Jun. 26th, 2013 09:55 pm
About a white boy
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muckefuckThe book of secrets turned out as disappointing as I feared it might. Maybe I'd've been more indulgent if I'd read it at a different time, but coming on the heels of Petals of blood, it can only suffer by comparison. Ngũgĩ's work has been criticised for being too polemical, and it's true that the internal political monologues can get tiresome. But even so there's a sense of vitality and engagement, the appeal of an angry young man talking about a subject that is of deep importance to him.
What Vassanji has to offer in his novel is mostly a sort of genteel indolence. The narrator is a retired schoolteacher, one who confesses that he "never took a risk" in his life. To give himself something to do in retirement, he tries to piece together the life history of a fate-kissed orphan from his poor beginnings in the upcountry during WWII through independence and immigration to England. Sound familiar? It feels familiar, too, despite the initial novelty of the Kenyan/Tanzanian setting. Early on I had hopes, but about a third of way in the trajectory becomes predictable, leaving only the "secret" of the title which the reader is expected to care about far more than I did.
SPOILER ALERT
Surprise! It's adultery. I guess I should've anticipated that a graduate of the Iowa school with a cozy existence in Canada and a handful of mediocre literary prizes would be this thoroughly bougie. Despite living through decolonialisation and dislocation, he can't find anything interesting to say about it. He makes a feint at criticising subaltern racism and then drops it. One of the characters is a homosexual--oh, wait, no, let's heterosexualise him in the last few pages. Bleah.
Not that I don't have problems with Ngũgĩ's work. The one major female character is a whore, and it doesn't remove the sting that this is, in large part, political allegory. It's very Kikuyu-centric; the suffering of the (presumably Maasai) pastoralists feels very short-shrifted. But even as he paints a bleak portrait of the transition to a Kenya run by Africans but not for them (or at least not the mass of them), he held my attention, and that's no easy trick. So my positive memories of his writing weren't false after all.
Now it's on to nonfiction, an English journalist's account of Kenyan government whistleblower John Githongo--a fascinating man with a fascinating tale to tell. It's another story of idealism betrayed, but one with a slightly more hopeful ending.
What Vassanji has to offer in his novel is mostly a sort of genteel indolence. The narrator is a retired schoolteacher, one who confesses that he "never took a risk" in his life. To give himself something to do in retirement, he tries to piece together the life history of a fate-kissed orphan from his poor beginnings in the upcountry during WWII through independence and immigration to England. Sound familiar? It feels familiar, too, despite the initial novelty of the Kenyan/Tanzanian setting. Early on I had hopes, but about a third of way in the trajectory becomes predictable, leaving only the "secret" of the title which the reader is expected to care about far more than I did.
SPOILER ALERT
Surprise! It's adultery. I guess I should've anticipated that a graduate of the Iowa school with a cozy existence in Canada and a handful of mediocre literary prizes would be this thoroughly bougie. Despite living through decolonialisation and dislocation, he can't find anything interesting to say about it. He makes a feint at criticising subaltern racism and then drops it. One of the characters is a homosexual--oh, wait, no, let's heterosexualise him in the last few pages. Bleah.
Not that I don't have problems with Ngũgĩ's work. The one major female character is a whore, and it doesn't remove the sting that this is, in large part, political allegory. It's very Kikuyu-centric; the suffering of the (presumably Maasai) pastoralists feels very short-shrifted. But even as he paints a bleak portrait of the transition to a Kenya run by Africans but not for them (or at least not the mass of them), he held my attention, and that's no easy trick. So my positive memories of his writing weren't false after all.
Now it's on to nonfiction, an English journalist's account of Kenyan government whistleblower John Githongo--a fascinating man with a fascinating tale to tell. It's another story of idealism betrayed, but one with a slightly more hopeful ending.