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Nov. 28110. Eduardo Lalo, Simone [2019] 190 pages [Kindle] [in Spanish]
This short novel set in San Juan was the Puerto Rican choice for the World Literature group I'm in on Goodreads, which is finishing up a year devoted to Hispanic American writers. It begins with the first-person narrator, a depressed schoolteacher and sometime author, writing short unconnected fragments in a notebook about his daily life in the city, his observations about the things he sees and hears around him. About a fifth of the way through the novel, he begins getting strange messages, in his school mailbox, e-mail, stuck under his windshield and so forth, which are or seem to be quotations from books, and strike him as being mysteriously connected to his thoughts and situations. Some appear to be signed by someone named Simone. One message refers to Walter Benjamin (again, Walter Benjamin!): "Walther Benjamin says that in our time the only word really endowed with sense — critical sense as well — would be a collage of quotations, fragments, echoes of other works" (my translation), which is a kind of key to the style of the novel (and even more so, to the last book we read for the group, Yo, el Supremo).
Simone is unapologetically an intellectual book, dealing with ideas and literature (although it has a great parody of the pseudo-intellectual academic elite at a literary conference, with the obligatory and generally irrelevant quotations from Lacan and Derrida — two names which will usually cause me to drop a book very quickly.) While it covers several themes, including the condition of Puerto Rico in general, the problems of the small Chinese community of San Juan, and the psychology of relationships, it always returns to literature, and the last few pages (the book is not divided into chapters), where the reader would expect the climax of the action, are given over to a dialogue which amounts to a literary manifesto of a sort.
Nov. 30111. Stephen Colbert, I Am America (and So Can You!) [2007] 230 pages
Unpacking my Christmas decorations and found this book which my brother gave me for Christmas a few years back. Stephen Colbert is a comedian who had (and may still have for all I know) a television parody-news show called The Colbert Report. Probably I would have appreciated this book a bit more if I had ever seen the show, but I have never owned or wanted a television set.
basic idea of the book is similar to Archie Bunker, in that Colbert pretends to be a conservative and makes such extreme and absurd statements that it parodies conservative opinions; I believe he was especially parodying Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly who had the kind of right-wing personal political shows that The Colbert Report pretended to be.
The problem with that is that as American politics has become more polarized the statements of a Colbert (or an Archie Bunker) are too close to what the right actually says to be exaggerated or funny; for example he pontificates that we should build a wall on the Texas border to keep out Mexicans -- nine years later Trump was elected promising to do just that in reality. (Of course the contemporary "woke" liberals go beyond Archie Bunker's Meathead as well. All our politicians are basically parodies of themselves today.)
On the other hand, the satire was also more good-natured than we would find today, when political differences are not considered as honest disagreements and tolerated, but as "conspiracies" and "lies". So while the book was somewhat humorous in places, it didn't really have me laughing out loud.
Dec. 1112. Prosper Mérimée, Mateo Falcone [1829] 14 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
113. Prosper Mérimée, Vision de Charles XI [1829] 6 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
114. Prosper Mérimée, L'Enlevement de la redoute [1829] 4 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
115. Prosper Mérimée, Tamango [1829] 16 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
As I approach the end of my seven-year Balzac reading project, I decided to take up Mérimée's nouvelles — hopefully a much shorter project, like maybe a month. Wikipedia claims that Mérimée invented the form of the novella, but I'm not sure how they define the term; certainly there were stories called "nouvelles" at least from the Renaissance on, and these stories don't seem long enough to qualify as "novellas" in any case, at least as the word is used in English (maybe Carmen or Colomba would qualify.) He is certainly one of the first completely Romantic story writers — Stendhal and Balzac are more transitional or "hybrid" in their styles.
Mateo Falcone was his first nouvelle. It is set in Corsica and based on the Corsican code of honor. Vision of Charles XI is a short ghost story; L'Enlevement de la redoute is a war story. Tamango is a story about a slave-ship rebellion, which is referenced in Diop's Le temps de Tamango, one of the reasons I decided to take up Mérimée before going on to another long project.
Dec. 8116. Fodé Sarr, Histoire, fiction et mémoire dans l'oeuvre de Boubacar Boris Diop [PhD. diss., Univ. of Montreal, 2010] 335 pages [in French] [+ 12 journal articles, 190 pages]
Having over the past year read six novels, a play and a story collection by Boubacar Boris Diop, this year's Neustadt Prize winner, I decided to read a bit of criticism of his work. I found twelve articles and this doctoral dissertation on the Internet. As one would expect from a dissertation, it was a very academic treatment with a lot of literary theory, although thankfully no quotations from Lacan or Derrida and most of it seemed relevant.
The first chapter was mainly theory and gave definitions of history, memory and fiction and how they differ; the thesis of the book is that Diop's writing is based on combining these three genres in new ways. It also places him in the context of other francophone African authors and the debates about négritude, which was very interesting.
The rest of the book is about specific movels. The second chapter was about Murambi, le livre des ossements and described how he tried to overcome the difficulty of writing fiction about genocide (which some philosophers and critics have claimed in relation to the Holocaust is impossible) by the plurality and uncertainty of the narrative voices. The third chapter dealt with Le cavalier et son ombre largely in terms of the relationship between orality and writing, also a major concern in contemporary African literary criticism. The fourth chapter compares Le temps de Tamango and Kaveena and shows how the style in both books helps to elucidate the reality of French neocolonialism in its former African possessions. It also deals with the intertextual relation of Le temps de Tamango and Mérimée's Tamango, which I read before reading the chapter. This was in some respects the most interesting chapter in the book. The last chapter compares the use of memory and history in Les traces de la meute (the one novel I haven't read) and Les tambours de la mémoire. The book ends with a short "General conclusion" which basically just summarized the book.
My major criticism of the book is that it is extremely repetitious; if all the unnecessary repetitions were removed, it would be too short to be a dissertation. I did get a better appreciation of Diop's work, less of the individual novels than of how all his writing is connected in terms of both style and content.
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Articles:
Mudimba-Boyi, Elizabeth, The State, the Writer, and the Politics of Memory (Studies in 20th Century Literature 23, 1, 1999) 16 pages — Compares Les tambours de la mémoire and Le Clezio’s Onitsha. An interesting comparison.
Gehrmann, Susanne, Face à la meute – Narration et folie dans les romans de Boubacar Boris Diop (Présence Francophone 63, 1, 2004) 16 pages — Discusses the fact that so many of the protagonists in Diop's novels either are, are thought to be, or become insane, and how that functions in the narration. This article is cited in several of the others.
Nissim, Liana, “Ne pas écrire couché”: Boubacar Boris Diop, l’écrivain tourné vers l’avenir (Autres modernités 2, 2009) 11 pages — Biography and short overview of his works and their themes. Worthwhile.
Vaucher, Pierre, Les espaces de non-dit chez Boubacar Boris Diop [2014] 22 pages — Discusses the role of silence in Les tambours de la mémoire, Le cavalier et son ombre and Murambi, le livre des ossements. Nothing that wasn't pretty obvious from reading the novels.
Semujanga, Josias, Présentation: Boris Diop, au-delà de la vanité d’écrire (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 15 pages — The introduction to an issue of the journal Études françaises devoted to Diop; a general introduction to his work and the issues that the various other papers will deal with. I did learn finally what his name is, which had me confused: the usual name outside Senegal, Boubacar Boris Diop, is actually the conflation of his real name, Boubacar Diop (or Buubakar Joób, in Wolof) and his pen name Boris Diop (after the character of Boris in Sartre's Le sursis).
Boubacar Boris Diop, La Bibliotheque de mon père (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 5 pages — Diop reflects on his father's all French library, and the symbolic conflict between his own reading of French literature and the oral tales he heard in his childhood.
Diop, Cheikh Mouhamadou Soumoune, Boubacar Boris Diop: auteur, traducteur et éditeur en wolof (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 18 pages — Discusses the work of Diop in translating and editing translations of world literature into Wolof, as well as his two novels in Wolof, Doomi Golo (which I have read in translation) and Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma (which as far as I can tell has not yet been translated.)
Diouf, Mbaye, Boubacar Boris Diop et le roman total (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 15 pages — Discussion of Les petits de la guenon, the French translation by Diop of his own novel in Wolof, Doomi Golo, in terms of a "total novel" incorporating other genres, in particular the funeral elegy (taking Badou's departure for an unknown land as a metaphor for death). The author relates the novel to other contemporary African novels, which I haven't read, so it is difficult for me to know whether what he is saying is correct or not.
Ndiaye, Christiane, Monstres, princesses et justicières: du féminin pluriel chez Boubacar Boris Diop (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 17 pages — Discusses the figures of Johanna, Khadija, and Mumbi Awele. Interesting in that it proposes a development in Diop's work.
Nissim, Liana, Fables, énigmes, paraboles: les contes allégoriques des Petits de la guenon (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 19 pages — As the title says, this discusses the allegories in the novel. One of the more interesting articles because it actually sticks to the text.
Semujanga, Josias, Murambi, le livre des ossements, ou la question du jugement (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 19 pages — Considers the novel as a judicial investigation.
Uwe, Christian, De la question littéraire à l'oeuvre: aspects métapoétiques de l'oeuvre romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop (Études françaises 55, 3, 2019) 17 pages — As is obvious just from the title, this was an article that spent more time defining its "lit-crit" jargon with quotations from literatry theorists than actually applying the theory to the texts of Diop, although there were a few insights along the way. The emphasis is on the ways in which the texts discuss the conditions of literature itself; while the author promises to also discuss how the texts lead to political action that is never really discussed.
Dec. 10117. Honoré de Balzac, Les Cents contes drolatiques [1832] 773 pages [Kindle, in French]
The title, "The Hundred Droll Tales", is misleading; Balzac only finished thirty stories, divided into three groups of ten which were published separately, the last group in 1832. So, a very early work, which is outside the Comédie Humaine which includes most of his works. These are (mostly) "ribald" stories (mild enough by modern standards), set in the Middle Ages or Renaissance, supposedly in the manner of Rabelais, although Rabelais' works were not so completely devoted to sexual themes, if I remember them correctly (it's been thirty or forty years since I read the books by or attributed to Rabelais.) They are also written in an attempt at imitating Middle French, although this was mostly a matter of spelling and a few obsolete words.They are of course all intended to be "droll" or humorous; some were, some not so much, but that is really a subjective opinion. There is a strong anti-clerical element, which is traditional for this type of story. I started reading these tales in high school (in translation, which kind of misses the point) but ran into censorship issues and gave up; I'm glad I finally got around to reading them in French.
The edition I downloaded from the Internet (free Kindle book) besides the text itself (about 600 pages) contains four other works, which seem to have been selected mainly on the basis that they were in the common domain; there was a short collection of contemporary (1839) reviews of Balzac's novels by Eusèbe Girault de Saint-Fargeau, whom I've never heard of, a brief biography by Balzac's friend and fellow-author Théophile Gauthier (1855), a 93 page vitriolic Catholic attack on Balzac and all modern French literature by a lawyer named Eugène Poitou (1856) — certainly only because it was common domain, it was worthless and I ended up more or less skimming through it, and a long essay on the death of Balzac by Octave Mirbeau (1907).
Dec. 11118. Prosper Merimée, La Perle de Tolède [1829] 3 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
119. Prosper Merimée, Federigo [1829] 12 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
120. Prosper Merimée, La Vase étrusque [1830] 22 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
121. Prosper Merimée, La Partie de trictrac [1830] 14 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
122. Prosper Merimée, La Double méprise [1829] 60 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
123. Prosper Merimée, Les Âmes du Purgatoire [1834] 50 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
A few more of Merimée's nouvelles. La Perle de Tolède was only three pages, I'm embarassed to list it at all; it was a parody of Spanish stories about duels (maybe a self-parody because many of these nouvelles contain duels.) Federigo was also short but fun, a gambler outwits the Devil, Death, St. Peter and Jesus to get into heaven. La Vase étrusque is a story about jealousy (and a duel.) La Partie de trictrac has a romance, a gambling scene, a parody of duelling (the French garrison has to leave Brest because their officers are nearly all killed by the marine officers in duels) and a naval battle, among other things, all in fourteen pages. La Double méprise is the longest I've read so far, about an unhappy marriage; it reminded me strongly of Balzac. I was expecting it to also finish up in a duel, but Merimée chose another Romantic cliché for the ending. It's a story which like many from the early nineteenth century is difficult to appreciate today, when our social norms and hence the psychology are so different. Les Âmes du Purgatoire is the story of Don Juan de Maraña. When I read Dumas' play I assumed he had invented this variant of the Don Juan legend but apparently the play was based on this story by Merimée. Just as an aside, I was surprised to find out on the Internet that nearly all these nouvelles, except the very shortest, have been made into movies, some several times.
Dec. 12124. Honoré de Balzac, Le Faiseur [1848] 77 pages [in French]
About seven years ago I began a reading project to read Balzac in the original French and in Balzac's preferred order, a few books or stories a month; from time to time I got busy with other reading and dropped it for a while, or cut back to one every two or three months. I started with the Avant-propos of the Comédie Humaine, and read all of the first (and longest) two divisions, Scènes de la vie privée and Scènes de la vie de province, then from the other divisions I read the best-known works or those which I happened to have physical copies of in my garage/library. Altogether I read 52 works of the Comédie (about three-quarters of the whole series), of which about 40% were novels and the rest novellas or short stories. This month I read two more works not part of the Comédie, the 600 page Contes drolatiques and finally this play, Le Faiseur, to represent his dramatic works. I hope to finish two biographies of Balzac this month as well, and then I will be leaving him until my next chronological literature project, beginning with Blake and Burns, reaches him again in another three or four years when I may (or may not) fill in one or two other works.
To paraphrase someone or other, as a dramatist Balzac was a good novelist. His descriptive and psychological style was utterly unsuited for drama, and dialogue was not his strongest point even in the novels. Not surprisingly, none of his plays were successful, and if occasionally (very rarely) performed today as novelties, they have never been part of the standard repertoire. This play in particular, which was titled Le faiseur in the edition I read, although the original title and the most often used was Mercadet, ou le faiseur (one recent English translation calls it Waiting for Godeau!!), was found to be very difficult to follow, and it was confusing enough for me even reading it.
"Le faiseur" is literally "the maker", but it also has the slang sense of someone who presents a false image of himself, an "imposter". Mercadet, the protagonist of the play, is a speculator who has been largely unsuccessful in life, which he blames on his former partner Godeau, who left for overseas with their joint treasury a decade earlier. At the point at which the play begins, he is very much in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. He tries various schemes to get a reprieve in the hopes of making a killing on the stock market in the meantime. These schemes constitute the plot and are very obscure; they were even to play-goers in 1848, and are more so today when laws and financial practices are very different. I figured out most of what was going on eventually (think Trading Places)but I would never have understood it on stage even in English. There is also a sub-plot concerning his daughter and her suitors, which is more obvious.
Dec. 15125. Claribel Alegria and Darwin J. Flakoll, Cenizas de Izalco [1966] 209 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in Spanish]
Carmen, a young married woman living in the United States, has returned to her native city of Santa Ana in El Salvador for the funeral of her mother, Isabel. Her father, the retired and now near-invalid Alfonso, is devastated by the loss of his wife. We learn that he is a Nicaraguan who fought with Sandino against the U.S. occupation. Carmen for reasons which she doesn't understand has been given the diary of Frank, a recovering alcoholic from Oregon who visited Santa Ana in 1931-1932 and with whom her mother fell in love. He tried to get her to leave her dead-end life in Santa Ana and go with him to Paris, but in the end she decided to stay with her husband in Santa Ana. I suspect Isabel may have left the diary to Carmen as a way of encouraging her to break with her own dead-end life with her "organization-man" husband Paul. The story alternates between Carmen's present, with her brother and other relatives, and her memories of childhood, and the diary of Frank.
The story of Frank and Isabel takes place against the background of an eruption of the volcano Izalco and the revolt (and massacre) of the Salvadoran Indians and peasants under the leadership of Farabundo Marti. (I recall that in the eighties, when the Sandinista Front (FSLN) was in power in Nicaragua, the Salvadoran guerillas were called the Frente Farabundo Marti (FLMN). Both have since become opportunist electoral parties.) The novel has a feminist theme of the boredom of both Isabel and Carmen, denied any real life of their own apart from their husbands and children, in places where "nothing happens, nothing has ever changed".
This was one of the few novels of the Latin American "Boom" written by a woman author (though in collaboration with her husband), and one of the few from Central America.
Dec. 17126. Prosper Mérimée, La Vénus d'Ille [1837] 27 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
127. Prosper Mérimée, Colomba [1840] 125 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
128. Prosper Mérimée, Arsène Guillot [1844] 42 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
129. Prosper Mérimée, Carmen [1845] 51 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
Four more nouvelles of Mérimée. La Vénus d'Ille is a supernatural horror story about a statue of Venus discovered at the town of Ille; not a bad story but rather obvious, perhaps because I had already read it at some point, probably in some anthology, or perhaps because the basic idea has been used too often by others in the last two centuries. Colomba is by far his longest story, more than twice the length of any of the others. It is an exotic adventure story very much in the style of Sir Walter Scott set in Corsica, with the theme of a vendetta. Arsène Guillot is very much in the Romantic style as well, based on a coincidence and also rather obvious, about a poor dying woman, a wealthy religious woman who takes an interest in her, and a young man who turns out to have been in love with both of them. Carmen is of course his best-known work, having been the subject of Bizet's opera and several well-known films, and one that I am sure I have read before. The table of contents lists another story between Arsène Guillot and Carmen, L'Abbé Aubain, but it was not actually in the book I downloaded.
Dec. 19130. Gaëtan Picon, Balzac par lui-même [1956] 191 pages [in French]
A volume in the series "Écrivains de Toujours", this was not what I expected it to be. I assumed it would be a biography mainly in Balzac's own words, probably from letters and so forth. In fact it was an attempt to describe Balzac's psychology rather than his life, based mostly on selected passages from his novels with Picon's "profound" commentary; essentially it was what Picon imagined Balzac to have thought, and to the extant I could even follow his confused "literary" prose, it was not at all how I would imagine the author of the Comédie Humaine. Picon seems to forget at times that personages in novels think and speak in character and don't always present the ideas of the author; and that Balzac's novels have novelistic plots as well as character description. In fact, he actually says that all Balzac's important characters are really aspects of Balzac himself. Although I have read three-quarters of the Comédie Humaine, he somehow manages to quote mainly from the books I haven't read, so it was hard to know what the context of the quotations might have been or even whether they were from the narrator (not necessarily identical with Balzac) or from a character. The only real redeeming feature of the book was the many (black and white) illustrations, both portraits (and cartoons) of Balzac and people he interacted with and illustrations obviously taken from editions of his works (none of the illustrations were sourced).
Dec. 23131. Claribel Alegria, Luisa en el País de la Realidad [1987] 165 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in Spanish]
This is a wonderful book. The title Luisa en el País de la Realidad, i.e. Luisa in Realityland as the English version is titled, is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland. Luisa is obviously Alegria herself, possibly a bit fictionalized, and the names of some friends and family members are changed, but this is clearly autobiographical. The form is a hybrid, like Ruben Darío's Azul. . ., with short stories (she calls them viñetos, or vignettes) interspersed with poetry. The stories are mostly memories of her childhood, set in Santa Ana, and have obvious resemblances to the novel she wrote with her husband, Bud, Cenizas de Izalco. The poetry is partly also about her childhood, but there are also some really good political poems, perhaps influenced ultimately by Neruda, and more directly by Roque Dalton, who is mentioned frequently in the book, although for a Salvadoran poet to write political poetry doesn't really require any models.
Dec. 25132. Claribel Alegria, Pasos Inciertos: Antología 1948-2014 321 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in Spanish]
This was an anthology of about 140 poems from sixteen of Alegria's books. They were a bit uneven in the early books, but the later books were very powerful. There was personal poetry about her childhood, her mother and her mother's death, love poems to her husband Bud and about his death, much political poetry, and some mythology in the last books. I'm adding her to my short list of favorite modern poets.
Dec. 26133. Prosper Mérimée, Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia [1846] 22 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
134. Prosper Mérimée, La Chambre bleu [1866] 16 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
135. Prosper Mérimée, Lokis [1869] 40 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
136. Prosper Mérimée, Djoûmane [1870] 8 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]
The rest of Mérimée. Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia is a story which appears to be one genre but is actually not. There are no more nouvelles for twenty years, and then three which are not very good in my opinion, La Chambre bleu and Djoûmane have "surprise" endings which are just annoying and Lokis is a supernatural tale which is just too trite and obvious, though perhaps it wasn't when it was written.
137. Chimamanda Adiche, The Visit [2021] 20 pages [Kindle Unlimited]I'm going through my short Kindle Unlimited books so I can download more next year, and to try to catch up on my reading goals for the year, which I am really behind on. This short story is an Amazon Original, part of a series called "Black Stars" of science fiction by Black authors.
The story is set in an alternate reality in which women dominate government and industry and the men are submissive and concerned mainly with appearance, pleasing their husbands and taking care of the house and children. In other words, a reversed-role story. This sort of story had a point at the beginning of the feminist movement (I remember some examples from the 1950's which were thought-provoking at the time) but today they seem less original and more trite. On the other hand, Adiche is a Nigerian author and the story is set in Nigeria, so if it is intended for a Nigerian audience, where the feminist movement is still at an early level, it may be more justified. Of course it is very well done, as one would expect from Adiche, who is a very good writer (Half of a Yellow Sun is one of my favorite novels.)
Dec. 27138. Nalo Hopkinson, Clap Back [2021] 21 pages [Kindle Unlimited]
Another book in the "Black Stars" series, by Caribbean/Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson, this is about a fashion designer and a Black protest performance artist who use a future nanobot technology — with unexpected consequences.
139. Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages [2021] 31 pages [Kindle Unlimited]In this strange fantasy, also in the "Black Stars" series, a genie trapped in a manuscript is released when a library is burned by al-Qaeda jihadists. She meets up with a young man on a vacation from Chicago to see his parents, who is also somehow the person responsible for trapping her in the book centuries ago. The point seems to be the description of the Arab terrorists; the plot makes little sense and the ending explains nothing. It almost seems as though it is the first chapter of a longer book.
140. Jeff VanderMeer, Wildlife [2022] 56 pages [Kindle Unlimited]Another Amazon Original, from a different series (the "Trespass Collection"), this is a strange story with the same "feeling" as VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy: Nature that isn't quite "right" and an ending which doesn't really explain anything.
140. Jeff VanderMeer, Wildlife [2022] 56 pages [Kindle Unlimited]Another Amazon Original, from a different series (the "Trespass Collection"), this is a strange story with the same "feeling" as VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy: Nature that isn't quite "right" and an ending which doesn't really explain anything.
141. Stefan Zweig, Balzac [Eng. tr. 1946] 404 pagesStefan Zweig was many things, novelist, playwright, historian, but he is probably best remembered as a biographer. This last work was left unfinished — but not incomplete — when he died in Brazilian exile from the Nazis; although it covers the whole of Balzac's life without any serious gaps, apparently he intended to significantly expand it. Some material was added or slightly rewritten from his notes by the editor, Richard Friedenthal, as Friedenthal relates in a short epilogue.
Balzac was one of the greatest French novelists; in his own lifetime, only Stendhal could be compared (and only Balzac recognized Stendhal's genius). As a person, however, he had little judgement, and took everything to extremes. Zweig does a good job in my opinion of balancing the description of his novels with the "novel of his life". Of course, it was the literary side which interested me the most; this is the last book of a long project of reading Balzac.
Dec. 31142. Widukindus Corbeius, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri tres Book 1 [967?] 61 pages [HTML, Biblioteca Augustana] [in Latin]
Widukind of Corvey (ca. 925-after 973) was a monk at the monastery of Corvey; we know almost nothing else about him. He may or may not have been associated with the court of Otto the Great, whose reign is the subject of the second and third books of the history; in any event the work is dedicated to Otto's daughter, the princess Mathilda. The title in English would be Three books of the Deeds of the Saxons. The version I am reading is freely available in HTML from the Biblioteca Augustana website; the text is that of the latest modern edition, edited by Hirsch and Lohmann in 1935, which is also apparently available free from the Digital Monumenta Germania Historica online, though I haven't checked out that site. Given that it took me four days to get through these 61 pages, it may take me a while to get through the two longer books, so I'm listing them separately. Although honestly I am reading this mainly as practice in Mediaeval Latin before I attempt other things I am more interested in (i.e. Hrotsvita's plays), the book is not without its own interest.
While the second and third books about events in his own lifetime and in which he might have been to some extent a particpant are important primary sources, this first book is hardly up to the standards even of tenth-century historiography, which are not very high. (Though I admit that the "crazy" parts were the most fun to read.)
He begins by admitting that the origins of the Saxons are unknown, and that there are two theories, the first that they were "Northmen" (not an unreasonable guess for the time) and the second, which of course he considers more probable, that they were descended from Macedonian soldiers who wandered North after the death of Alexander the Great. (He doesn't question why they speak German rather than Greek.) He says that they arrived in Germany on ships, and that their coming into the land was made more difficult because of the resistance of the natives "who were called Thuringians"; he then gives a folktale story about how a Saxon boy from the ships tricked a Thuringian into selling him the land (the boy gives a heavy gold ornament for a bucketful of dirt, and then spreads it on the land, which apparently gives him ownership of the land).
He has a brief digression about the Saxon conquest of Britain, which ends up by telling the reader that the Saxons in Britain are called Angli-Saxons because Britain is in an angle of the the ocean.
The next few chapters are about a war between the Franks and the Thuringians, which ends with Thuringia being given to the Saxons. This is loosely based on facts, but in contrast to the more sober chronicles written about the same time he apparently follows a rather imaginative and probably oral tradition. Like the ancient and other mediaeval historians, he makes up speeches by the leaders, but goes them one better giving us private conversations between conspirators. Essentially he is writing a historical novel, and since most people get what little they know of mediaeval history from historical novels, a historical novel written at the time is probably better than one from a nineteenth-century Romantic writer.
He sums up the next three centuries with a paragraph about how Charlemagne "converted" the Saxons. He then digresses to the history of the Hungarians ("Ungarii"): he says that they are properly called "Goths"; some women in the camp of the Gothic army were fighting about hunting, and the Gothic king banished them into the swamps beyond the camp, where some of them being pregnant gave birth and eventually there arose in the marshes the people called the Huns, who later became the Hungarians. (Again, he doesn't ask why they speak Hungarian rather than Gothic.) He then proceeds to the rise of Duke Heinricus to become the first King of the Saxons (the figure known to historians, though not to Widikund, as "Henry the Fowler"). The remainder of the book deals with the deeds — mainly the wars — by which Henry expanded the Saxon kingdom at the expense of Slavs, Bohemians, and Hungarians. The book ends with the death of King Henry and the succession of his son Otto, whose reign is the subject of the next two books. Henry died when Widukind was probably about twelve years old, so the rest of the work is contemporary and presumably more accurate — I'll know when I finish it.
109. Boubacar Boris Diop, Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks [2003, Eng. tr. 2016] 271 pages [Kindle]
Boubacar Boris Diop's Doomi Golo is a complex novel with a complicated history. It was written and first published in 2003, in the Wolof language of Senegal; the author made a translation, or perhaps more accurately, an adaptation, in French, called Les petits de la guenon, published in 2009. This book is the English translation of that French version, with a long and very interesting introduction by the translators. Written after his realistic novel Murambi, le livre des ossements about the Rwandan genocide, and before his somewhat realistic novel Kaveena, this one returns to his earlier experimental style, telling the story out of order and with much that could be described as "magical realism". As with all his novels, it is a very political book, concerned with the relationship of Black Africans to the legacy of colonialism.
Ostensibly the book consists of six notebooks (and a seventh, more secret one which is never revealed to the reader) written by the elderly Nguirane Faye and buried to be found by his grandson Badou, who has emigrated to an unknown foreign country and disappeared, if he should return to his native neighborhood of Niarele in Dakar (Niarele is fictional but according to the translators is based on the actual Dakar neighborhood of the Medina.) Selections from the various notebooks alternate through the book. The first notebook (called The Tale of the Ashes) seems to give a fairly straightforward account of events in the life of Nguirane from the funeral of Badou's father Assane Tall, a soccer-player and star of the Senegalese National Team who emigrated to Marseilles to play for a French team and died there in poverty. The body was accompanied by Assane's widow, Yacine Ndiaye, from Marseille and their twin children Mbissane and Mbissine, who take up residence in Nguirane's home. Acting French, which is to say arrogant and aloof, they are unpopular with the people of the neighborhood, with the surprising apparent exception of Assane's first wife, Badou's mother Bigué Samb.
The other notebooks are stranger. Notebook 4 is an avowedly fictional story (Ninki-Nanka, A Fiction) of a fictional country which is obviously a caricature of Senegal; there is a civil war going on between the President, Dibi-Dibi, and various unclear opponents. Dibi-Dibi is a caricature of President Daour Diagne of the "real" notebooks, who is in turn obviously based on the historical President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal. The translators' introduction refers to Jean Baudrillard's claim that the copy of a copy is hyper-real. Atou Seck, the protagonist of this story-within-a-story, is captured and tied up by a monkey and her two children, who act like human beings and spend their time watching television. This "magical realist" story turns out to foreshadow similar but even more "unreal" events in the "real" notebooks. The title of the novel, Doomi Golo, is Wolof for "the monkey's children"; the monkeys throughout the book are obviously allegories of the Senegalese who "ape" their foreign masters.
In Part Two of the novel, the notebooks are continued by Ali Kaboye, a "vagrant lunatic", treated realistically at first but who later seems to become a fantastic figure like the cavalier of Boris Diop's earlier novel Le Cavalier et son ombre who has lived many lives and can see and hear everything which happens anywhere in the world. Here the magical realist features begin to predominate over the realist aspects. It would be impossible and probably a mistake to try to make a consistent sense out of the various stories of the notebooks. As in the earlier novels, there are many allusions to real and legendary figures in African history, from Anta Cheik Diop, Patrice Lumumba and Amilcar Cabral to Thomas Sankara.