Recently in African Novels Category

Part of the deal for allowing him to play World of Warcraft and Starcraft was he had to read some Africa-related stuff... this wasn;t the best thing to start with, but it was OK.

This unassuming novel is something I just found on the bookshelf of Santa Clara University's library.  A really good read.  Once I got started I just plowed the whole way through to the end. 

It is written in the form of a series of letters from mother to daughter.  While there is much hat-tipping to "Africa" really one has to be extremely clear, the Africa in the book is an extraordinarily well-educated, well-traveled and wealthy African family, albeit with rather normal roots in a village.  The setting, Zimbabwe, is an outlier in terms of colonial history. 

Mariaire is nowhere near the writer that Doris Lessing is (though she could have been- the bio notes indicate, rather, that she is a doctor and neurosurgeon).  While the prose is very good, and the style of letter writing is quite forgiving since meandering is part of the form, the subject matter makes the book complex.  At heart it is a serious attempt to construct an identity.  And this is where the reader (me) gets a little nervous, because I can't figure out whether Mariaire is a novelist, and is trying out what it would be like for someone to construct this particular identity, or whether Mariaire herself is constructing the identity.  The reason for nervousness is that it isn't really a very interesting identity to construct... the reflections of the identity-former and the narrator never really transcend, they stay very simple.  Like a knee-jerk to various stimuli.  It is useful to contrast with Chimananda Ngozi Adichi...

Thirty-five years after my father left Ethiopia, he died in a room in a boarding house in Peoria, Illinois, that came with a partial view of the river. We had never spoken much during his lifetime, but, on a warm October morning in New York shortly after he died, I found myself having a conversation with him as I walked north on Amsterdam Avenue, toward the high school where for the past three years I had been teaching a course in Early American literature to privileged freshmen.

That the opening of a great short story by Mengestu, in the current issue of The New Yorker.  It is a well-crafted story about stories.

Very scary story.  Read in morning, not at night.  From the BBC:

The Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry has won this year's Caine Prize for African Writing, regarded as Africa's leading literary award. The prize was given for his story Stickfighting Days - the judges said it presented a heroic culture that was "Homeric" in its scale and conception. They described Olufemi Terry as a talent with an enormous future. Terry was born in Sierra Leone, grew up in Nigeria, was a journalist in Somalia and Uganda, and now lives in Cape Town. His book is about Raul, a boy who lives in a dump and uses sticks to fight with other boys. The Caine prize, of £10,000 ($16,000), is given annually for a short story published in English by an African writer. Terry, however, told the BBC he thought it was "unhelpful" to see writers from the continent as a distinct category. "There is a danger in seeking authenticity in African writing," he told the World Today programme. However, he said he was glad to have won the prize, as it would help him get his first novel published.

My colleagues Alain-Joseph Sissao (Author), and Nina Tanti (Translator) have published an English-language version of Alain's collection of Moose folktales.  It is available on amazon.com here.  Here is Alain reading one of the stories (in French).  Congratulations Alain and Nina!

Development economist's are going to think something happened to Bill Easterly... and for awhile (speaking of visual illusions) I could not train my brain to realize that there actually was not a short story in this collection by Petina Gappah about how Bill Easterly was or was not responsible for Zimbabwe's collapse.

The stories are pretty good... good not great, as they say.  Certainly for someone interested in doing research on Zimbabwe, it offers a first glimpse into the country's social and economic structures.  Especially good on elite attitudes!  I look forward to reading more form Gappah.

Over the past week I undertook a reading marathon and read volumes 2, 3 and 4 of Aya, the bande dessinée that is sweeping West Africa by storm... sympathetic characters, realistic storylines, lovely drawings.  Cannot complain. 

The coolest thing is that Abouet too has gotten bit by the library bug and apparently has set up a foundation to establish a neighborhood library in Abidjan.

From the blog vasigauke:

Naomi Benaron, a Munyori author, Wins the 2010 Bellwether Prize ($25 000)

Naomi Benaron, whose short story, "The Geology of Ghosts", recently appeared on Munyori Literary Journal, is the winner of the 2010 Bellwether Prize, worth $25 000. 00, for her novel manuscript Running the Rift, which is set in Rwanda. The Bellwether Prize of fiction, coordinated by Barbara Kingsolver, supports literature of social justice, and Naomi Benaron, whose works are set in Africa, particularly in Rwanda, is a perfect fit. And she is not new to literary awards; her debut collection of short stories, Love Letters from a Fat Man, won 2006 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Fiction.I have read and enjoyed her work, including the manuscript of Running the Rift.

Barbara Kingsolver called the manuscript "culturally rich and completely engrossing. It engages the reader with complex political questions about ethnic animosity in Rwanda and so many other issues relevant to North American readers. For one, it conveys the impossibility of remaining neutral within a climate of broad moral compromise--even for purportedly apolitical institutions like the Olympics."

For more details, visit the Bellwether Prize website.

My colleague Alain Sissao is visiting Santa Clara, and lent me his copy of Verre Cassé, so I am finally reading it.  Superb writing!  A perfect novel for discussion in a literature class... every chapter full of meanings, deep and surface.  The style itself of course.  And the literary and popular references crammed in... at one point Bobo-Dioulasso potatos are mentioned... huh?

I haven't finished, but could not resist this little extract, a tiny little riff off Hampaté Bâ, and I come across the aphorism so many times that I know some day I won't be able to resist, just like Mabanckou wasn't able to resist...