I used to do far more of this, but inspired by K-Bax and the incomparable Jen, I felt like it was time to do a quick round-up of January’s reading.
Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Ryszard Kapuscinski was a gift from my aunt Gaynor. She gave me The Emperor, The Shah of Shahs and The Soccer War when I was a teenager, and I was blown away. Kapuscinski was a fascinating man and a personal hero of mine. It was said of him that he had personally witnessed or reported on no fewer than twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed forty times or more, and had survived four different death sentences. The Emperor narrated the fall of Haile Selassie; Shah of Shahs told of the Islamic Revolution and the last days of the Pahlavi dynasty. Questions have been raised about his depictions of Africa and about the authenticity of some of his details, but one dirty secret of journalism is that the odd fabrication can be excused, especially in the interests of revealing a greater truth. He is not an academic; he was a poorly-educated boy from behind the iron curtain, plucked almost at random and hurled into the world with scarcely any preparation at all. And in the end, when it came to the collapse of empires, Kapuscinski was the twentieth century’s foremost authority, a primary witness of unimpeachable experience.
Travels is more of a memoir, and is thus somewhat unsatisfying. To give this slight tome a hook, Kapuscinski grounds it in the battles of ancient history, focusing his narrative on the copy of Herodotus’ Histories that he was given as upon departing for his first assignment. The subtext is clear; one gets the uncomfortable feeling that, by overlaying the story of the ancient traveller, narrator and seeker of truths, Kapuscinski – old and dying – was using his last work to try to frame his own epitaph.
If so, this book is affected detrimentally for it. Gone is the piss and vinegar, and the lonely sense of alienation and abandonment, and the sheer uncompromising fear that formed the combustive fuel for his earlier work; this is a mellow, peaceful, reflective book, still beautifully written and gently humorous, and lacking the insight and power of his documentary works. The real star of the show is Herodotus, whose stories of the clashing armies of Persia, Greece, Scythia and Egypt caught the imagination in a way that Kapuscinski’s slightly parochial descriptions of revolutionary China and post-war Khartoum did not.
It’s a good book, but not a great one. If you want to see a truly fitting testament to the talent and verve of one of the world’s greatest reporters, though, then you should read him at the height of his powers – in Iran in 1979, Angola 1975, and Ethiopia as Sellassie’s power erodes beneath him. When you are truly great, your epitaph looks after itself.
Sunnyside by Glen David Gold
Carter Beats the Devil was another firm favourite from my university days. A richly detailed prewar setting mixed with the exoticism of the life of the professional stage musician, infused by the inherently fascinating story of Charles Carter, the book was exciting and enjoyable – an adventure story for the more refined palate.
Sunnyside is exactly the same book, except that it has Charlie Chaplin instead of Charles Carter, and isn’t as good.
Let’s be fairer than that; it may well be that I am glamourising my memory of Carter, and that it’s actually just as accomplished. But if that’s the case then neither of them are very good, and this write-up becomes more complicated, so let’s stick with the facts at hand: Sunnyside is, simply, not all that good.
Its problems are several. Firstly, of the three interweaving storylines, only two actually interweave and only one is really worth your time. The first is the story of Hugo Black, a private in the section of the American army which – for no very justifiable reason – continues fighting World War One well after the Armistice, against the Russians, from their own city of Archangel on the north coast. It’s mostly divorced from the rest of the plot, being almost entirely tacked on, and doesn’t really resolve in anything like a satisfactory manner.
The second concerns Leland Duncan, whose story arbitrarily links in with the third story but which is much more thematically sound. Leland Duncan was a real person; in the first world war, he rescued two dogs in a bombed-out barn in Normandy, one of which would go on to become Rin Tin Tin, movie dog extrodinaire. As a slightly more likeable character, Leland carried his plotline in a way that Hugo simply fails to do.
The third plotline is by far the strongest, and on its own would have made a lighter, but much more compelling, book. It’s the story of Charlie Chaplin as he seeks to avoid the draft, find a mode of working that he can take pride in, and stave off the machinations of a Hollywood aligning itself against him. It includes several well-written passages, including a couple of fascinatingly ornate set pieces. These sections reveal Gold at his most comfortable, and somewhat work to the detriment of the weaker storylines that surround them.
Another problem that besets Gold’s work across all of the plotlines, however, is Gold’s lack of talent at writing for female characters. The females in Sunnyside are jarringly mannequin-esque – and are almost all reduced to romantic interests for the three male leads. It remains disappointing to me that male writers, as a class, seem to be incapable of overcoming this single, basic hurdle to narrative believablility.
Sunnyside is not a total failure. It has some charm, some adrenaline-inspiring passages, and some almost touching moments. But at its heart, it’s still not very good. It’s too long, and the quality is too diluted. Perhaps I’m just too old for this?
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
African literature is a hard market to excel in. On the one hand, there is no shortage of stories to be told; from the cradle of life and the birth of civilisation, to the war-torn and fractious borders of today, Africa deserves voices who are prepared to represent it in its totality. On the other, it must be acknowledged that the main audience for African literature is, and remains, white Europeans and Americans (not to mention their publishers and editors), who will happily apply and enforce their own – often arbitrary – benchmarks of quality and authenticity. To be an African author who can successfully balance those competing demands is a nontrivial task.
Ngugi wa Thion’o is one such. This latest book gives some hints as to his approach; it is defiantly anti black universalism, proudly feminist, and as celebratory of the individual as it is of the crowd. This is a remarkably warm, human novel, despite being born out of an impossibly sad event – in 2004, Ngũgĩ ended his exile to return to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa, but during the trip, robbers broke into his apartment: they stole money and a computer, brutalised the professor, and raped his wife.
This is not a novel of recrimnination, however. The Africa of Wizard Of The Crow is an Africa on the cusp of a renaissance, held down only by the infinite venality of its ruling class. With one hand, Thiong’o paints a vivid picture of the benefits brought to African society of the possibilities generated by affordable Indian advanced education, the richness of the intellectual awakening of Africa’s own dissent, and the small ways that populations can, in their own fashions, make dictators accountable. On the other, though, he excoriates the political elites, with their absurd modes of deference to power, their “white-lust”, and their ever-more ornate and elaborate ways of deflecting attention from their true activities.
The story is that of a fictional African nation called Abruria, which exists under the heel of an otherwise-unnamed Ruler. Meanwhile, the heroes of the piece – Kamiti and Nyawira, each foreign-educated, each poor and shiftless – adopt the identity of the Wizard of the Crow. Tales of their magical healing exploits proliferate amid a fog of rumour, mythmaking and political spin.
In the New Yorker, John Updike called it “too aggrieved and grim to be called satire” – but I found it to be full of hope and remarkably free of bitterness. At more than 700 pages, its flaws, of obsessive reiteration and prolixity, arise partly from its bold experimentation with oral forms, and from giving rein to the pathologies of the corrupt at the expense of the more intimate dilemmas of those who challenge them. But the poisonousness of its targets never infects the author’s vision, nor his faith in people’s power to resist. Perhaps that in itself is a triumph.
Samarkand by Amin Maalouf
I will be up-front about this book and freely admit that this is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. There’s a degree of inbuilt bias, there – it’s a book about the height of Persian culture and civilisation, and it’s a book about books; my interests rest perfectly in the venn overlap of these themes. But there’s also a lot of objective truth in it, too. This is an excellent book at any speed and deserves to be read.
The story splits into two parts. The first tells the story of Omar Khayyám, the 11th-and-12th Century Persian mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician, poet, mechanic, geographer and musician. Khayyam is a fascinating subject to begin with; a disciple of the great Avicenna, he was a celebrity in the royal and imperial courts of the Islamic world at a time when most Europeans were living in dung huts. He lived his life in the intellectual, cultural and political capitals of the world – Nishapur, Samarkand, Merv – and, in a relationship that forms the centrepiece of this novel, was part of a set that included two men who influenced their world possibly more than any others. On the one hand was Nizam al-Mulk, the vizir of the Seljuk Empire, author of the still-famous Siyasatnama (The Book of Government), and probably the most powerful single man in the world at that time. On the other, however, was Hassan i-Sabbah, master of Alamut and the founder of what would come to be known as the sect of Assassins.
Not that it matters overmuch, but while this section of the book deals somewhat with fact, it remains heavily fictionalised. There is no actual evidence that Khayyam, al-Mulk and Sabbah ever met, other than an apocryphal story often linked to Jorge Luis Borges; but in this book their relationships are close and personal. The bare bones of the historical narrative are true – the movements of Khayyam can be traced fairly closely, the foundation of Alamut is a matter of record, and the relationship between al-Mulk and his King have, at the very least, the ring of truth – but Maalouf’s skill is in putting flesh on those bones. This book is absurdly successful in this aim. The symbiosis of the fascinating characters and the alluring, evocatively described settings make for gripping reading.
The second part of the book moves to turn-of-the-Century Iran, and somewhat more towards the wholely fictional. We now follow a young American who is on the trail of Khayyam’s Rubaiyaat – the supposed original document in which Khayyam transcribed his quatrains, rather than the speculative and heavily editorialised FitzGerald anthology and translation. This quest lead him into the political imbroglio of 1900s Iran, an era of revolution in which democracy briefly flourished, only to be ruthlessly crushed, in one of Europe’s more shameful moments, by the colonial powers of Britain and Russia. The main characters in this section are somewhat less absorbing than in the first; they’re not bad, and a lesser book (like, say, Sunnyside) would be better for their inclusion, but they lack the draw of Khayyam and his coevals. But the themes remain compelling.
The grand sweep of history has Iran, once again, chafing under the yoke of enforced tutelage. The book speaks with an empassioned voice about the limits of nationalism, religion and fanaticism to drive change, but also stands as a paean to human spirit under oppression. It’s a book about art and culture, and the enjoyment of life’s pleasures. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read.
