Gods and Soldiers

My review of Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing has appeared at Scott Esposito’s online magazine The Quarterly Conversation. I’m a bit more critical than other reviewers have been—for instance, noting the absence of writers like Tahar ben Jelloun, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, M.G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nega Mezlekia, Malidoma Patrice Somé, and Aminatta Forna.

Meanwhile, the article ”Clout of Africa” by James Gibbons uses Gods and Soldiers as the centerpiece of an investigation into whether Africa is experiencing a literary boom. If so, he notes, it is a boom marked by displacement and exile. “Nearly all the Francophone writers [in Gods and Soldiers] have settled in France, and the typical English-language writer has an American MFA and professorship.” Like me, Gibbons notes that “the choice of nonfiction is a little scattershot,” and he has his own list of notable omissions, including Ben Okri and Assia Djebar.

Gibbons’ Africa roundup also includes the new collection The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (my own review will be in The Quarterly Conversation), Secret Son by Laila Lalami, and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih.

Gibbons’ article is thoughtful and well-informed, though he refers to the demise of Transition magazine (as of 1992) without mentioning that it was revived in 1991 and has published fifty issues since then. He is able to be quite harsh on certain aspects of a book (”Secret Son can be remarkably lacking in subtlety") while recognizing where it shines ("a narrative logic that is polemical but never overheated or shrill").

The Thoreau You Don’t Know

At Book Court not long ago, where I went to hear Mimi Zeiger talk about Tiny Houses, I was reminded of Thoreau and his own tiny house by the shores of Walden Pond. I took the train to Concord many times when I was living in Cambridge, and on an early date with Jenn we got drenched in a rainstorm on the way back from the pond. (She continued to go out with me anyway.)

Leaving the bookstore, I looked at a schedule of readings and was sorry to see that I had missed Robert Sullivan reading from his new book The Thoreau You Don’t Know.* I loved his books The Meadowlands and Rats, and was curious to see what he would make of Thoreau, the writer I have probably delved deeper into than any other.

A lot, as it turns out. The Thoreau You Don’t Know is largely devoted to blowing up the usual image of Thoreau as a recluse, a crank, a skulker, a prig, even a jerk. (It is also devoted to erasing the false idea that Thoreau drew a sharp line between nature and man, and came down hard on the side of nature. Those who complain that Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t in the wilderness, and that he took his laundry home for his mother to clean, miss the point that Thoreau was interested not so much in pure wilderness as in the places where man and nature interacted.)

The Thoreau you don’t know sang, danced, played the flute, looked after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, and threw big watermelon parties. Though he avoided the usual careers that awaited a college graduate (medicine, law, religion) he was hard-working not only as a writer but in more practical ways. Answering a question from his alma mater, he wrote, “I am a Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.”

The Thoreau You Don’t Know is full of things I didn’t know about Thoreau, and am glad I do now. He owned seventeen dictionaries. He subscribed to a magazine called Businessman’s Assistant. He did magic tricks: making pencils disappear, then pulling them out of children’s ears. He once trapped a bothersome woodchuck and carried it two miles away rather than kill it. (I once did something similar with a raccoon.)

And he liked Walt Whitman and New York City quite a bit more than is usually reported. “When I think of them together,” writes Sullivan, “the ultimate city poet and the ultimate nature writer, the divide between city and country, between nature and civilization, melts away like a polar ice cap.”

*As it happens, I didn’t entirely miss the reading. It’s available on Sullivan’s quirky and engaging book blog. ....

Orwell and the toads

As part of what is becoming a continuing series on authors and toads (see Camus and the toads and Thoreau and the toads), today I bring you a selection from Orwell’s essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” as featured in the recent collection Facing Unpleasant Facts.

Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

I was pleased to be reminded not only that Orwell (like Thoreau) saw the toad as an important sign of spring, but that he noticed (as I did as a child) the beauty of its gold-flecked eye. Long ago it occurred to me that when Shakespeare wrote that the toad, “ugly and venomous / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head,” he might not have been speaking literally. 

Facing Unpleasant Facts by George Orwell

At the library recently I picked up a recent collection of essays by George Orwell. The first of two volumes, Facing Unpleasant Facts includes narrative essays while the second, All Art Is Propaganda, is devoted to critical essays.

Like a new selection from Thoreau’s Journal, a new collection of Orwell essays provides an excuse for going back to work you may have been meaning to return to. Selecting the contents of these two volumes couldn’t have been all that difficult, since Harcourt had already published Orwell’s complete essays, journalism, and letters in a four-volume set. (I can leaf through my own set without getting up from the breakfast table.)

However, editor George Packer does his part by providing a foreword and an introduction, and making a strong argument that despite all the copies of 1984 and Animal Farm in print, Orwell was first and foremost an essayist.*

As if to underline the title Facing Unpleasant Facts, the perennially grumpy Packer begins with “The Spike” (about homelessness), “Clink” (about prison) and “A Hanging” (self-explanatory). He ends with “How the Poor Die” and “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a fifty-page reminiscence of the public school where the young Orwell was chronically underfed and beaten for wetting his bed. But in between are pieces like “In Defence of English Cooking,” “A Nice Cup of Tea,” “The Moon Under Water,” and “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” that are thoroughly enjoyable and often quite funny.

*At the PEN festival, Philip Gourevitch and others discussed how the “big game” of the novel has caused literary masters of nonfiction like Primo Levi (and, I would add, George Orwell, John McPhee, Edward Hoagland, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Richard Rhodes) to get second-class treatment.

Blogging at WWB

I’ve been busier than usual at the Words Without Borders blog lately. I posted twice about John Updike and African literature…

Updike on Africa
Updike on Africa, Part II

And I took Friday off and spent a good chunk of my three-day weekend covering the PEN World Voices Festival. Three of my posts have appeared already…

The Moth Revolution: Stories of Change
Mark Z. Danielewski and Rick Moody
Is Nonfiction Literature?

The last one, on Nawal El Saadawi, should appear soon. (Here it is now.) It might ruffle a few feathers. (I admire El Saadawi’s courage and her work on behalf of human rights, but I’m not a fan of her fiction.)