The Adventures of Vela

by Albert Wendt

Journey through the many stories and worlds of the immortal Vela - Vela, so red and ugly at birth they called him the Cooked; Vela the lonely admirer of pigs and the connoisseur of feet; Vela the lover of song maker Mulialofa the Boneman.

Follow him down through the centuries on his travels, encountering the single-minded society of the Tagata-Nei and the Smellocracy of Olfact. Accompany him, too, as he recounts the stories of Lady Nafanua, the fearsome warrior queen, before whose powers travelling chroniclers still bow down today.

"This novel-in-verse, with its chronicles of Samoa's immortal songmaker Vela and other divine figures, is the result of a lifetime's incubation and a slow rendering that owes a debt to both indigenous oral traditions and Western literature. A book that holds you in its grip (and that grip is the enticing voice of the storyteller), Vela is a sumptuous feast that brings to mind the resonating layers of Dante's Divine Comedy or Boccaccio's Decameron. Guy Somerset, NZ Listener

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2009

About the author

Albert Wendt was born in Apia, Samoa.
Wendt's epic Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979) won the 1980 New Zealand Book Awards. He was appointed to the first chair in Pacific literature at the University of the South Pacific in Suva. In 1988 he took up a professorship of Pacific studies at the University of Auckland. In 1999 Wendt was visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. In 2001 he was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to literature. In the 2013 Queen's Birthday Honours he was appointed a member of the Order of New Zealand.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my year of reading Oceania in 2015. It isn't easy to find books set in Samoa, and most of them are by Albert Wendt or Margaret Mead. According to the internet and the little information I can find on this book, Wendt sees this as his masterpiece, what he worked toward his entire life.

It can be a challenge to read. It is about Vela, an immortal storyteller who is either embodying people as he tells their stories or is multi-gender, multi-character. It may be both. He almost feels like a god but while he converses with them, he does not seem to have the powers they do.

The stories are told in verse, almost in a chanting way, and oral performance is implied. The language is heavily Samoan and I was often at a loss as to what was going on! Still a lot of Samoan culture and values, as filtered through Wendt, can be discerned by reading these stories - the openness of sexual relationships is a frequent theme (but we know this to be true from Margaret Mead!), the presence and purpose of pig, the landscape, the food, the outsider - it's all here. And a little sidetrip to China, which is confusing to me!

"Yes he murmured our only gift is to fashion stories out of our
misery and in the storying bring some meaning to it."

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot better than the others of his that I've read. It's a 'novel in verse' based on pacific oral tradition, but with elements taken from modern culture also. it's probably at its best when it gets really scatological and sexual in a very genuine way that reminds me of some premodern texts. there's also some very memorable scenes like the part where two guys have a song contest and the loser has his bones extracted and turned into a one legged 'bone-man' that dances.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendt has succeeded where so many have failed, and written a modern epic poem. Like most epics, it is a national tale. Wendt describes the emergence of a new Samoan identity in the wake of colonisation. Every aspect of the poem contributes to express this sense of identity. The narrative digresses across 300 years of Samoan history, and spreads wide across the Pacific (even my own Australia gets a bit part). The language pulses. There is more than a shade of Salman Rushdie in Wendt's style. He litters the book with Samoan and Maori words. He is as disgressive and casual as George Gordon Byron, and just as Romantic. He settles into a flexible five-line stanza with plenty of coordinate clauses, enjambment and cesurae. His paratactic style will appeal to fans of Old English epic. The plot is tragic, but as in many tragic stories all the destruction leads to a great renewal. At first I felt the book lacked structure. Wendt is more in the Mahabharata school of encyclopaedic epic, rather than in the terse and focussed Homeric school. But by the end of the book, the threads come together, and it ends on an exhilarating note of, to use Wendt's word, 'resurrection'.

Wendt must surely be one of the most important authors in all world literature today.

[Reading Monster's faithful servant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book about six years ago and it remains unsurpassed in my opinion as the best book.

It took me at least a year and a-half to read, because reading just a page or two would deliver so much richness and complexity that it was like a meal and I would be full. Also, the form, an epic poem, is not my comfort zone so I did need to acclimatise and develop a reading muscle for it. But it's just so good and I felt humbled to be allowed to experience it. I still keep a spare copy so that I can gift this book to anyone who comes to my home who wants to read the best book.

The Adventures of Vela is many things: a Pacific epic, a work from Samoan lyrical storytelling tradition, a multiverse (Vela spends time in various different societies not yet disturbed by Palagi, and full marks for worldbuilding), social/historical commentary, bawdy erotica, genius.

Something that it is to me, also, is a queer masterpiece. Gender and sexual diversity are normalised here in a way that would have been true pre-colonisation and that some activists want for today as well. My use of the word 'queer' is from my Western perspective and I'm using it as shorthand here, but this book is completely without Western LGBTIQ+ kinds of labels. There are several characters who I would recognise as trans or genderqueer or intersex, bisexual, gay or lesbian, through their description or through their deeds - but these traits are not expressed with those labels.

Wendt is showing us visions of worlds that are free from Victorian-era Christian morality; for me they are hard to imagine but he imagines them seemingly with ease and I'm glad to have been shown them.

Perhaps my favourite dynamic in this book is between the atua Nafanua and a stupid white baby who washes up on her shore called Maifea? (with the question mark in the name). Maifea? seems to satirise Captain Cook, Jesus, British imperialism and Christian patriarchy all at once. Nafanua inexplicably adores and dotes on the very feckless and meritless Maifea?. Wendt seems to be unfurling a scroll here about how just how pernicious colonisation is, and how it plays out.

That's just one storyline; there are many here because Vela is an epic voyager and storyteller.

[HomeInMyShoes · Rating 3 out of 5]

“We can't rewalk the exact footprints
we make in the stories of our lives
but we'll hear again our footprints
like the lullabies our parents sang us
the moment our stories end
Perhaps out of our footprints
our children will nurse wiser lullabies” ~Albert Wendt

Worth it for the first section of the book. This is a quite, not graphic, but definitely non-prudish. I wish there were more books from this region of the world because the myths and stories were very interesting and I'd love to read more interpretations.

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned after the end of the sample (which is the first 10% of the book). It's rare for me not to finish a book, even one I don't like, but this style just wasn't for me. I'll try another of his books to see if it suits me better.