What’s fascinating here is the political context that we get for each of Seneca’s major essays. That said, it must be remembered that the author here What’s fascinating here is the political context that we get for each of Seneca’s major essays. That said, it must be remembered that the author here provides essentially a consensus view of many matters. The notes are filled with the clashing views of scholars.
For instance, “On the Shortness of Life“ is generally believed to have been written so Seneca‘s father-in-law might save face on being turned our of office—he managed grain supplies—by the emperor Claudius’s wife Agrippina. It was important that Seneca make it appear that his father-in-law was retiring for philosophical reasons, not, as was the truth, being turned out cruelly by Seneca’s enemy.
The story of Nero’s brutal murder of Brittanicus—deified Claudius’s natural son—simply for purposes of undermining his mother, Agrippina, takes the breath away. He had him poisoned at dinner with Agrippina there to witness. She had been threatening Nero, her blood son, with Brittanicus’s right to the throne, since he (Nero) was getting out of her control. It’s quite a scene. “On Mercy” is Seneca’s attempt, on one level, to absolve Nero for the murder and lead him to a new acceptance of virtue.
——
“Seneca had been the recipient of many such gifts [from Nero] over the years. Gardens, villas, and estates, including some of which had perhaps belonged to Brittanicus, made him vastly wealthy. But accepting them had made him an accomplice in the rough methods by which they were obtained. That Seneca was struggling with the problem is clear from the treatise he published in the late 50s or early 60s [AD], De Beneficiis, a long meditation on the topic of giving and receiving.” (p. 127)
After reading this book I will never again be able to read Seneca’s essays with a straight face as, say, Montaigne once read them....more
**spoiler alert** Caryl Philips is a wonderful writer. He has a gift for tone and archaic (seemingly lost) forms of diction. This is a contrivance, no**spoiler alert** Caryl Philips is a wonderful writer. He has a gift for tone and archaic (seemingly lost) forms of diction. This is a contrivance, no question. And it’s not always the shortest road to Rome. But it’s generally used with such skill that the rhetoric vanishes as one is carried by the story.
His novels often have a multistory structure, as this one does. Switching narrators and points of view. He’s not interested in chronology but in its subversion, though this particular book is more straightforward than some.
The hatred these characters bear for each other, and themselves; it’s staggering. It poisons their souls. It’s not sustainable. Its depiction is so engrossing that one feels emotionally exhausted when it’s over.
Phillips’s narrators tend to be reliable, though one character here, Monica, who’s world is collapsing, seems an exception. Phillips’s best books deal with slavery, post-colonialism, and the fate of the African diaspora. I especially like this one, Cambridge, Crossing the River, A Distant Shore, and The Nature of Blood.
Quibbles: Why not simply call the persons of color here persons of color? Instead the writer hints and alludes to curly hair etc. It’s just one of hundreds of esthetic choices the author makes, but, I wonder if it doesn’t make the depictions less substantial?
Another annoyance is the Faulknerian choice to open a given section merely with a pronoun and let the reader float along for pages until it’s finally revealed who we are reading about. Faulkner‘s trick was to use “it.” One wouldn’t mind this so much once in a while, but it seems to be used in every chapter....more
Why isn’t this exquisite writer being read more hungrily by my Goodreads fellows? Especially now that half of America is marching in the streets for BWhy isn’t this exquisite writer being read more hungrily by my Goodreads fellows? Especially now that half of America is marching in the streets for Black Lives Matter. This is the man whose work you want to read—in addition to James Baldwin et al— for his subject matter is the African Diaspora. Absolutely outstanding work!
This nonfiction account is not so much a history of the violent global dispersion of those of African descent as much as it is an inquiry into it. It begins with Phillips’s crossing to Britain from the New World on a banana boat. As so many Africans were ripped from their lives and forced to make the middle passage to America or the Caribbean in chains, so Phillips wants to make his own sort of counter crossing now. He wants to be on the water, perhaps to help him imagine the fate of his ancestors. The book is travelogue, memoir and a few specific historical moments chosen to illuminate his theme of the historic travails of Africans and their present day psychology. In elegance of style the book reminds me of the nonfiction of V.S. Naipaul, which is high praise.
The narrator swerves from the story of his own crossing to tell the story about the son of an African merchant who is sent to Liverpool to follow up on a deal gone sour in the 1880’s. The theme being the avariciousness of the white man, his collective impacts on Africans, for it’s clear the money invested has been embezzled. Then we’re back to first person narration again as the author travels to Liverpool, the former European capital of the slave trade. All the grand decaying buildings of Liverpool were “rewards” for the trading in human flesh. That they still stand—“a truly spectacular repository of marble, statuary, oil paintings and gilt”—is detestable.
In Ghana the author meets with the playwright, poetaster, academic and former politician Mohammed Ben Abdallah to explore the idea of Pan-Africanism. It is in this discussion with Dr Ben Abdallah that Phillips seems to hew closest to what Naipaul did in his nonfiction, in which the interview was paramount. Both writers share an interest in post-colonialism, but Naipaul never took any interest in Africans or those of African dissent, not even when he was touring the American south (See A Turn in the South). Phillips on the contrary embraces the topic. I feel as if I’ve come across a vital resource on the subject.
Then Phillips visits an African-American, Dr. Lee, who grew up in the south and emigrated to Ghana in 1956 to establish a dental practice. Their discussion of the “castles,” or slave forts, and how they’re misunderstood by locals I found surprising.
“‘The African doesn’t really understand the slave trade,’ says Dr. Lee. ‘To bring it up causes him embarrassment. If they can make money out of it by turning these places into shrines of tourism for Africans in the diaspora to come back and weep and wail and gnash their teeth, then so be it. They’re businessman. But to go deeper into the psychological and historical import of the slave trade is not what most Africans wish to do.’” (p. 153)
The Panafest Phillips then attends, meant to be a joyous coming together of members of the African diaspora, is ham-handed and sparsely attended. It is also moving and darkly funny. Phillips is able to evoke all of these emotions at once. Fascinating is the story of Philip Quaque, an African who in 1754 was sent from Cape Coast Castle to England for his education and ordination as a Anglican deacon, who then returned to Africa ostensibly as a missionary. Never once, the author notes, in his voluminous correspondence spanning 1766-1812, did the good father ever write about the slave trade; though over that period Africans in their tens of thousands went through Cape Coast Castle on their way to bondage in the U.S. south and Caribbean.
Phillips travels through the American south to tell the story of a white federal judge and his wife who were ostracized for his decision in a civil rights case that went against the ruling white politburo there. The cruelty that still is the American south!
A major theme of the book is the romanticization by black and brown people of the Return to Africa movement. Phillips seems to think it’s all quite ridiculous, though he makes no judgments. He simply show us the people and describes what they’re doing. That is more than sufficient. Now he is in the Negev desert of Israel where many returnees live. It’s hot! He is being fed vegetarian food, which he can’t stomach. Meanwhile a woman serving him speaks of coming out of “the great captivity” in Chicago in 1978 to live in the promised land, for she believes she and her fellows are the “...descendants of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob. We are the true children of Israel.” (p. 269)
I have ordered Crossing the River, a novel. It should be here in a few days. What a stunning new find Phillips is for me! Read him, friends....more
The model here is Dante. Author Forché’s Virgil is Leonel Gómez Vides. He came to her home in California whe“The horror, the horror.” —Joseph Conrad
The model here is Dante. Author Forché’s Virgil is Leonel Gómez Vides. He came to her home in California when she was in her twenties, accompanied by his two teenage daughters, on a mission he called the reverse Peace Corps. Though he was never so direct, he wanted Forché to bear witness to the forthcoming civil war in El Salvador (1979-1992). It hadn’t started yet, but it would very soon. Leonel foresaw it, and so felt it was important to have someone around afterward who could speak to what it was truly all about. The hard part though, she must survive it.
It was a civil war of the 1980s, one that pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades—with U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war. More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads. Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others. —Raymond Bonner, The Atlantic
Leonel and Forché visit the dirt poor peasants, campesinos, Indians almost entirely. One day she watches Monseñor Óscar Romero perform the Roman Catholic Mass. She sees him off and on after that, sometimes dining with him in a group, and she is present at what she believes to be his final interview before his assassination; and on one occasion before she is about to leave, for the coup d’état has occurred and the danger is great, they speak, quite memorably. She is shown a rural hospital by a woman doctor which has no equipment or medicines. She spends the night in a peasant’s home and learns how the men go to the mountains to sleep at night to avoid the death squads who naturally work exclusively under the cover of darkness.
She is a witness every bit as observant as Victor Klemperer in his two-volume I Will Bear Witness. But Klemperer was a Jew with an “Aryan” wife who suffered under the Nazis. Until the middle of the memoir, Forché is just a teacher in El Salvador on a fellowship grant. She’s compassionate but somehow not fully invested, if that’s the right word, in the crimes happening around her. Then Leonel sends her on a tour of a government-operated prison. Inside she’s shown to a special room by a trustee named Miguel
What I saw were wooden boxes, about the size of washing machines, maybe even a little smaller. I counted the boxes. There were six, and they had small openings cut into the fronts, with chicken-wire mesh over the openings. They were padlocked. As I stood there, some of the boxes started to wobble, and I realized that there were men inside them. Fingers came through one of the mesh openings. Blood rushed to my ears, as I stood, trying to orient myself so that I could know not only where the room was but also which wall the boxes were against, and then I walked slowly towards the light of the open door and into the hallway, where Miguel was standing against his crutch.
Miguel tells her:
’That’s the oscura, the darkness, solitary. Sometimes men are held in there for a year and can’t move when they come out because of the atrophy of their muscles. Some of them never recover their minds. Tell them on the outside, tell them,’ and then, raising his voice he said, ‘Carolina, it has been nice to see you again. Give my love to Anna and Carlos [his parents].’ (pp. 159-160)
This is a watershed experience. Not even finding dead bodies in the street one night moves her as the prison does. Leonel continues to introduce her to various Salvadoran military officers. He coaxes her to visit the American Embassy and meet the new ambassador, for whom she gets talking points. Foremost among the points is the name of one Richardson, an American killed by a Salvadoran death squad leader named Chacón. Then there is an incident of brazen chicanery when Forché and Leonel meet with one old Salvadoran honcho, also to discuss Richardson, who may think Forché is the next U.S. ambassador. You have to read it. This section is just through the roof brilliant in its pacing—as is the entire book. Then Forché returns to the U.S. to take care of her academic responsibilities. Some weeks later Leonel calls her there to say Chacón has been killed. Are the seeds she helped to plant with both the honcho and the ambassador in whole or in part responsible for this outcome?
Written in pencil: When someone joins a death squad he is in for life if you quit you might talk and no one wants to be fingered later for these crimes the first time such a man goes out on an operation he is tested by the others they tell him he must rape the victim in front of them and cut off certain pieces of the body they want to see if he has the stomach for this after that he is as guilty as the others and ... his reward is usually money why isn’t it enough to kill a victim why must each also suffer mutilation the death squad members must all be guilty of every murder so one rapes another strikes blows another uses the machete and so on until it would be impossible to determine which action had caused the death and the squad members are protected from each other by mutual guilt also when mere death no longer instills fear in the population the stakes must be raised the people must be made to see that not only will they die but die slowly and brutally. (p. 261)
Then comes an extraordinary moment. She’s in San Salvador with her friend Margarita who gets a call. The government’s cohesiveness has broken. “Several hundred campesinos had fled the army and had been given sanctuary by the church.” Forché’s presence is needed at the sanctuary for it is believed that if American journalists are present, the army will refrain from massacring the AWOL soldiers. She goes, posing as a journalist, which she clearly isn’t.
The people who had crowded into the courtyard were refugees from the combat areas of San Vincente and Cabañas, severing hundred of them.... I was giving a woman water when a child told me that someone was at the door and asked me to come. An American stood there, gaunt and exhausted, with two cameras hanging from his shoulders.... His Spanish was fluent, almost natively so. He was with Time magazine, was all he said, but “never mind that.” We had been told that as soon as the people were given refuge, a rumor flew around that the soldiers were coming and they were going to kill everyone.... I don’t remember that we exchanged another word. As one by one we heard the trucks pulling up near the entrance, engines thrumming, a seminarian who had been trying to calm someone down told me that it was time. I left the water and stepped outside, as did the photographer, until we were visible to the open trucks which the soldiers rode standing, pointing their rifles at the clouds, engines idling. I heard a whir and click, whir and click. Click click click. The American was taking photographs, so I opened my notebook and started to write nonsense, looking at the soldiers as if I were taking down names. You could hear the din of the courtyard from the street: crying, shouting. The soldiers seemed all to have mastered a certain demeanor: set mouths, hard eyes, helmet straps over their chins. The photographer was still photographing. I didn’t want to go any closer, but they could plainly see me writing in the notebook. And then, just like that, one after another, the trucks wheezed into the road and drove away. ‘Well, that was close,’ I heard the photographer say under his breath. (p. 306)
Here she thwarts multiple live weapons, a small army, with her pen—and the tired photographer, whom she later marries. The danger Forché puts herself in will set your hair on fire. Her simple style minimizes it, or seeks to. But she is permeated by the overwhelming selflessness of her fellows. So many people so willing to die. The US’s culpability—as it is also depicted in Thomas Hauser’s Missing (Chile) and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie (Vietnam) and elsewhere—is sickening.
It’s clear to me that I have never really understood the Salvadoran civil war before. My new grasp of the truth is the gift of this fine book....more
I agree with David Brooks who reviewed this book in January 2013 that much of its essential idea— that the West can learn from traditional and small-sI agree with David Brooks who reviewed this book in January 2013 that much of its essential idea— that the West can learn from traditional and small-scale societies—doesn’t really leap off the page. Brooks’s point is that the reader doesn’t really get to meet individuals of traditional and primitive societies, and that undermines Diamond’s arguments that the West try alternatives to its present justice system. One idea that I Iiked was emotional mediation in some cases of murder. Here the killer and his victims are brought together to face each other over a table and talk about how the loss of a loved has affected them or, in the case of the killer, a show of remorse. This may seem preposterous on its face, but for those so inclined such an approach can provide closure for the parties that most present Western systems of justice cannot, since parties in Western disputes tend to talk at each other through adversarial intermediaries called attorneys. I can also see why Diamond sticks to discussing traditional and small-scale societies from the perspective of populations, since a divagation to an individual’s story might skew his arguments unduly. Having said that I also see how the populations approach appears inherently anti-individualistic and even Marxist. Marxist intrusions into the social and behavioral sciences in the second half of the 20th century were horrendously counterproductive, but I do not believe that is the author’s intent here. Nevertheless, the lack of human stories makes for rough sledding. There are some, but very few. So a bit of a narrative Catch-22....more
Soul crushing. We in the West know nothing about degradation. The strife and misery of this narrative! And yet the writing is captivating, the modulatSoul crushing. We in the West know nothing about degradation. The strife and misery of this narrative! And yet the writing is captivating, the modulation of emotion through action and image masterful. A novel of people whose very essence, they’ve been told for thousands of years, is defilement. I must read more on caste and how it came to be. It’s incomprehensible to the Western mind.
Bakha, a strong young man, a sweeper of latrines, has spent time at the British barracks, where he was treated as if he possessed no taint. This has broadened his thinking, shown him the imbecility of the millennia-old system he lived under, and made him feel things could be different than they are. Bakha and his kind are, among other indecencies, deprived of education, fed like swine, denied participation in community, and consigned to wretched quarters. As the story progresses, and Bakha is assailed from all quarters with declarations of “pollution, pollution!” That this handsome and industrious young man should on this day, perhaps for the first time, truly feel the proportions of the terrible trap that is his life, makes for a terrible moment.
He was part of a consciousness which he could share and yet not understand. He had been lifted from the gutter, through the barriers of space, to partake of life which was his, and yet not his. He was in the midst of a humanity which included him in its folds and yet debarred him from entering into a sentient, living, quivering contact with it. (p. 137)
The Mahatma shows up with a message tailor made for Bakha. It’s a subtle bit of didacticism in which one is reminded of certain harangues of Dostoyevsky. Fortunately it’s brief. Untouchability was prohibited by law some 65 years ago. But it is said that Indian elections still reflect a caste consciousness. How could they not, after millennia under such a system? The book, scatological in the extreme, is deeply moving, mainly due to the rage it evokes in the reader. It is also utterly without parallel in my reading experience. That is, I’ve never read anything else that even touches on the subject in the headlong manner this does.
PS Guess who helped Anand with his novel? His initials are M.G.
A too brief summary. The book is an overview of the 1857 Mutiny in Delhi. Striking in the early going is the mutual tolerance Muslims and Hindus had fA too brief summary. The book is an overview of the 1857 Mutiny in Delhi. Striking in the early going is the mutual tolerance Muslims and Hindus had for each other. King Zafar was king to all his heterogeneous peoples, or he sought to be. The two faiths were interlarded. Astonishing.
“It is clear that [King] Zafar consciously saw his role as a protector of his Hindu subjects, and a moderator of extreme Muslim demands and the chilling Puritanism of many of the 'ulama. One of Zafar’s verses says explicitly that Hinduism and Islam “share the same essence,” and his court lived out this syncretic philosophy, and both celebrated and embodied this composite Hindu–Muslim Indo-Islamic civilization, at every level. The Hindu elite of Delhi went to the Sufi shrine Nizamuddin, could quote Hafiz and we’re fond of Persian poetry. Their children . . . studied under maulvis and attended the more liberal madrasas, bringing offerings of food for their teachers on Hindu festivals. For their part, Muslims followed the emperor in showing honor to Hindu holy men, while many in the court, including Zafar himself, followed the old Mughal custom, borrowed from upper cast Hindus, of drinking only Ganges water. Zafar’s extensive team of Hindu astrologers rarely left his side.
“Given the somewhat dubious and sectarian reputation of madrasas today, it is worth remembering that many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), were the products of madrasa educations.” (p. 77)
The book is masterful, what we’ve come to expect from Dalrymple. By the time the slaughter of the Mutiny occurs, the reader knows the players and their temperaments on both sides. The fighting is harrowing. British evil received it due—though one wishes the women and children could have been spared. But apparently that’s not how religious terror works. These native soldiers were convinced that they were being defiled by various means—that their religions were being assaulted—so the British could convert them to Christianity. And here in Delhi, too, of all places, where freedom of worship was once so revered under the Mughals. The mutineers were both Hindu and Muslim working if haphazardly toward a common goal: the genocide of all Christians.
The mutineers had almost no leadership. One of King Zafar’s sons—Mirza Mughal—finagled a commander in chief position but he was almost entirely ineffective. The mutineers acted on whim and anger and showed no cohesion beyond the regimental level. Their greed overcame them. They looted the city incessantly. They never had the sympathy of the general population for it, too, was looted indiscriminately. There was no command and control which the British, after the initial onslaught, were able to restore.
“The Gujar and Mewati tribesmen around the city . . . effectively controlled most of Delhi’s hinterland. Robbing anyone who attempted to move along roads in and out of the capital, they kept the city in a far more effective state of blockade than anything achieved by the British to the north.” (p. 242)
One of the reasons the Union won the U.S. Civil War was because it had quartermasters who dealt with procurement. Not that it was the most efficient operation by any means. The Confederacy tended to live off the land, as the mutineers did the city, which was unsustainable. Moreover, we are told, the mutineers felt invulnerable because they believed God was working through the King, “...God‘s shadow on earth.” V.S. Naipaul has written about the gift of religious people being their confidence, which is often enviable. (See Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey.) The Hindus, too, who comprised the lion’s share of the mutineers, had their own rebellion boosters. Here we had over-confidence and no strategic plan, much less access to a telegraph. But. . .
“In the two weeks after the British returned to the Ridge [an artillery perch northwest of Delhi] the rebel forces received several thousand reinforcements—from Ambala and Jalandhar, in the north, and Haryana and Nasirabad, in the west. Larger than any of these was the enormous rebel army heading slowly toward Delhi from Bareilly, 200 miles to the east. Across Hindustan, of the 139,000 sepoys in the Bengal army, all but 7,796 had now risen against the Company, and over half were now either in Delhi or on their way to it.” (p. 244)
One knows how it will turn out, but even so one keeps hoping what cannot happen: that the mutineers will somehow prevail. The book invests us in the underdog for he holds the moral right. The British shouldn’t have been there; that’s irrefutable. No argument about the upside of British Colonialism can ever convince us otherwise. (See Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.) So when Bakht Khan—“a much-garlanded and battle-hardened veteran of the Afghan wars” (p. 263) and the sepoys’s first true strategic thinker—arrives on the scene one is filled with futile hope. But Khan’s reign is brief; lack of discipline soon undermines him.
The story of King Zahar, the last Mughal of the title, is the clever biographical thread stitching together the entire narrative. Poor man. It was the British’s own “blunders and insensitivities that had precipitated the outbreak, and the slow hesitant . . . bungling response that had allowed it to spread with such speed.” (p. 283) The king was caught in the middle between the British, who treated him as a vassal, and the mutineers, who believed he was the source of inexhaustible treasure that could fund their poorly conceived and ineptly led revolution.
The mutineers’ slaughter of innocents and the British exponentially larger counter-slaughter makes us shudder with revulsion. This is a story that needed to be told. But with so much vivid new archival material compressed into a single volume the book is at times almost more than one can bear. Page after page of hideous massacres, bloated corpses, men shot down in their prime etc. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Let’s close with excepts from William Howard Russell, the Times’s correspondent, who wrote after visiting King Zafar before his show trial in 1858.
“To my mind, the position of the King was one of the most intolerable misery long ere the revolt broke out. His palace was in reality a house of bondage; he knew that the few wretched prerogatives which were left to him, as if in mockery of the departed power they represented, would be taken away from his successors; that they would be deprived even of the right to live in their own palace, and would be exiled to some place outside the walls. We denied permission for his royal relatives to enter our service; we condemned them to a degrading existence, in poverty and debt, inside the purlieus of the palace, and then we reproached them with their laziness, meanness and sensuality. We shut the gates of military preferment upon them — we took from them every object of honorable ambition — and then our papers and our mess rooms teemed with invective against the lazy, slothful and sensuous princes.” (p. 402)...more
The ramp up of Part 1 seems unusually long, though hardly a slog. In it Naipaul’s classic, young, post-colonial island man takes up residence in a shaThe ramp up of Part 1 seems unusually long, though hardly a slog. In it Naipaul’s classic, young, post-colonial island man takes up residence in a shared house in post-war Kensington, a part of London that was once seedy and cheap according to the author. The house is full of Maltese and Italians and various sad alcoholics who fall down a lot. Leini, an Italo-Maltese woman living in the dank basement, gets a party together to attend the baptism of her fatherless child. It’s a sad affair.
The narrator, Ranjit Kripalsingh, shortened to Ralph Singh, then marries an emotionally damaged young woman with magnificent breasts who by acting out randomly alienates anyone who might befriend them as a couple. Soon a retreat to the author’s native isle of Isabella seems prudent. On docking, Singh’s mother, learning she now has a white daughter-in-law, makes a scene. Soon thereafter Singh gets creative with a legacy of wasteland and becomes a wealthy developer. The wife gets worse due to the materialism. Soon they’ve gone their separate ways and Singh has begun to write. It’s like The Mystic Masseur but gutted of the humor. The reader, like the writer, dutifully soldiers on.
Part 2 reverts to Singh’s childhood. Suddenly, the book feels more like a Naipaul novel. In it we get the story of his early life on the tropical island of Isabella. His father, an underpaid school teacher, marries into a family a few years before they grow wealthy as the island’s sole Coca-Cola bottler. Formerly seen as a good match, the father is now deprecated by the wife’s family. The now affluent wife comes to believe she’s married beneath herself. The father later becomes a millenarian figure leading disaffected dock workers to a brief idyll in the mountains.
It was not until page 117 that I finally discovered what I’d been missing. It was Naipaul’s frank talk of race. On a school outing, for example, the beautifully Chinese Hok is discovered to be the son of a black mother. As Singh tells us:
We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in a classroom: the name of a shop, the name if a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return.
Hok ignores his black mother in the street. His teacher is appalled. Hok is made to acknowledge her if only by the passing of a few simple words. Suddenly, the boy known in class as Confucius, is persona non grata.
It was for this betrayal into ordinariness that I knew he was crying. It was at this betrayal that the brave among us were tittering. It wasn’t only that the mother was black and of the people, though that was a point; it was because he had been expelled from the private sphere of fantasy [the school] where lay his true life. . . . I felt I had been given an unfair glimpse of another person’s deepest secrets. I felt on that street, shady, with gardens, and really pretty as I now recall it, though then to me wholly drab, that Hok had dreams like mine, was probably also marked, and lived in imagination far from us, far from the island on which he, like my father, like myself, had been shipwrecked. (p.117)
Whoa. From here on the novel begins to fascinate. We’re back in Naipaul Land. And—again—one feels what a privilege it is to read him. Once the narrator moves on to tell the story of his island childhood the old magic ensnares us. I wouldn’t say that Part 1 is inferior, but I was unable to get traction in the story until p. 117.
Part 3 may be brilliant. Time will be helpful in determining that. In it Singh recounts the rise and fall of his political career on Isabella with hardly a dabbling in the substantive issues. The novel becomes not one of scenes and description and dialog—A House for Mr Biswas is the book to go to for that. Here, the novel’s later pages are almost wholly about the actions and opinions of men as they manipulate others’s emotions and reap praise and celebrity. Here, it might be said, the novel becomes all voice, all Singh’s persona, and the concreteness of detail commensurately flattens, dissipates. The world withdraws. A collapse is coming. Singh retreats inward. One has the sense in the end of a lost person, the homunculus peering out of his vessel in desperation, withdrawing, giving up the world....more
A few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs oA few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs of collectivization (20 million dead) and Hitler's genocide (11 million dead). I am largely unshockable. However, the avarice and deceit of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (15 million dead) has been something of a revelation. I hereby enter his name in my Rogues Gallery roster. It is important that we remember what he perpetrated for his own personal gain. Adam Hochschild's book does an excellent job of registering these crimes in the collective memory. The book has been justly praised. Let me add my own.
Also, it turns out the first great unmasker of Leopold was an American, George Washington Williams. He was a lawyer, minister, popular author and activist. He wrote an open letter to Leopold that was published in the Times in 1890 and which might have saved millions of lives had he been listened to. Williams was a man of considerable intellectual acumen and courage. Largely because he was black, however, he was ignored. I had always thought that that great whistleblower was Roger Casement. And certainly Casement's key contribution is recounted here, as is that of the great popularizer of the Congo cause, E.D. Morel, but Williams' audacious early warning was a surprise to me. I hereby enter his name into my book of latter-day Cassandras, and decree he be given greater emphasis in all relevant texts and courses....more
An interesting history of anti-colonial intellectual life in the East during the greatest days of Imperialism. Mishra's new book is one much needed byAn interesting history of anti-colonial intellectual life in the East during the greatest days of Imperialism. Mishra's new book is one much needed by Western readers. It's a necessary corrective. It's loaded with information about intellectuals in the Muslim world, China and India most of whom I have never heard of before. Each of these men--Jamal al din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao, Rabindranath Tagore and others--possessed insights into the true nature of Western nations' motivations in Asia. They saw the dependence by Eastern states on the West and knew nothing good would come of it. They saw that their own states were weak and predisposed to this manipulation because of aspects in their own cultures, say, favoring authoritarianism or the blandishments of religion. Theirs were not democracies. The populace did not take a personal interest in government, which was opaque and insular. The Enlightenment had caused western states to swing away from despotism toward participative democracy. There was no such parallel movement in the East. There doesn't appear to have been much scrabbling about in dusty archives by Mishra. He does not appear to have a working knowledge of either Arabic or Chinese, and, it seems, has relied exclusively on English-language sources....more
I have said in my comments on this site that I think that the millenarian tendencies of some of my more, shall we say, zealous Christian forebears, miI have said in my comments on this site that I think that the millenarian tendencies of some of my more, shall we say, zealous Christian forebears, might have made me keenly receptive to dystopic narratives, among other grim eschatological works. We know there are talents as well as resemblances, not to say cognitive skills and deficits, that pass from one generation to the next. Having said that, and having just finished my second reading of this Naipaul gem, I wonder if Naipaul's own forebears might not have prepared him for a certain hyper-vigilance to status and caste.
Naipaul is descended from a high-caste Brahmin family. One of the singular features of all of his work has always been a hyper-awareness of status that is unlike anything I know in any other contemporary writer. Who stands where in the social pecking order, how that standing has altered over time, whether someone is higher in repute, fame, success, than they were in the past, or lower and why —all of these concerns fascinate Naipaul.
Now, you could argue, I suppose, 'well, he's a writer, naturally he would have keen observations about character and related matters.' To that I would respond, yes, true, but there is something unique about the content of Naipaul's observations and his remarks upon them. There is a pitiless honesty, yes, but also something more. Is this the result of some kind of genetic hardwiring? This is something the cognitive sciences have only begun to study. So I wanted to think out loud a little here, and ask if my Naipaul-loving GR friends might have any insight into this aspect of his work. Has anyone else marked this penchant of Naipaul's?
Fun fact touching on both V.S. Naipaul and the James Bond movies. Did you know that A House for Mr. Biswas was once in production as a Broadway musicaFun fact touching on both V.S. Naipaul and the James Bond movies. Did you know that A House for Mr. Biswas was once in production as a Broadway musical? The following quote is from the obituary of songwriter John Barry, The New York Times, 2 Feb. 2011:
The origins of the James Bond theme are disputed. Mr. Norman [Barry's biographer] said that Barry brushed off a musical passage from “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” a song he had written for a musical version of the V. S. Naipaul novel A House for Mr. Biswas. With a few adjustments, it became the theme to Dr. No, [the film that launched the James Bond series].
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