An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

My review of An Elegy for Easterly appears today in the Christian Science Monitor. I’m delighted to be appearing in the Monitor for the first time, and it’s especially nice to be writing about Zimbabwe, where I lived and worked for a time. It’s a good book, too.

The characters in these stories are not Zimbabwe’s worst off. They are not dying of AIDS, though they know people who are. Many have seen foreign countries, though they may no longer be able to afford a plane ticket. Many are educated, with bits of T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy in the backs of their minds.They are suffering, though others are suffering far more, but they face the grim realities of their country with creativity, liveliness, and a resilient sense of humor.

“An Elegy for Easterly,” the title story, follows the lives of the inhabitants of a squatter settlement until the government’s bulldozers come to scrape away their homes of poles and mud and plastic. “The Annex Shuffle” is about a law student’s mental breakdown, temporary yet long-lasting in its effects. “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion” tells of an aging coffinmaker with an unexpected flair for disco dancing.

Caillebotte at the Brooklyn Museum

The first painting by Gustave Caillebotte that I fell in love with was a still life of a fruitseller’s stand that I saw at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It gave me the impression that he was an artist devoted to intense tropical colors (not at all true, as I found out later).

Next was the painting shown here, La Place de l’Europe, Temps de Pluie. When I sat in on a course by T.J. Clark on art and social change, he used a slide of this painting to show the long airy vistas of the new Paris created by Baron Haussmann, who drove broad avenues through what was a labyrinth of narrow streets (at least in part to make it more difficult for rebels to blockade their neighborhoods). Then I was fortunate enough to see Caillebotte’s painting The Floor Scrapers in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

According to the Brooklyn Museum, there has not been a major exhibition of Caillebotte in New York for thirty years, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss this one. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. None of my three favorites were on display—though there was an alternate version of The Floor Scrapers that was among the best works there.

I did learn what I didn’t know before, that Caillebotte was an avid yachtsman, and I enjoyed seeing the polished wooden models he made for yachts that he planned to build and sail. Each one was a half-hull, about three feet long, and the curves of the hulls and keels were like the contours of powerful sharks.

Bonds beat stocks?

I used to read Andrew Tobias’s blog for investment advice, but in recent years I’ve read it for political commentary and general entertainment. In the meantime, though, Tobias’s friend, “the estimable Less Antman,” has been taking up the slack.

In the latest issue of his online newsletter, Antman takes issue with an article in the Journal of Indexes (I must have missed that issue...) which maintains that bonds outperformed stocks over a recent 40-year period.

Though bonds are certainly less volatile than stocks, Antman argues that they have serious shortcomings as a long-term investment. While most investors fret over stock market crashes, they tend to underestimate the much greater threat that a too-conservative portfolio will simply fail to grow enough to meet their needs.

Just as they have done in virtually every 40 year period in American history, stocks beat bonds over the last 40 years, and by a clear margin of nearly 1% per year (9.0% vs 8.1%).  Because of the effect of compounding, this difference is hardly insignificant: each dollar invested in the Lehman Aggregate Bond Index (or equivalent) at the beginning of 1969 would have grown to $23 by the end of 2008, while a dollar invested in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index of large US stocks would have grown nearly 40% more, to $32.  Strangely, this was the SMALLEST margin of victory for stocks since the 40 years beginning 1822 and ending 1861.  Over the course of American history, an average 40 years saw a stock investor end up with nearly five times as much money as a bond investor.

Reviewed by The Complete Review

While I’ve been recuperating from minor surgery, it was a treat to see Michael Orthofer’s review of my book A Basket of Leaves in The Complete Review:

The clever and simple idea behind Geoff Wisner’s A Basket of Leaves is to give readers a sense of Africa by introducing them to 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa ... He does a very good job, and it is what he writes in A Basket of Leaves — and not the ninety-nine excerpts he offers — that make this a good and useful overview of and introduction to Africa ... he packs an enormous amount of variety and information into such a manageable book.

Orthofer zeroes in on some of the hurdles I faced in writing this book: the difficulty of finding literature in English from countries like Chad and Equatorial Guinea, the challenge of dealing with the embarrassment of riches in countries like Nigeria and South Africa, and my desire to include books that shed light on what is distinctive about a particular country. (I thought Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was a fine novel, for instance, but one that didn’t have to take place in Nigeria, and therefore I didn’t include it.)

Another nice notice

Warrior Wisewoman 2 got a detailed review from Nerine Dorman, an author and blogger in South Africa, including this about Jenn’s story:

If there’s one story that stood out the most for me, it’s The Executioner by Jennifer Brissett. After reading this one, the majority of the stories in this anthology paled in signficance. Jennifer tells the tale of a future where ordinary persons have to play the role of executioner, much as Americans have jury duty, from what I understand of the US’s system. We see that the death-dealer is very much a woman, a nurturer, who is forced to take a life. A gritty, shocking tale, it caused a pause for thought.

Dorman seems like an interesting individual. Here’s her bio:

Nerine Dorman was born in Cape Town, during the previous century, and has been writing weird tales involving gothboys, vampires, werewolves and other strange beasties since she can remember. She’s been a Spur waitress, is an experienced penguin wrangler, plays piano accordion badly, edits genre fiction, loves travelling and lives with her photographer husband in a log cabin on stilts near Cape Point, where she regularly has to fend off baboons armed only with a broomstick. Her mother still asks when she’s going to write some “proper” fiction.