Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.42 AVERAGE
3.42 AVERAGE
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I probably went into this book with the wrong mindset.
Wildly praised, on the list of -100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, I expected greatness.
I did not get it.
I thought the book was slow and somewhat rambling.
I was constantly putting it down. If I had it in me to stop reading a book, this might have been one I abandoned.
My first impression of this book was that it was a challenge to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There was a river in Africa that the main character traveled up to reach an inland settlement, half-colonial, half-postcolonial. There were tons of fascinating questions bouncing around as I started reading. Like the issue of narration – who was the speaker really talking (or testifying) to? He talked about a “you” imagining what the river was like by day or by night, and that of course made me wonder whether he meant “you” to be the Western reader specifically, or if he meant “you” to be the general human being (8-9). (Though of course whiteness and/or Westernness are typically understood to be the defaults of the human experience in everyday conversation.)
But I also noticed some tropes that were really confusing for me, because they were exactly the same as those in Conrad’s and so many other texts – this notion of Africa being the past, or somehow being backwards in time, backwards in culture and civilization. So Naipaul writes about Zabeth, who goes into the future to buy her goods and then returns to the past, her village, to sell them (9). And Salim also claims that “True Africa was at our back” (10). What does that mean? The same ideas, coming from a voice we so rarely hear from. And sometimes the characterizations of the African people were oddly reminiscent of colonial literature, but not always. And the main characters were all non-African, except for Zabeth and Ferdinand (though I suppose it can be difficult to try and speak for people one doesn’t really come from, so I wouldn’t write about, say, Jewish Americans from my perspective, despite us both living in the US). So I didn’t really know what to think.
Reading up on the book, I saw that some critics have been upset with Naipaul for exactly that problem. People have said he’s “neo-colonialist” (I definitely don’t think so), that he’s got something against African peoples (I don’t think so either). I think maybe what we’re running into here is a case of the native intellectual who’s struggling to understand their world while being extremely limited by their own educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and by the identity that these two produce. It seems to depend on how we try to look at things – or in this case, at Africa and the “Third World” it represents – and how we do look at them.
For example, something that’s always bothered me is how so many of our marginalized and colonized communities have lost their histories and their self-knowledge because of colonialism. (Granted, this isn’t always the case; there have been libraries of Arabic literature, Chinese history, etc, etc, and we can make a case that the rise of oral history as a scholarly thing is also recovering a new form of self-knowledge and self-ownership.) Naipaul raises this problem about how knowledge of one’s own community, in this case, Salim’s Indian background, comes only from the writing of Europeans (11-12). And Naipaul spends a lot of time problematizing how history is produced, and so the suggestion is that there must be something wrong about one’s own identity being produced by the colonizer. So for instance, Salim also notes how the European stamps that highlight local landmarks or features are the things that have taught him how to see his own environment (15). If someone else didn’t point out that they were interesting, unique, or somehow noteworthy, then they wouldn’t be. It’s very much in line with theories of tourism, whereby tourists look at a thing because it’s designated important (a French cafe, for example). I’m reminded of the contradiction that I see more clearly in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which is that she’s invested in reclaiming her identity and gender through embracing Mexican culture, but so much of her empowering information comes from Western scholars! How does that work out??
That issue of looking at Africa is just rife throughout the text for me. The masks are another example of that – one could see them as symbols of a culturally and spiritually rich Africa, like Father Huisman did, or they could just be objects of curiosity and exoticism. Or one could look through a mask, African or European, and see other people with “eyes of an African” or maybe not (37).
The commentary on Raymond versus Father Huisman’s brands of knowledge about Africa is also really interesting to me at this moment, where I’m doing my best to figure out the line between what activism is and what scholarship should be. I read this article recently about a waiter at a Seattle restaurant who was serving a group of Asian American writers, and he just made so many faux pas, assuming they were foreign visitors.
YES! Exactly. Many Asian Americans are so tired of being angry about the most basic racist things, but they keep happening, over and over. And so as an intellectual (gotta admit, I’ve got a college degree and I’m applying to grad school now), it’s exhausting to rehash the same tropes that have been troubling us for the past fifty, sixty years. But we can’t let them go because the rest of the world still hasn’t caught up. And so Naipaul’s commentary on Raymond and other European academics was interesting because they all seemed to be working relative to developments in Europe. So the sources are documentary and archival, not oral, because that’s what’s accepted by the European academe, even if it’s not true to Africa or to the history of the particular region. If I’m going to be a historian, I don’t want to do work that’s irrelevant to my communities of interest. But neither do I want to end up rehashing the same things that we’ve been complaining about forever.
So I found this book beautifully written, very heavy and pensive in tone. Sure it has some uncomfortable metaphors and tropes, but it’s also brought up some really interesting questions for me. I’m interested in reading some of Naipaul’s travel writing, since he’s one of the few people who doesn’t get routinely bashed as a colonial anti-conquest douchebag in studies of travel writing.
But I also noticed some tropes that were really confusing for me, because they were exactly the same as those in Conrad’s and so many other texts – this notion of Africa being the past, or somehow being backwards in time, backwards in culture and civilization. So Naipaul writes about Zabeth, who goes into the future to buy her goods and then returns to the past, her village, to sell them (9). And Salim also claims that “True Africa was at our back” (10). What does that mean? The same ideas, coming from a voice we so rarely hear from. And sometimes the characterizations of the African people were oddly reminiscent of colonial literature, but not always. And the main characters were all non-African, except for Zabeth and Ferdinand (though I suppose it can be difficult to try and speak for people one doesn’t really come from, so I wouldn’t write about, say, Jewish Americans from my perspective, despite us both living in the US). So I didn’t really know what to think.
Reading up on the book, I saw that some critics have been upset with Naipaul for exactly that problem. People have said he’s “neo-colonialist” (I definitely don’t think so), that he’s got something against African peoples (I don’t think so either). I think maybe what we’re running into here is a case of the native intellectual who’s struggling to understand their world while being extremely limited by their own educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and by the identity that these two produce. It seems to depend on how we try to look at things – or in this case, at Africa and the “Third World” it represents – and how we do look at them.
For example, something that’s always bothered me is how so many of our marginalized and colonized communities have lost their histories and their self-knowledge because of colonialism. (Granted, this isn’t always the case; there have been libraries of Arabic literature, Chinese history, etc, etc, and we can make a case that the rise of oral history as a scholarly thing is also recovering a new form of self-knowledge and self-ownership.) Naipaul raises this problem about how knowledge of one’s own community, in this case, Salim’s Indian background, comes only from the writing of Europeans (11-12). And Naipaul spends a lot of time problematizing how history is produced, and so the suggestion is that there must be something wrong about one’s own identity being produced by the colonizer. So for instance, Salim also notes how the European stamps that highlight local landmarks or features are the things that have taught him how to see his own environment (15). If someone else didn’t point out that they were interesting, unique, or somehow noteworthy, then they wouldn’t be. It’s very much in line with theories of tourism, whereby tourists look at a thing because it’s designated important (a French cafe, for example). I’m reminded of the contradiction that I see more clearly in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which is that she’s invested in reclaiming her identity and gender through embracing Mexican culture, but so much of her empowering information comes from Western scholars! How does that work out??
That issue of looking at Africa is just rife throughout the text for me. The masks are another example of that – one could see them as symbols of a culturally and spiritually rich Africa, like Father Huisman did, or they could just be objects of curiosity and exoticism. Or one could look through a mask, African or European, and see other people with “eyes of an African” or maybe not (37).
The commentary on Raymond versus Father Huisman’s brands of knowledge about Africa is also really interesting to me at this moment, where I’m doing my best to figure out the line between what activism is and what scholarship should be. I read this article recently about a waiter at a Seattle restaurant who was serving a group of Asian American writers, and he just made so many faux pas, assuming they were foreign visitors.
As Korean American writers, we have explored and recounted, in books and articles, various incidents of racism in our lives. We have tussled, over and over, with the issues of ethnicity and identity. Yet we have felt the need of late to start pushing beyond these subjects—not because America is now “post-racial,” as some would claim, but because we have said our piece and want to tackle other themes. Younger Asian American writers in particular are yearning to break out of the ethnic-literature box. Racism, though extant, isn’t as pressing a topic to us anymore as our primary literary focus. There may still be tweets like The Colbert Report’s that will call for the establishment of a “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” There may still be frat boys and sorority girls dressing in yellowface on Halloween. There may still be TV reporters who butcher Korean pilots’ names for a chuckle or make ill-advised puns about Jeremy Lin. But overt racism—slurs, bullying, discrimination—isn’t something we experience as much as we used to, particularly in big cities on the coasts, and we’ve been ready to move on. As writers, we’ve gotten kind of bored rehashing this stuff.
YES! Exactly. Many Asian Americans are so tired of being angry about the most basic racist things, but they keep happening, over and over. And so as an intellectual (gotta admit, I’ve got a college degree and I’m applying to grad school now), it’s exhausting to rehash the same tropes that have been troubling us for the past fifty, sixty years. But we can’t let them go because the rest of the world still hasn’t caught up. And so Naipaul’s commentary on Raymond and other European academics was interesting because they all seemed to be working relative to developments in Europe. So the sources are documentary and archival, not oral, because that’s what’s accepted by the European academe, even if it’s not true to Africa or to the history of the particular region. If I’m going to be a historian, I don’t want to do work that’s irrelevant to my communities of interest. But neither do I want to end up rehashing the same things that we’ve been complaining about forever.
So I found this book beautifully written, very heavy and pensive in tone. Sure it has some uncomfortable metaphors and tropes, but it’s also brought up some really interesting questions for me. I’m interested in reading some of Naipaul’s travel writing, since he’s one of the few people who doesn’t get routinely bashed as a colonial anti-conquest douchebag in studies of travel writing.
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No