Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

I found an online downloadable copy of An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&r...

Ok, thread here about Sudan and surrounding countries. From the present to the past, so have fun! https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Please feel free to post thoughts and comments about other books/experiences/videos/articles as much as you like, even before I report back. This is a thread for everyone and everything about the Horn of Africa region. :)

Ok, since Sudan is topical, I have sourced a few books to look into in the next few days:
South Sudan: The Untold Story from Independence to the Civil War and
The Nubian Past: An Archaeology of the Sudan
and
Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda

I'll report back about them as I find the time. :)

Chadi wrote: "Thanks, again! Let the feast begin! 📚🎉"

Indeed! ✨😎
The culture and tradition part is interesting, but unfortunately a lot of the more recent history is rather sad and violent... 😥

It would be nice to go back in time, at some point, to the very wealthy and/or interesting empires from further back in time right back to antiquity as well, but I think for now we probably want to look into Sudan, eh? ... to get a bit of background about what's going on there. I'll make a thread for that soon.

Folder for specific discussion of Nigeria and Achebe's Things Fall Apart, here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Just to start the ball rolling, I personally enjoyed the style of the novel, it's not quite as sophisticated as Garcia-Marquez's and some other magical-realist's work, who also writes about superstitions, but then, I think Achebe is simply showing, not really writing in an MR style, though other may disagree.

I find the misogyny of the tribe being described stunning, and found Okonkwo to be one of the most unlikeable protagonists that I've read so far, barring Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita.

I do like that Achebe is at least honest about the negative aspects of the tribe's culture and religious traditions. Perhaps I should leave commentary on that for a later message.

Nigeria is really a fascinating country, and as I'm sure you all know, Nigeria has offered up many internationally-known authors, so I think it deserves a thread of it's own. Most of you have probably read it already, but a good place to start would be with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

So for now, the Nigeria discussion will deal with that novel, but anything related to it can also be discussed in this thread, thanks!

Since this is a general discussion thread, feel free to post comments about your African reading experiences and links to articles re Africa in this thread. Then please request dedicated threads for specific countries here as well - I will shortly start on making threads for each country, for ease of access and to keep things tidy, but we can chat about anything related to Africa in general in this thread. :)

I've started the African ball rolling here : https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Hi everyone, what sparked this endeavour off, was a discussion with a friend about exploring African history and culture, and the best place to do that, seems within a group, since not only does it facilitate wider discussion, but one can also post links from a group (I hope one still can!)

Let's test the premise. The original discussion started more or less with this:
For a short story club I belong to, we read a story by Chinua Achebe which is also included in Girls at War and Other Stories. So, to give me more background, I quickly read Things Fall Apart by the same author, which is a very popular book in the West, especially as a prescribed novel that represent an "authentic" African viewpoint.

I have also started reading Achebe's essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. (I will try and post a link to an avialble copy of the essay if I can find one)
I might re-read Heart of Darkness and rewrite my review on that, but I don't think that book is very informative since it's written from a very biased Westerner point of view.

So I have now started with Nigeria and the Congo. I want to also include Kenya, and of course Sudan.

I have also previously read a book by a woman from Zimbabwe, which we can also get to a bit later, but it might be better to take it country by country.

I have also read up a bit about the Nigerian civil war here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria..., and a bit about colonial Nigeria here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia...

Also, the Fang people are very very interesting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_pe...

Hey, guys, as you know, we discuss fiction from all over the world, but events in Africa have given some of us a desire to explore the continent via fiction and non-fiction avenues. I will therefore create a folder for "Africa". If having only one folder available proves too constricting, one could always think of creating an "Africa" group or a group that specializes in geographically focused history and literature, which would then explore various countries and regions. ..but let's start the experiment here and see how it goes, since I already have a few takers.

Has anybody moved on to the picture-cleaner and Ultan's library yet? (Chapters 5 and 6, where Severian has to go and take a letter to Ultan the library curator).

PS. ..and of course, since we'd started discussing SF history a bit higher up, I do have to make a mention of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth which, fun as the story may be, is one of Verne's predictions that didn't pan out.

Bummer, it would have been fun if the earth was hollow, though I'm not too sure that we'd exist, then, because we wouldn't have gravity, and another downside would have been that we wouldn't have been able to make use of geothermal power. 😋

Puddin and Jennifer: I wish GR hadn't blocked our ability to link to links outside of GR itself. One of these Wolfe groups I mentioned earlier on, have actually made attempts to draw maps of the Citadel, and it's actually huge! When I have a bit more time, I'll try to link to some of the images.
To just give a small idea of how big it is, in Chapter 4, where Severian talks about the dog Triskele, when he goes to look for him after he disappeared, he says: "The spear-towers of the Citadel rose on every side, so that I knew I had not left it - instead, I seemed to be somewhere near its heart, where I had never been. Shaking with cold I crossed to the nearest door and pounded on it. I had the feeling that I might wander forever in the tunnels below without ever finding another way to the surface, and I was resolved to smash one of the windows if need be rather than return that way.

Earlier on in the chapter: "The Citadel is immense and immensely complicated, with little-visited rooms and passages in its towers, in the buildings that have been erected between the towers, and in the galleries delved under them. "

This bit is just before he comes to the Atrium of Time that I mentioned in an earlier post: "I have no way of knowing how old those tunnels are. I suspect, though I can hardly say why, that they antedate the Citadel above them, ancient though it is. It comes to us from the very end of the age when the urge to flight, the outward urge that sought new suns not ours, remained, though the means to achieve that flight were sinking like dying fires. Remote as that time is, from which hardly one name is recalled, we still remember it. Before it there must have been another time, a time of burrowing, of the creation of dark galleries, that is now utterly forgotten.

So interestingly, what he seems to be describing when he talks about the tunnels that pre-date the spaceship hull of the citadel which rests upon these tunnels, the obsession with "burrowing into the ground" that he describes, I thought could possibly be a reference to mining, and possibly also fracking (the burrowing urge he mentions). (Which would be around our current era, ha ha.) Hmm, did they have fracking back in the 1980's? I see they did. The US started fracking in 1949, apparently.

I should have phrased myself more clearly; by taboo things I was mainly pointing to things like exhuming the dead; torture and execution are of course not taboo - I should rather have said uncomfortable to think about, and controversial as discussion topics. Apologies, lazy writing on my part there.

Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: " The usual method at the time (electrocution) was also grisly and could be extremely painful before death."

Ugh, how could anyone who has ever watched the film adaptation of The Green Mile ever forget!
Yes, now we are starting to touch on the very hard ethical issues. I feel like whenever there's a war going with high stakes, there's perhaps always going to be torture of captured agents/soldiers for intel., and I'm not saying that to excuse it.

But as touched upon earlier, it does seem as if the torturer's guild are an instrument in the perpetuation of terror, much as the SS was for the Nazi's and the KGB for the Soviets. (And I'm definitely not saying these were the only people who ran a reign of terror via the use of fear of torture or pain of death - I'm sure that was a thing even before the Romans started doing it.)

I'd love to discuss this more in the context of Shadow, but I feel it might perhaps be a bit early to start discussing their political system, since at this point in the story we don't know much about it yet.

...and as you might remember from your previous reading, there will be ample time to discuss shenanigans with the dead later on.

I guess what the current discussion at this point boils down to for me, is whether torture can ever be justified, and if at all, where does one draw the line?
Of course, the whole execution thing is just as controversial. On the one hand, I am of course against execution because I pretend to be civilized, and yadda-yadda-yadda. (Also because I hate the suffering of people, and whether the life of a person can or should be taken, is another hard ethical nut to chew). However, I can see that in a society where imprisonment or containment of a person who is a danger to others, that in such a society the death sentence might make sense. I'm not saying that is the case in Severian's society, mind you.

What a nice juicy message full of fodder for discussion, Puddin! 😎

Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "I think you'd have to dig back to pre-World War II sci-fi to find a preponderance of optimism, but you'd find very few people who'd consider most of that stuff serious. H. G. Wells comes to mind as an exception, and.... his work wasn't terribly optimistic, that I've seen. ..."

Ok, you've managed to flush an HG Wells fan out of the woodwork, Puddin, said fan being MOI!
Speaking of SF that involves extraterrestrials, of course there is HG Wells's famous The War of the Worlds first published in serial form in 1897.
I'll sock anybody in the eye who says HG Wells wasn't a serious writer! (Just joking, of course). I read many of his books as a prepubescent girl already, which is probably enough to qualify me as a fangurl, but even as we look back today, one has to marvel at how prophetic and prescient he was.
Of course the other, and probably most well-known, SF writer of the period was Jules Verne, who foresaw much of technology ripen before it actually came to pass.
These were not the very first in the genre, of course, one of their forerunners which quickly jumps to mind, was Edgar Allan Poe.

Want to say lots more but run out of time for now. More later!

I've been musing about that clock/sundial contraption thing in the secret sideways garden with the statues of ancient animals. I'm sure I'm missing something about the clock contraption, it must have some kind of meaning to the story, but I haven't figured it out yet. Perhaps no coincidence that statues of long-extinct animals from different time periods on earth are to be found next to a dial with different facets that had slipped sideways?

The girl from the tower that Severian spoke to, said of it, after Severian asked: " "Is that what you call it? The Atrium of Time? Because of the dials, I suppose."

"No, the dials were put there because we call it that."

To me, that sounds a bit like an exchange you'd find in Alice in Wonderland...

Next thread is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

..and let me try to kick my bad habit of editing my own posts by adding a new comment separately: Yes, I'm glad you mentioned the first-person narrator. Especially in postm0dern literature, which in my personal opinion this work is an example of, first-person narrators are pretty much usually what is termed an "unreliable narrator" not really because the person intentionally lies in their narration, but because it is per se a subjective view of the world and events that the narrator is telling us about, and for various reasons which we should discuss later on in the book, Severian is as unreliable as they come, but not because he is insane, as in the case of Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, or the governess (there is a possible interpretation that she doesn't quite have all her marbles together) in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw but er... for different reasons which would be a spoiler at this point in time. Interesting discussion point for later!