Phyllis read and liked Richard Kunzmann's review of A Beautiful Place to Die:

"A Beautiful Place to Die – Malla Nunn
(Picador)

Turn back the clock to 1952, South Africa. The National Party is at the height of its power and, to paraphrase the author, not a year goes past without the government introducing some ...more A Beautiful Place to Die – Malla Nunn
(Picador)

Turn back the clock to 1952, South Africa. The National Party is at the height of its power and, to paraphrase the author, not a year goes past without the government introducing some new heinous law that can be broken by virtue of a person’s skin colour.
The body of Captain Willem Pretorius is found floating in a river bordering on Mozambique, and Detective Emmanuel Cooper is sent from Johannesburg to investigate the killing. At first smugglers are suspected, but what Cooper eventually uncovers in the small town of Jacob’s Rest unleashes a political and personal storm that catches him wholly off guard.
On the surface, it seems that the townspeople had great respect for the captain. His family owned much of the business in the town, he was widely acknowledged as a white induna, or leader, amongst the Zulus, and appears to have had crime wholly under control. But as with all good mysteries, appearances are deceiving, and the peace in Jacob’s Rest, is no exception. The Englishman Cooper almost immediately runs afoul of the Captain’s four Afrikaner sons, and it is not long before the outsider is forced to form alliances with people at the fringes of society, in order to solve the case.
One is immediately struck by how one-dimensional all the Afrikaner characters in this novel are, and how the entire culture is ruthlessly vilified at every turn, when the author goes to great lengths to illustrate the complexities and conflicting moralities of the other characters. The junior police officer in the town, Hansie Heppel, is depicted as the village idiot to such extent that one wonders whether the character would ever have realistically been given a uniform; he is beyond parody. The white townspeople are routinely illustrated as zealous Christian fundamentalists, who have few qualities other than being inbred and mean. The women are milkmaids of bountiful mammaries, while the men are almost exclusively built like bulls, with the intelligence and temper to boot. A disappointment when one considers Detective Cooper. Our white detective from the big city is easy and comfortable around non-whites, yet his demons, associated with a failed marriage, his time in the trenches of the Second World War, and an even darker history further back in his childhood, is an achievement for a debut novelist. As is the old Jew Zweigman, a character very similar to the old shopkeeper in Richard Reve’s excellent Buckingham Palace. Though he sells his wares on the outer edge of white society, trading with blacks and “coloureds”, he too has a brooding history that’s resulted in his dear wife being a shattered husk of her earlier self.
The storyline stumbles in two places. At one point, a troubled man rather predictably emerges as the main suspect in Cooper’s investigation. The character dramatically shifts from a troubled lost soul to a heinous Proverbs-spewing rapist with only the vaguest explanation as to how he might have transformed himself in this way. Further on, Cooper and his romantic interest get into a pickle with very cold-blooded professional killers, and yet they escape what is an extremely harrowing and successful scene with a distraction that is implausible at best.
But let these objections not deter you. Malla Nunn’s prose is easy and accessible, her descriptions finely woven, the plot multi-layered, so that Jacob’s Rest and its people come alive in a memorable tapestry. The book’s strength lies in the metaphor that the town becomes for the racial tension in the country, at the time. The big houses and wide open streets belong to the whites, but they have no secrets the housemaids and garden boys don’t know about. Then there are the “kaffir paths” running in the veldt behind those houses and shops, trodden by those who are forbidden to walk proud in a white man’s town. The secrets hidden on these paths are invisible and inaccessible to the whites who have purposefully blinded themselves to what lies beyond their ideology. Cooper follows the clues into this world and discovers a world of paedophiles and porn, whores and drugs, and the white men who can’t leave non-white women alone. By stepping off the beaten track, the scales are removed from his eyes and he finally sees Jacob’s Rest for what it really is.
This metaphor, the meticulous build-up of the plot, and a very engaging Detective Emmanuel Cooper make this brooding mystery more appealing than most of the whodunits out there. It would be very interesting to see what Nunn does next with Cooper, who has the potential to become one of the great detectives of African crime fiction.
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Phyllis read and liked Kelly Franklin Robinson 's review of The Bluest Eye:

"When I finish a book, I like to hop on over to Amazon to see what others thought of it. I don't go to periodicals where only book snobs and literary gurus give their expert analysis; I like to see a spectrum of responses, from the librarian or profes...more When I finish a book, I like to hop on over to Amazon to see what others thought of it. I don't go to periodicals where only book snobs and literary gurus give their expert analysis; I like to see a spectrum of responses, from the librarian or professor to the housewife or high school student. There are always positive and negative reviews, always long and short reviews, always thoughtful and lazy reviews.

And even if I go to a book I love and see other people giving it 1 out of 5 stars, as long as that reviewer sheds some light and gives an honest and thoughtful reflection, I'll click the "helpful review" icon.

But I was honestly surprised at the feedback I saw for The Bluest Eye. I understand that readers will not always "get" books; heaven knows I totally miss the point often. But the negative reviews people gave The Bluest Eye were so naive...and since Amazon isn't set up as a discussion board, I'll reflect here.

First let me address the book itself. The Bluest Eye was my first read by Toni Morrison, and I'll definitely be exploring her works more. It weaves through the lives of 1940s African-American poverty in an Ohio town. The writing is poetic and the subject material extremely brutal. The title is based on a request of one of the characters, a girl named Pecola, whose life is the essence of misfortune. At one point in the book she visits a dream interpreter and asks for blue eyes, thinking she'll be accepted by the world if only her eyes were different. The premise is painful enough, and Morrison never sheds much hope for any of the characters.

In the epilogue Morrison discusses the work, which was first published in 1970 but didn't much receive recognition until fairly recently. She doesn't believe now that she captured the situations with enough sophistication in the writing (if I interpreted her correctly). But I don't know if any amount of "sophistication" can really capture suffering. As Murakami says, "There is no such thing as perfect writing, just as there as no such thing as perfect despair." Which especially rings true in this case...there is no ideal way to put words to pain, but we can only try and value the efforts that are the most accessible to us.

I'm not sure what people were expecting when they picked up The Bluest Eye, but the negative reviews it got were from those who brushed aside its potency as being TOO depressing, TOO graphic. And because they didn't personally enjoy it for this reason, they saw no value.

This is not a book that you curl up with by your stupid hearth with to be entertained, amused, tickled, or heart-warmed by. It's the kind of book you read to marvel at and grieve for the characters and in the end hope that you learned something about human nature.

Then there are those who say that the book is just "another outlet to blame whites." (If it was an isolated incident I would have blown it off as ignorance, but multiple reviewers actually claimed this.) WTF? Now, obviously racial blame games happen from every race at every angle, and probably always will until the day race no longer exists. But trust me, it's not in this book. The cruelty that exists in its pages is mostly familial. And seriously, do these people read a Holocaust memoir and then huff that it's just another way to blame Germans? If you felt an implied BLAME on whites based on a fictional black 1940s neighborhood, it's because whites were to blame--maybe less so as time progresses but ESPECIALLY then.

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