Monthly Archives: February 2023

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Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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In one of my writing classes, we were discussing Isak Dineson’s memoir Out of Africa with its haunting opening: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She goes on to describe the beauty of the landscape: “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet.” She gives us the burnt colors like pottery, the spice-scented grass, and “the crooked bare old thorn-trees,” ending with “Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.”

Since we were talking about setting and how to describe it through the perceptions of your main character, we speculated as to how someone from one of the tribes displaced by the colonial powers would describe the same setting.

In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve, remembers:

. . . it was the season of drought, when every day was the same as the last. Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made the houses shudder and heave for breath. Clouds of dust puffed up at every tramping footfall and a hard-edged stillness lay over the daylight hours.

Told he’s going on a visit with the man he’s been taught to call Uncle Asiz, a wealthy trader, Yusuf later learns he has been given in payment for his father’s debts and that Asiz is his seyyid or master, not his uncle. The boy is put to work in the store under Kahlil, an older Indian, also collateral for his father’s debt, who introduces him to the complex society of precolonial urban East Africa.

Yusuf’s story unfolds gradually. He begins volunteering to help the elderly gardener in Asiz’s gorgeous walled garden. When he’s 17, Asiz takes him on a trading trip to the interior, leaving him for years with one of his trading partners in a small village, before returning to take him even deeper in the hills. It becomes an epic journey into the heart of a country on the verge of change. They encounter disease, raging rivers, and hostile tribes, as well as a gorgeous waterfall that is said to be the gates of Paradise. Later Yusuf is brought back to town and the garden he loves, yet which becomes his undoing.

The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag or righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.

Although Yusuf is a slave, this is not structured like a traditional slave narrative which is about escaping to freedom. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story in which Yusuf seems to make the best of each new adventure. Terrified at times, he doesn’t rebel against being a slave. He doesn’t complain about his exile from each of the homes he’s found or try to escape, even as the dangers grow and the risks more terrifying. Then, as the walled garden turns into a place of danger, the rumored encroachment of the German colonizers becomes a reality.

It appears to be a retelling of the story of Joseph in the Koran, at least in part. Published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker prize, Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

What book have you read set in East Africa?

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Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov

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This is the first book in Asimov’s classic Foundation series, though he wrote it after five of the six novels in the series. It is meant to be a guide as well as a prequel. Asimov says he hadn’t planned for his first Foundation short story, published in 1942, to grow into a multi-volume series, so had decided a better introduction was needed.

Hari Seldon, a young mathematician, delivers a paper at a conference held in Trantor, capital of the empire, and thus comes to the attention of young Cleon I, whom we are told is the last Galactic Emperor of his dynasty. Cleon is mostly a figurehead, somewhat like the British royal family, relying completely on Eto Demerzel, his brilliant and somewhat mysterious advisor.

Cleon is intrigued because it sounds as though Seldon has worked out how to predict the future. When they meet, Cleon is disappointed that Seldon’s work is all theoretical and unlikely to yield practical results. However, whether Seldon’s so-called psychohistory actually works is less important to the Emperor than the possibility of using the process to issue rosy predictions about Cleon’s successes, thus calming the restive planets in the far reaches of the empire.

The next day, as he’s preparing to return to his home planet, Seldon meets a journalist in the park. Chetter Hummin alerts Seldon that Demerzel will try to detain him and offers to use his connections to take the mathematician to a safe place. Thus begins what’s known in the Foundation books as The Flight.

I read some of the Foundation novels in my teens, at a time when I was reading a lot of science fiction. I certainly thought they were interesting enough to keep reading the ones that were available then, but now I remember nothing about them, unlike some of the other SF books I consumed back then. A writer friend suggested I read this Prelude.

The story certainly flows well and has plenty of suspense and potentially interesting characters. However, it shows its age. Don’t get me wrong: Asimov was amazing. What an imagination! However, in the following decades—the first Foundation story was published 80 years ago—SF has changed.

An obvious area that’s improved is world-building. Asimov uses two methods of conveying information about the people, culture and settings of the story. One is to preface each chapter with an excerpt from the fictional Encyclopedia Galactica, directly providing information to the reader. The other is that Hari, being new to every world he travels to in the course of The Flight, must have everything explained to him. We have no access to his thoughts, but he obviously doesn’t pick up things on his own; someone must tell him.

As a result, the story is more talk than action, and it’s awkward, stilted talk at that. In today’s SF novels, world-building is much more subtle. It’s incorporated into the story. A particularly effective example is the beginning of The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which starts with action and the thoughts of the protagonist Katniss. We’re never lectured on the way that world works; instead it becomes clear through what’s going on.

Another area that’s improved in today’s stories is the characters. Hari and the other characters are flat. We don’t learn much about them as people; they are just there to serve the plot. None has the character arc we’ve come to expect in modern novels of every genre, where the person actually changes during the story, as a result of what they experience. Today’s authors get to know their characters as fully rounded people and then set them free to act and react naturally as the story progresses.

This is not a criticism of the Prelude. Plot dominated in most early SF stories. It was a rare author whose characters came alive; Ursula Le Guin comes to mind, though she was writing somewhat later than Asimov.

I’m grateful to be reminded of the enormous strides in quality that SF has made, specifically here with world-building, dialogue, and characterisation, but also thrilled to see again the strong plotting that made these early stories so interesting.

Have you gone back to read a novel from the early days of science fiction?

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The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

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What if you grew up reading fairy tales, all the ones I found in a corner of the little stone library near our house: the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault? Perhaps like Zoë you would come to believe that someday a fairy godmother would come or a magic cloak be given, a prince, a slipper, so that you yourself need do nothing but hold yourself in readiness, be calm and pleasant and passive.

What if you lived with your widowed mother, a sad and solitary woman, with no friends or even visitors aside from two of your mother’s cousins-in-law who descend on you with indigestible food, unsolicited advice, and unwelcome invitations before disappearing again (to yours and your mother’s relief)?

Zoë says:

After I had done my homework in the evening I would take up my position at the window. I liked to watch the lights go on in other houses, as if preparing for a wayfarer’s return. My reading had conditioned me to think in terms of wayfarers, so that footsteps on the pavement gave me an agreeable sensation that the stories contained enough authenticity to justify the fact that I still read them.

When Zoë is sixteen, her mother unexpectedly meets a man at one of the cousins’ parties and marries him, whereupon Simon whisks his new wife off to his home in Nice. Zoë is delighted with Simon but wants to stay in their old London flat. She is finally ready for freedom.

Freedom. It can mean so many things. As Zoë faces increasingly difficult challenges, she discovers different ways of being free, from sacrificing her own ideas and desires as she clings to an indifferent lover to Sartre’s existentialist freedom with its attendant responsibility and anguish.

As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice.

With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of the people Zoë interacts with, such as elderly Mme Levasseur whose face was somewhat twisted after a stroke, and her bitter disappointment when her grandson, a small child, refuses to kiss her.

As quietly brilliant sentences follow one upon the other, Zoë’s experiences bring her to a place where many of us have found ourselves. As poet Stevie Smith put it:

Oh I know we must put away the beautiful fairy stories
And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment

Then we must read on to discover how Zoë will manage her new adult freedom. This most unusual coming-of-age story will deliver surprising insights if you will let it.

What coming-of-age story have you read that was especially memorable?

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The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay

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“I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” It’s a great first sentence and resonates throughout the book, taking on new shades of meaning as Shalini tells us the story of what happened when she was twenty-four.

A privileged young woman, she lives in Bangalore in southern India. Her father is a successful businessman, freeing her to lead a life without purpose: drinking and clubbing, occasionally volunteering.

Like a few of my recent reads, this novel is set in motion by the death of the protagonist’s mother. Chapters alternate between what happens next, as Shalini sets out on a journey to politically unstable Kashmir, and flashbacks to her childhood growing up with her larger-than-life mother.

Shalini’s mother never went to the U.S. like her father, and still prays to the Brahmin idols that he’s abandoned. Sarcastic, rude, and uninhibited, her mother wields her anger like a cudgel to get her own way with shopkeepers, family, and everyone else. Only Stella, their servant, remains imperturbable in the face of the tornado. Shalini calls her mother “incandescent” and “vicious.”

Then a traveling salesman comes to the door selling clothing from Kashmir. Shalini is shocked when her mother invites Bashir Ahmed in and even more so when he treats her mother’s insults and barbs with humor. A teller of magical stories that enchant both mother and daughter, he becomes a regular visitor, the only regular visitor to the house.

However, at the time of her mother’s death, they hadn’t heard from him for ten years. Floundering without her mother’s strong presence, Shalini sets out to find the charming and mysterious Bashir Ahmed.

Some people in my book club believed that Shalini hoped to discover exactly what the relationship was between Bashir and her mother, but I thought she believed that in him she would find again the comfort and certainty she’d lost when her mother died.

The writing is gorgeous, and seduced me from the start. Vijay’s descriptions and unusual images are stunning.

. . . below us was the river. I’d learned its name as a child in school, and that it was one of the five mighty rivers of the north, but I had not been prepared for such a vital, living, thing. The water was gray in places, slate blue in others, and, farther off, a tawny green. The roar was so loud it seemed to dampen the sun’s glare, so that it felt momentarily as if we were standing in shadow.

As she steps out onto the swaying bridge, at first she watches her feet but then looks up.

I could see miles and miles up and down the river, mountains looming dark on both sides, all that tall blue sky held between. It was terrifying and exhilarating, and a sound—a laugh of delight or moan of fear, I couldn’t tell—escaped me, torn away in an instant by the gale that funneled through the valley.

There is much else to like about this story. I welcomed learning more about Kashmir and Bangalore. The political divisions in Kashmir emerge organically in this story. And I’ve never before run across Bangalore as a setting in the Indian novels I’ve read.

However, I found some of the plot hard to believe. Without giving anything away, the generous assistance Shalini encounters on her journey seemed designed to advance the plot rather than how people would realistically behave, even in a culture that honors hospitality.

Several people in my book club disliked Shalini to the point where it kept them from enjoying the book. However, I found her credible. It’s not surprising that an immature, very privileged girl would be self-centered and unable to understand how to behave with the very poor people she encounters in Kashmir.

The story is a fascinating look at the clash between the wealthy urban culture of Bangalore and that of an impoverished and politically unstable village in the Kashmiri mountains.

Have you read a novel set in Kashmir?