Elliot were decent reads. But Martha Quest isn't leavened with humor or much of a plot, and Martha is the only real main character. We spend the entire novel inside her head, and it's just not that interesting a head.
I suspect this book speaks much more to the female experience. It did not speak to me. And I feel a little guilty for panning it, but when I literally have to force myself to finish a book because all that lovely, nuanced prose is so tedious and the story so banal that I cannot find a single shit to give, well, sorry Ms. Lessing, it's not you, it's me. Maybe someday I will try The Golden Notebook....more
Huh � so, the plot of this book, I say to myself, having chosen it at random from Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list, is a rich white guy goes to Africa tHuh � so, the plot of this book, I say to myself, having chosen it at random from Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list, is a rich white guy goes to Africa to learn the meaning of life from the noble savages. Oh, I can see that this will turn out well.
Saul Bellow is one of those Big Literary Dudes I've never read, but by reputation I was expecting him to be kind of like Philip Roth or J.M. Coetzee (who I did not love) � lots of manly wangsting to the tune of .
Okay, let me dial down the snark. If you read Henderson the Rain King with your PC glasses off, it's actually a better book than I was expecting, with a certain exuberance and joie de vivre that endeared it to me. I'm pretty sure "joie de vivre" isn't actually what Saul Bellow was going for, as the protagonist is actually a rather depressive fellow, a middle-aged divorcee whose wife and kids don't understand him, a World War II combat veteran with scars of the sort that that generation never admits to, running off to Africa because despite being rich and comfortable, he can't get no satisfaction, a decade before Mick and the Stones. Actually, Henderson's constant internal refrain is I want, I want, I want, and he spends the entire book trying to figure out what it is he wants.
But there is something I liked about that big galoot Henderson, despite the fact that he goes stomping around Africa like the blundering big-nosed American he is. He loves and respects the Africans he meets, referring to them unselfconsciously as "savages" but meaning it in a nice way, and otherwise never displaying any racial prejudices. Is he a great big schmuck? Yes, especially after his attempt to "help" the first tribe he meets goes disastrously wrong. Like the big impervious dumbass white man he is, he walks away unscathed, feeling very, very bad about it. He finds another tribe, becomes a friend and confidant of the king, becomes the Sungo, the Rain God, in an improbable feat that had me rolling my eyes (okay, seriously? You're gonna go there, Mr. Bellow?), but as it turns out, the tribe has been playing their own game all along, using the clueless white guy as an instrument in their machinations since he so kindly presented himself as a useful fool. That being said, just as Henderson has genuine affection for the Africans, in his oblivious, patronizing way, they have genuine affection for him � even if they are willing to literally throw him to the lions, should it come to that.
Most of the book, though, is taken up with the inside of Henderson's head, which is a more interesting place than it has any right to be thanks in large part to Saul Bellow's writing.
"Sometimes a condition must worsen before bettering," he said, and he began to tell me of diseases he had known when he was on the wards as a student, and I tried to picture him as a medical student in a white coat and white shoes instead of the velvet hat adorned with human teeth and the satin slippers. He held the lioness by the head; her broth-colored eyes watched me; those whiskers, suggesting diamond scratches, seemed so cruel that her own skin shrank from them at the base. She had an angry nature. What can you do with an angry nature?
Ah, why can't any SF authors write a space opera with prose like that?
So this is a book about dudely dissatisfaction, yes, and it is kind of hard to feel sympathy for a millionaire who goes gallivanting off to Africa, deliberately seeking out the untouristed Africa and disappointed that there is so little untouristed Africa left. (As the first tribe he meets out in the hinterlands apologetically explains to him � in English � "We are discovered.") Bearing in mind this was written in the late 50s. Yet I did feel sorry for poor Henderson, and I even liked the guy. He makes a study of his own suffering, but he also tries to do right, ineptly but sincerely. And Saul Bellow paints him in big, bold colors, very much alive, very much complicated, an ultimately puny and comic human figure despite his vigorous strength and enviable wealth.
My rating wavered between 3 and 4 stars, so I give it 3.5, and will round to 4. I didn't love it, but would not be averse to reading another of Bellow's works....more
I had heard of this series, and in the mood for a light mystery and fond of those that use settings that most American readers aren't familiar with, II had heard of this series, and in the mood for a light mystery and fond of those that use settings that most American readers aren't familiar with, I gave the first book a try. I was pleasantly surprised by the combination of warmth and seriousness that Alexandra McCall Smith brought to his stories about Mma "Precious" Ramotswe.
Precious decides to go into business as a private detective after her no-good abusive husband leaves her. Mens' violence against women and the extreme sexism of African culture is a common thread running through the book, which, while probably realistic, made me a little suspicious of yet another white guy writing about how badly those non-white people in some other country treat their women. However, I didn't feel that Smith was being patronizing in his depiction of Botswanan culture. Precious is proud of being African, and while she has something of a chip on her shoulder when it comes to men (not without justification), she's a very humane and very sharp person, with friends who are men and women alike.
This book isn't really a full-length novel, more of a series of short stories and vignettes about Precious, her life before and after starting her detective agency, and life in Botswana.
Men frequently ask Precious, "Who ever heard of a female detective?" to which she retorts "Haven't you ever heard of Agatha Christie?" Most of her first cases are not exactly the sort you'd see Miss Marple taking on. Women who suspect their husbands of cheating (which, according to Precious, all men do), a strict father who believes his teenage daughter is running around town with a boyfriend, and an old doctor friend of hers who needs to find out what's going on with one of his colleagues. However, Precious slowly starts brushing up against more serious criminals, and a witch doctor who might be responsible for abducting and killing a child, and who has ties to some very powerful men.
Some of the short pieces are funny, some are beautiful in their description of Botswana and the land and people whom Precious loves so much, and some are sad. This isn't a "cozy" � besides cheating husbands, lazy con men, and the Case of the Disobedient Teenager, there is also rape, racism, poverty, and corruption. But it's a charming and likable book that's mostly optimistic despite the bitter parts. I don't know that I'm in love enough to go read the entire series, but I can certainly see myself picking up more volumes when I want some light reading. 3.5 stars....more
Ostensibly a biography of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, the fact is that it's hard to write authoritatively about what the man himselOstensibly a biography of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, the fact is that it's hard to write authoritatively about what the man himself was like. Most of the records were written by his enemies, the Romans, who characterized him as cruel, mad, and treacherous. However, by looking at his actual actions, a different picture emerges, of someone who was a pretty decent man for his time, considering he spent the latter half of his life at war with an enemy that wanted to destroy his nation (and ultimately did). So most of the book talks about the history of the 2nd Punic war, which was the great contest between Rome and Carthage for domination of the Western Mediterranean.
Hannibal was a strategic genius who led his army in an extended campaign against the Roman Republic, before its ultimate ascendancy. For nearly twenty years he trounced the Romans in Italy, before finally being defeated on his home ground. His archrival, Scipio Africanus, was another man of great power and genius, and he defeated Hannibal after studying him for years.
One thing that emerges from this book is how much individual personalities mattered, both in war and in politics. Different generals than Hannibal and Scipio Africanus would almost certainly have meant different outcomes. Likewise, even after losing the war, Hannibal was powerful and influential in Carthage and instrumental in getting the city to repay its reparations to Rome. Likewise, forceful personalities in Rome (like Cato, who absolutely hated Carthage) were responsible for history taking the course it did. This book is a pretty strong argument for the theory that great men shape history. (I should probably say "great persons" or "great personalities," but frankly, women didn't have much to say in either Carthage or Rome.)
There are some modern parallels if you consider the reasons why Rome and Carthage went to war, and look at the political maneuvers of the Romans, the way Hannibal had to drag the super-wealthy Carthaginians into line to get the city's debts paid, and then how he was ultimately betrayed, first by his own people and then repeatedly by other rulers whom he assisted in resisting Rome.
There is a certain tragic inevitability in Carthage's ultimate fall, and Hannibal and Scipio Africanus both came to more ignominious ends than these great men deserved.
If you like histories of Roman antiquity with a fair amount of military information (but not too much about the nitty-gritty details about tactics and maneuvers), this is a good book. It's a bit dry at times; Lamb sticks to the source material and anything that might make it more interesting -- conjectures, ahistorical personalizing of the individuals, guesses about what might have happened -- he labels as such and doesn't go too far down that path. Hannibal himself remains more an icon than a man; if you want to hear his voice and see his personality, you'll have to resort to historical fiction....more
"Salvo" is the son of a British missionary and a Congolese woman. He's grown up in England, and now he's a fully Anglocized African... or so he thinks. He makes a good living as a translator, having a talent for languages and knowing a bunch of little-spoken African languages, he's married to a pretty white journalist in a fashionable but shallow marriage in which it's hard to say who is whose trophy-spouse, and on the side, he also happens to be a contractor for British Intelligence when they need his special language talents.
Salvo gets a sudden assignment: 2 days, 3 days top, and a sizeable bonus, to attend a secret meeting of Congolese warlords. He's told this is for the benefit of British national security and also for the benefit of the Congo. They're trying to negotiate a peaceful and stable government. Instead, Salvo finds out that they're planning a coup and dividing the spoils... just business as usual in central Africa. He is sure his superiors will be shocked -- shocked! -- at these unsavory developments, and surely Her Majesty's government will want to prevent the imminent chaos and bloodshed over mineral rights.
I'm going to up my ranking to 5 stars though because of David Oyelowo's reading of the audiobook. The man's voice is perfect for the role, a real pleasure to listen to, and he conveyed all the emotions throughout the story just as if you are hearing Salvo himself speak....more
The first-person narrator of this book is Magda, the daughter of an Afrikaner sheep farmer on a remote ranch in the South African veldt. Magda has groThe first-person narrator of this book is Magda, the daughter of an Afrikaner sheep farmer on a remote ranch in the South African veldt. Magda has grown up alone with her stern, patriarchal father and the servants. She is a bitter old maid, ignored and disregarded. By page ten, you figure out that Magda is kind of nuts. Somewhere along the way, you figure out that between one paragraph and another, sometimes within the same paragraph, Magda slips between fantasy and reality without warning. By the end of the book, she has completely lost her mind and you have to reevaluate everything you've read because it's not clear what really happened and what was Magda's imagination, fabrication, or delusion.
The story centers around Magda and her father and Hendrick, a black African servant who comes to work on the farm, and his wife Anna, whom Magda's father, living alone and wifeless out on the veldt, soon covets. Obviously this isn't going to end well, especially with Magda watching, judging, and resenting. The violence seems to be the point where Magda goes off the rails into complete unreliability. She tells multiple separate and conflicting stories over the course of the book, with no textual clue to the reader that they are not all part of one seamless narrative.
The imagery is stark and isolating as Magda and the handful of other characters scratch out a living in the scorpion and jackal-haunted boonies, but what's really stark and isolating is the relationship between the white farmer and daughter and the black servants, initially friendly and benevolent on the surface, but their every interaction is fraught with the weight of colonialism. The power dynamic between oppressor and oppressed switches several times over the course of the novel, which I think was probably Coetzee's intent. It is indeed a bleak and powerful tale.
That said, this is a book for readers who like literary prose, meaning sentences and paragraphs worked and reworked to artistic effect rather than to tell a story. Magda's internal monologue, even when it's not spinning off into crazy la-la land, is incessantly navel-gazing, dense, and verbose. In the Heart of the Country is one of those books where sometimes you have to reread a paragraph several times to figure out what is actually being said and what's going on. You would think a novel with as much sex and violence as this one packed into its sparse few pages would be more, well, interesting, but it's only interesting on the level of verbiage and literary analysis. It's the kind of book literature professors like to talk about and ask midterm questions like "Describe some of the metaphors the author uses for colonial and patriarchal relationships," blah bah blah.
Honestly, I don't understand people who read books like this for "fun." Literary, prize-winning prose is often not exciting, storytelling prose, and in this case it's almost like simple declarative sentences and a linear narrative are verboten. Yes, I understand the story, yes, I saw the hidden depths in Coetzee's book and I'm sure I could write a term paper about it as well as the next English major (even though I was never an English major), but boy did did it drag and unlike some other literary authors (like Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami) who sometimes annoy me but also tell a story even when they are experimenting, and intrigue me enough to want to read more, Coetzee makes me want to stay away from anything else he's written because this book did not endear him to me.
That sounds like a pretty negative review, and if I were rating this based on my enjoyment of the book alone, In the Heart of the Country would probably get 1.5 or 2 stars. But I can't help but admire an author who puts words together in a way that most can't and manages to drag such powerful weight and layered meaning into such a small book. So I am bumping it up to 2.5 stars based on "literary merit," but rounding down because I still thought it was self-important dudeliness. I can't say I recommend it unless you are reading it for a specific purpose, though, or you just really like this kind of book....more
This is not your average urban fantasy. It's set in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a world where murderers and other criminals acquire magical animalsThis is not your average urban fantasy. It's set in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a world where murderers and other criminals acquire magical animals that are mystically bonded to them. "Zoos" are discriminated against, but with their animal also comes a magical talent, unique to each Zoo.
Zinzi December is an addict whose drug habit got her brother killed, and thus burdened her with her Sloth companion and a magical talent for finding lost things. She's a very flawed protagonist, but very believable, a woman who's not a bad person but has made some really bad choices and is now swimming with sharks as a result. Beukes's world is interesting, both the animal companions with their mashavi talents coexisting with the modern world, and her dark, gritty portrayal of South Africa, with all of its poverty, homelessness, refugees, sex trafficking, drugs, and AIDS. Definitely worth reading for something outside the usual North American/Western European setting.
The story gets a little bit choppy towards the end, and while I liked the fake magazine articles and academic essays describing the nature and history of the "animalled," it felt a bit like filler in places. Still, a good read that's a little outside the mainstream. I give it 4.5 stars, which I'm rounding up to 5 because I'd like to see more books like this in the "Urban Fantasy" aisle and fewer tattooed vampire-boinkers....more
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