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A review by extemporalli
Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono
4.0
I really enjoyed this novel by Oyono, my first - I'm probably going to look for more of his work. I think the part about this novel that struck me the most was that while it managed to be sad and subtle, in terms of storyline and characters (esp the white characters), it combined that sad, quiet, subtlety with these casual little asides of brutality.
This isn't related to anything else, but I just want to put here that I often think about something my friend once said about 12 Years A Slave, about how unconvincing and weakly liberal it was that they had Solomon strung up in the yard in full view of the slaveowners' house. The violence would have been more removed, she said. I take her point, but a novel like this - written by a contemporary of colonialism - makes me more convinced than ever that she's wrong. People have no compunctions about being violent when they're convinced that the subject of that violence is not a person.
Spoiler
And then he (the white master) kicked me in the shin and I went flying, etc. Or he casually trod on my foot as I was doing up his shoelaces. Etc. You know, just another day in the life of a houseboy.This isn't related to anything else, but I just want to put here that I often think about something my friend once said about 12 Years A Slave, about how unconvincing and weakly liberal it was that they had Solomon strung up in the yard in full view of the slaveowners' house. The violence would have been more removed, she said. I take her point, but a novel like this - written by a contemporary of colonialism - makes me more convinced than ever that she's wrong. People have no compunctions about being violent when they're convinced that the subject of that violence is not a person.