Books for
the long road
Broader horizons
By The Way believes in the importance of multicultural voices in storytelling. That’s why this month’s reviews are about authors from non-English speaking countries. The findings of the 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey asserted: “The publishing industry is white, straight and physically able, and the vast majority of books published are intended for these audiences.” If publishers and authors do not embrace diversity, they will lose out. A good start is with us – the readers. Let’s broaden our horizons and let publishers know, through our reading and buying habits, what we want more of in our literature.
The thing around your neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This Nigerian author is world renowned. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her brilliant 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war epic Half of a Yellow Sun. Her work has been translated into 30 languages and Adichie dazzles with her penetrating look at the African world. In this collection, she gives us 13 memorable stories examining the lives of women, men and children everywhere: East and West, Africa and Europe.
She introduces them all in her superb short fiction – the alienations, the complex trauma, how to preserve dignity when livelihood is at stake, the joy and pain of human lives, the tribulations of ordinary people, the disappointment and loneliness of being, love as tribulation, the alienation in a world away from the known, the soul stifled by oppression and poverty.
Some stories are like a punch in the gut, others will make you smile. Most are from the perspective of a woman.
Her words touch the world and its people, but especially Africa. Her books are certainly worth your reading time.
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Adiga won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for this novel.
The White Tiger is the smartest boy in his village, a member of a poor family and a worker in a tea shop because there is no money to finish school. Balram Halwai is not satisfied with his life and moves to Delhi, where he chauffeurs for a rich man. Here he confronts immense wealth and sees his chance to attain it by murdering his master. This is not a spoiler, by the way; the reader is informed by the first-person narration of the perpetrator.
The White Tiger is unrepentant, but he remains surprisingly likeable to the reader. Less so is the raw underbelly of India the reader gets to know: unromantic and full of squalor, rampant corruption and inadequate education.
Through the Tiger’s writing of a letter to the Chinese Premier who is to visit India, we learn of his crimes, his smartness, India’s caste system, the world in which he exists and what he achieves. And what he is, is not all to be condemned.
The writing is crisp and faces the two Indias: the Big Bellies and the Near Starvation. It is a disturbing but fascinating account.
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
This Peruvian author is a Nobel Prize winner for Literature. This book, which takes us to Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Peru, infuriated the academy to such an extent that, on publication, 1 000 copies were burnt at an official ceremony.
Llosa gives us four angry cadets at said academy; bored young men who set off on benders to stifle their boredom. It starts with theft and mayhem and surges to murder and suicide.
It is a venomous account of the academy Llosa himself attended and was found to be so scandalous it was accused of being anti-Peruvian propaganda when published in 1962. It was later hailed as one of the best works of fiction in Spanish.
This controversial book is written from various perspectives, which in itself makes it great experimental reading.
Let’s broaden our horizons and let publishers know, through our reading and buying habits, what we want more of in our literature.
Radish
Mo Yan
Another Nobel Prize winner for Literature, in 2012. In his acceptance speech of the prize, Chinese author Mo Yan said that his protagonist, Hei-hai, who is a skinny, silent boy with a superhuman ability to suffer and a superhuman degree of sensitivity, “represents the soul of my entire fictional output”.
"Not one of all the fictional characters I've created since then is as close to my soul as he is."
If an author of Mo Yan’s brilliance gives an indication of this nature, you know you’ve got to read this book. Radish is a little gem with extraordinary characters, all searching and reaching for different satisfactions. Their struggles are varied but their humanities all have fences and barriers to break through or to overcome.
Mo Yan's writing (other books are Red
Sorghum, Change, Frog, Pow, etc) is exquisite and delicate. Red Sorghum was even adapted to film, which won the Silver Bear prize at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival.
