Kenneth Champeon

NonfictionFiction

Behind the battle

Feature by Kenneth Champeon

Inspect Europe today, and you would struggle to believe that its greatest scuffles were once about anything other than bailouts and shared currency, or Eurovision and football. Yet 2015 marks the bicentennial of a battle that stands as a summation of that continent's centuries of bloody wars, particularly those of the 20th: Waterloo, which took place on June 18, 1815. Two new books take different approaches to remembering this conflict.

In his history, Waterloo, novelist Bernard Cornwell asks, why another book? Waterloo is among the most chronicled battles of all time. Paraphrasing the British general Wellington, Cornwell also concedes that describing a battle is like describing a dance. Yet it is describing this already well-chronicled dance in exacting detail that Waterloo attempts to achieve.

Still reeling from Napoleon's wars of conquest, Europe is appalled to learn that he has returned triumphantly from exile, retaken Paris and set his sights on Belgium. It falls to Wellington ("the unbeatable") to stop Napoleon ("the unbeaten"). Spoiler alert: He does! But the outcome is never certain in Cornwell's telling. He even points to Frenchmen like Victor Hugo, who tried to snatch a literary victory from the jaws of putative defeat.

Waterloo is wonkish as military history goes. Much attention is paid to the arithmetical and geometrical difference between columns and lines, for example. It therefore suffers from a lack of historical context, but compensates by quoting liberally from the battle's participants. Cornwell refers to a massive model of the battlefield residing today in a British museum. His book is largely the play-by-play of that model in motion.

Waterloo may be the first modern battle, both in its intensive use of artillery and its appalling rate of casualties. The dead bodies becoming mud themselves suggests the First World War. Bodies forming great fatty pyres, or being ground up for fertilizer, or their teeth extracted—or Napoleon's loose talk about exterminating barbarians and the Parisian woman's capacity for replenishing the war dead—are a reminder of the inhumanity of the Second.

Like Ken Burns, Cornwell clearly prefers to focus on the more dulce et decorum est aspects of pre-modern conflict, the gallantry and bravery, the tear-jerking letters home. He's written an elegy for war before the machines took over—poignant and inspiring but ultimately nostalgic.

PHILOSOPHY OF WAR
If the battle appears now to us as an exercise in romantic futility, imagine what it must have seemed to the hordes of rabbits near the battlefield. This thought experiment motivates Leona Francombe's The Sage of Waterloo, an unusual but effective "tale" weaving philosophical history with animal story, as if the last chapter of 1984 had been recounted by the fauna of Animal Farm.

The tale is told by William, a rabbit named after the allied commander William of Orange. It's mainly a dialogue between William and his sagacious grandmother, Old Lavender, concerning the baffling behavior of their superiors in the food chain. They conclude that rabbits would never engage in wholesale killing and that humans are only irrational for doing so. 

Francombe later posits that women don't care much for war either, suggesting that she is using her rabbits as symbols for women. Indeed, Francombe leans rather heavily on the testimony of one actual English woman, Charlotte Eaton, who witnessed the battle's aftermath. Francombe praises the "female sensitivity" Eaton brings to her account, a sensitivity she finds lacking in accounts by male writers, among whom she might include Cornwell.

This may be true, but otiose. If Waterloo proves anything, it is that men, and not just armchair warriors, tend to delight in violence. Old Lavender is right when she says that "war desperately needs a female perspective," but Francombe might be discouraged to dwell much on the female capacity for aggression, from Queen Elizabeth to today's pro-military "security moms.” In Cornwell's Waterloo, one dead soldier is a woman in disguise.

As the sage herself repeats, too much comfort "dampens the brain.” Nietzsche couldn't have said it better. But despite these inconsistencies, the novel is an exquisite and amusing meditation on a battle whose meaning clearly invites debate, by humans or otherwise. 

Inspect Europe today, and you would struggle to believe that its greatest scuffles were once about anything other than bailouts and shared currency, or Eurovision and football. Yet 2015 marks the bicentennial of a battle that stands as a summation of that continent's centuries of bloody wars, particularly those of the 20th: Waterloo. Two new books take different approaches to remembering this conflict.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Madness Is Better Than Defeat

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Some novels try to make you see or feel or think; others are a kind of intellectual indulgence for the author and those in the know. Ned Beauman’s new novel is one such inside joke—likely to be amusing to those who get it, exasperating to those who don’t. The person laughing loudest may indeed be Beauman himself.

Madness Is Better Than Defeat revolves around a Hollywood production of a film called Hearts in Darkness. But despite this title—and the novel’s epigram, which also alludes to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—the film isn’t about a Colonel Kurtz, but rather about a “Coutts.” The filming takes place not in colonial Congo but at a Mayan temple in Honduras in the 1930s. This tropical locale acts as a kind of quicksand for hapless Caucasians, as the shoot transforms into a 20-year standoff that tangentially involves the CIA and their sordid work ousting leaders for American corporations.

There is none of Conrad’s brooding in the latest energetic novel by Beauman, who uses a lot of what he calls “ten-dollar words” as he mocks Conrad’s plodding, Slavic style. He assumes familiarity with Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and makes repeated nods to philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who believed reality consisted only of ideas. There’s a boat called the SS Alterity. Get it? Maybe not.

At its best, Beauman’s novel calls to mind a younger Thomas Pynchon. But an older Pynchon wrote that serious literature shows a real awareness of death. He also reflected that to start with ideas and derive characters from them was a mug’s game. Beauman’s command of the language is first-rate, and the breadth of his ideas vindicates his philosophy degree from Cambridge. But by Pynchon’s reckoning, Beauman’s cavalier attitude toward death makes him unserious. His characters are but shadows of Beauman’s thoughts.

For a novel so concerned with darkness, it’s unexpectedly lightweight.

An indulgent jungle invention
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Denis Johnson’s final collection

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Ernest Hemingway once ventured that all American literature derives from Huckleberry Finn. By this he meant American literature elevates vernacular speech, befitting literature in a democracy. Denis Johnson’s posthumous anthology, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is superlative proof of that.

Johnson is best known for his Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke and short story collection Jesus’ Son. A pupil of Raymond Carver, he has garnered a reputation for the sordid and the hard-boiled. But only one story in his new collection, “The Starlight on Idaho,” might be called Carver-esque. It concerns a man in rehab and in fact is less Carver than Bukowski. It’s a no-hoper’s cri de coeur, avoiding the prevalent clichés of the rehab genre.

Johnson’s stories are that of a depleted and decadent civilization. He observes trains everywhere going off the rails. The joke of the title story, which is composed of many interlinked tales, is that modern life is distinctly lacking in largesse and sea maidens. The story “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist” is dedicated to Elvis, as the King is as close to mythology as such a society can come. Swirling speculations about Elvis’ supposed twin lost in childbirth reach a crescendo, which occurs just as the World Trade Center towers are struck and collapse.

Once a recovering addict, the late Johnson seems fixated on death and recovery. His stylistic range is certainly wondrous, straddling the starkness of “Starlight” and the hysterical realism of “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist.” Critics like B.R. Myers have found Johnson’s prose affected and artless, and one does wonder sometimes what purpose fiction serves if it doesn’t inspire. After all, even folksy Huckleberry Finn did that. But Johnson’s stories are pertinent and engaging. They hold up a mirror to society’s dregs and to that extent are flawless.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ernest Hemingway once ventured that all American literature derives from Huckleberry Finn. By this he meant American literature elevates vernacular speech, befitting literature in a democracy. Denis Johnson’s posthumous anthology, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is superlative proof of that.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A family in the wreckage

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A new novel about Hurricane Katrina could seem like retreading ancient history. That was before Hurricane Harvey made an ocean of southeast Texas and harassed Louisiana. Before Irma smashed into the Caribbean and Florida, and Maria into Puerto Rico. All made landfall close to the 12th anniversary of Katrina, which left wounds that are still raw.

C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel draws its title from a Japanese phrase signifying ephemerality, but it doubles as a description of New Orleans after Katrina. As a fictional retelling thereof, the book has few superiors. In Babst’s phrase, Katrina was a “hate crime of municipal proportion,” referring to the racial disparity in the storm’s victims.

Reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, The Floating World is also a meditation on kinship and family history. Like Franzen’s chaotic family, the one here is ambivalent toward their hometown. Before Katrina, the protagonist, Del, escaped to New York. After Katrina, the family patriarch sinks into assisted living. Their relations with each other and the world are stormy. One of them might have committed a murder.

The Deep South can seem fatalistic at the best of times, but the hurricane dragged this to new depths. Babst evokes Katrina’s symbology, like the Xs marking houses containing the deceased. She also revisits discussions about whether NOLA has a future in light of rising seas, to what extent the city’s devil-may-care ethos contributed to its destruction, and how the media fed off the Big Easy’s pain.

The author resists the temptation to turn her novel into a tract or advocacy—not that it lacks passion. To the contrary, the novel is very much of our irritable, harried times.

Like Harvey, Katrina was not just a storm but also a reconfiguration of a community. Babst’s novel is an invaluable record of that social devastation—and a warning of the devastations like Harvey to come.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel draws its title from a Japanese phrase signifying ephemerality, but it doubles as a description of New Orleans after Katrina. As a fictional retelling thereof, the book has few superiors. In Babst’s phrase, Katrina was a “hate crime of municipal proportion,” referring to the racial disparity in the storm’s victims.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Bleak and beautiful

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Polls often find that most Americans believe in angels, so it’s not hard to credit that a 19th-century Irishwoman might believe in fairies. Hannah Kent’s eerie novel The Good People invites us into this superstitious milieu.

The Irishwoman is Nóra. Inaugurating the novel is the funeral of her husband, evoking Faulkner in its impoverishment and starkness. The death leaves Nóra alone to care for her grandson, Micheál. But early on, the child evinces peculiar qualities and mannerisms. Nóra takes on a maid, Mary, to help and comes to believe that the child may be a changeling, a fairy, one of the “Good People.”

The novel thus centers on Nóra’s attempts to exorcise this uncanny being. She thinks this will transform the boy into her true kin or return the spirit to its rightful domain. Her methods become increasingly extreme, and finally Nance, a folk doctor specializing in keening, suggests submersion in a river. This leads to a prosecution, and the novel closes with a rather contrived courtroom scene. “CSI: Fairies,” you might say.

These three women are the principals, but the novel also features a kindly priest skeptical of the local folklore. Kent showcases botanical language and writes in a prose that’s often delectable. Her novel is more literary than thriller; for long stretches of the novel nothing much happens. There is but one central conflict, between Nóra and Micheál, but the resolution is decisive if unsatisfying.

Meanwhile, the novel succeeds in imagining a community of violent ignorance and lassitude. As in Faulkner’s best, Kent presents us with shells of people, consumed with survival. (Two decades later, famine would ravage the Emerald Isle.) The novel’s more historical aspects are more interesting and credible than those supernatural—but when most folks believe in angels, one would not want to presume.

Polls often find that most Americans believe in angels, so it’s not hard to credit that a 19th-century Irishwoman might believe in fairies. Hannah Kent’s eerie novel The Good People invites us into this superstitious milieu.

FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

A life lived half in shadow

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Not long ago, it would have been fantasy that Ireland would have a gay prime minister, but the majority-Catholic country welcomed its first in 2017. The country has evolved from an often hateful hierocracy to a seat of social liberalism. Of this evolution, John Boyne’s new novel is an essential witness.

In 1945, the priesthood tears the novel’s narrator, Cyril, as an infant from his mother. A banker and his literary wife, Maude Avery, adopt him. Cyril discovers that he has no interest in girls, instead nursing a crush on his best mate, Julian. Homosexuality in Ireland being both sinful and criminal, Cyril must stay mum. But he confesses his many backroom trysts to a priest, who croaks as a result.

Like many gay men, Cyril marries out of convention, but not before professing his love to Julian. This goes over like a lead balloon, so Cyril finds himself in Amsterdam in Conradian exile. Dutch mores are more amenable; Cyril meets the love of his life. But even Holland has its hostilities. So the pair ends up in New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis. There Cyril becomes a volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and he and his partner adopt a son after a fashion. Normalcy is within reach before a homophobe assaults the pair in Central Park.

These are Furies on the visible spectrum. They pursue Cyril back to Ireland, where signs of a thaw are already evident. (Cyril is even propositioned by a bisexual pol aspiring to become prime minister.) Cyril reconciles with the ghosts of his past, including his estranged wife and biological mother.

More than a coming-of-age story, The Heart’s Invisible Furies is one man’s journey from persecution to toleration. Punctuated with simple dialogue, its nearly 600 pages betray Maude’s dictum that “brevity is the key.” But the novel seldom lags and often delights.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Not long ago, it would have been fantasy that Ireland would have a gay prime minister, but the majority-Catholic country welcomed its first in 2017. The country has evolved from an often hateful hierocracy to a seat of social liberalism. Of this evolution, John Boyne’s new novel is an essential witness.

FictionWorld FictionDebut Fiction

The stories women can tell

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Indian civilization produced the Kama Sutra and sculpture of unsurpassed lasciviousness, yet its Bollywood films spare no artifice to prevent its leads from kissing. Some Indians will tell you the British made them into prudes. Others blame Islam. These tensions and the hypocrisies they entail inform Balli Kaur Jaswal’s entertaining novel.

Its main character, Nikki, is a young Punjabi woman living in London. When her sister announces her intention to have an arranged marriage, Nikki posts her sister’s advert at the local Sikh community center. There she stumbles into teaching a class in English to the aforementioned widows. But the women end up composing erotica, much of it told in full. In this the novel resembles the Decameron of Boccaccio, if one wishes to be charitable. But the widows’ stories are even more provocative.

Needless to say, word gets out. Among those alarmed is a group called the Brotherhood. Suggestive of the Muslim Brotherhood, they are in practice more like the Taliban. They harass women who go about with heads uncovered. But despite these intimidations, as well as mild alarm from the woman who first hired her, Nikki falls under the spell of the widows’ titillating yarns. Meanwhile, Nikki has her own love interest and even gets entangled in a mystery involving a newlywed presumed to have burned herself to death.

As for the author, Jaswal seems well past caring whether her novel will give offense. The tone throughout is one of impish glee, and the erotica is convincing despite its humorous frame. At times the novel screams chick lit, but the cultural milieu adds a new twist on the Bridget Jones subgenre.

It also lays waste to many a cherished stereotype. Readers will never think of Punjabi widows quite the same way. They may be more Kama Sutra than Bollywood.

Indian civilization produced the Kama Sutra and sculpture of unsurpassed lasciviousness, yet its Bollywood films spare no artifice to prevent its leads from kissing. Some Indians will tell you the British made them into prudes. Others blame Islam. These tensions and the hypocrisies they entail inform Balli Kaur Jaswal’s entertaining novel.

FictionComing of Age

Where a teen extremist begins

Review by Kenneth Champeon

The wannabe jihadi is not always a religious desperado drawn from the dregs of society. He is often (like Osama bin Laden) a child of privilege. And his motivation may be more worldly than not. Laleh Khadivi’s fascinating novel A Good Country features one such unholy roller.

The good country is the United States. Reza is an American of Kurdish-Iranian descent and an ordinary teenager. He’s bright enough to attend Berkeley, but his interests tend toward surfing and getting high. When a friend and then a lover, Fatima, shows signs of radicalization, Reza—motivated by hedonism and the wish to keep Fatima, with whom he has an intense sexual relationship—goes along for the ride.

But other factors are afoot. The Boston marathon bombings occur. So does a massacre resembling the one in San Bernardino. These events lead to an increase in hate crimes toward Muslims, including Reza and his father. Also to blame are radical imams, agitating about American atrocities towards Muslims abroad. Their goal, to erase the “gray zone” where Muslims and infidels live in peace, finds traction.

Khadivi doesn’t justify the path toward radicalism so much as show how effortless, even banal, it is. In this respect, A Good Country resembles Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, as it’s about an a-religious libertine fleeing vacuity and ending in conversion. Alternately, the first half of the novel echoes Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, when we see the more nightmarish and anomic aspects of California dreamin’. Meanwhile, Khadivi’s freewheeling writing style seems inspired by Beats like Jack Kerouac, which is all the more disconcerting when Reza and Fatima come to admire the stern prose of the Koran.

As accomplished in art as in storytelling, A Good Country addresses a central problem of our time. Is the American melting pot a reality, or is it a mirage?

The wannabe jihadi is not always a religious desperado drawn from the dregs of society. He is often (like Osama bin Laden) a child of privilege. And his motivation may be more worldly than not. Laleh Khadivi’s fascinating novel A Good Country features one such unholy roller.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

Arundhati Roy’s return

Review by Kenneth Champeon

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, June 2017

The sophomore effort of a novelist whose debut made a splash is fraught with high expectations that all too often go unmet. Arundhati Roy presents a special case. It’s been two decades since she won the Booker Prize and wide acclaim for The God of Small Things. But in the intervening years her nonfiction and activism have drawn comparisons to Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, underscores this veer toward politics.

The novel is one of the most polemical in recent memory, and the characters act as animators of these polemics. Expressed with her usual musical precision, Roy’s anger has many targets. The rise of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi is one bête noire. Another is India’s continued possession of the Muslim-majority Kashmir region.

Roy’s first novel arrived weeks before India’s first nuclear test—which she condemned—and commentators saw the novel and the test as assertions of a rising India. Her second novel is an indictment of an India drunk on power, mistreating its poor and minorities. Ever the contrarian, Roy defends Kashmiris who seek self-determination. To Roy this is a matter not only of justice but also of survival—of India as a heterogeneous, secular state and of South Asian civilization. Experts consider Kashmir to be the most likely flashpoint for a nuclear war.

More a mosaic than a traditional, coherent story, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness sometimes resembles James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even in style it ramifies, and Roy’s characters are a jumble—similar to India’s welter of competing adversities, which V.S. Naipaul described as a “million mutinies.” The God of Small Things was a lively, virtuosic performance. In its successor, disgust is a recurring theme, and Indian media will likely pan it for anti-Indian propensities. But Roy’s love for the people of India is clear. She doesn’t hate India; what she hates is oppression.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The sophomore effort of a novelist whose debut made a splash is fraught with high expectations that all too often go unmet. Arundhati Roy presents a special case. It’s been two decades since she won the Booker Prize and wide acclaim for The God of Small Things. But in the intervening years her nonfiction and activism have drawn comparisons to Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, underscores this veer toward politics.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Crossroads and crosshairs

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Peddling dangerous drugs to faltering countries has made many a developing nation great. The British sold opium to the Chinese at gunpoint. The American colonies got the British hooked on tobacco. And now Mexico floods the U.S. with the drug du jour. Philip Caputo’s novel Some Rise by Sin concerns one battle in the so-called “war on drugs,” down Mexico way.

Its main character could have walked out of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Riordan is an American missionary priest tending to the flock of a place called San Patricio. He likes his tipple, drives a Harley and reads Marcus Aurelius. He is also acrophobic in a country where drug cartels are liable to toss people off cliffs. Joining Riordan in San Patricio are two American lovers, Pamela and Lisette. Pamela is a bipolar artist on various medications; Lisette a doctor. Both seem even more out of place in Mexico than Riordan, who gets into trouble when a hired assassin admits her crime during confession. Riordan must consider breaking his vows of confidentiality. In another nod to Greene, he dwells on the “problem of evil,” viz. how a benevolent Creator allows malevolence.

Caputo does not bog down in theology. His novel is one of action, recalling nothing so much as “Breaking Bad.” But Some Rise by Sin does offer the occasional insight. Caputo points out that the surge in Mexican immigration to the U.S. resulted from NAFTA; the treaty flooded Mexico with cheap American produce, displacing Mexicans from their farms. And Caputo seems aware of the irony that Riordan, in the crosshairs of the drug war, is a fan of tequila and Ambien.

The overall lesson of the novel is a powerful one: Economics trumps morality in shaping the fate of nations.

Peddling dangerous drugs to faltering countries has made many a developing nation great. The British sold opium to the Chinese at gunpoint. The American colonies got the British hooked on tobacco. And now Mexico floods the U.S. with the drug du jour. Philip Caputo’s novel Some Rise by Sin concerns one battle in the so-called “war on drugs,” down Mexico way.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

A woman rediscovers her native country

Review by Kenneth Champeon

American involvement in Cambodia during the Vietnam War was often called a “sideshow.” Bombing of the countryside displaced the population and destabilized the government, which paved the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Music of the Ghosts by survivor Vaddey Ratner only touches on American culpability, but the grueling, heart-wrenching novel indicts any treatment of Cambodia as mere footnote.

The novel concerns a woman named Teera, who, like the author, lost her father, escaped Cambodia to America and attended Cornell. Teera returns to Cambodia to meet a man known as the Old Musician, who claims to have known her father. The Old Musician—once a pupil of Pol Pot, who was a teacher before becoming leader of the Khmer Rouge—ended up in one of the regime’s prisons, where officials tried to extract confessions to confirm their paranoia. There, the Old Musician often shared a cell with Teera’s father.

The novel thus splits in two. On the one hand are Teera’s impressions of her unknown native country. On the other are the Old Musician’s memories of life under “the Organization.”

Through Teera, Ratner seems keen to show present-day Cambodia as recovered from the war, if nothing else to offer contrast to the book’s darker chapters. Teera admits her time in America has made her a reflexive optimist, but the war keeps dimming her rose-colored glasses. The landscape is scarred by bombs. Social relations remain tense. In an unforgettable passage, Ratner describes a woman whose job is to remove mines, but she later replaces them, as otherwise she’d be out of work. Thus the never-ending parade of amputees perpetuates on Cambodia’s streets.

The novel isn’t unending desolation. On the contrary, it is often very sweet, told with a careful lyricism that sometimes gets the better of the plot. Occasionally calling to mind Things Fall Apart, another novel about collapsed societies, Music of the Ghosts evokes a world with ghosts aplenty, but less apt by Ratner’s hand to be dismissed as a sideshow.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

American involvement in Cambodia during the Vietnam War was often called a “sideshow.” Bombing of the countryside displaced the population and destabilized the government, which paved the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Music of the Ghosts by survivor Vaddey Ratner only touches on American culpability, but the grueling, heart-wrenching novel indicts any treatment of Cambodia as mere footnote.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

A musician versus the regime

Review by Kenneth Champeon

When Europeans left Africa, many predicted their replacement by tyrants as bad or worse. Several nations found themselves under the thumb of a "Big Man," capricious and cruel. In his novel Taduno's Song, Nigerian author Odafe Atogun imagines such a post-colonial dystopia. Atogun also imagines efforts to resist it.

Taduno is a musician in exile from his native Nigeria. Upon his return, he finds that no one remembers him. This is fantastical, even Kafkaesque. For Taduno had been so beloved that his protest songs had almost toppled the regime. He left behind a girlfriend, Lela, kidnapped by the "gofment" and languishing in prison. He endeavors to reclaim his identity and to free Lela.

But the president has other ideas. He makes the lovers' freedom conditional upon Taduno becoming a mouthpiece for the regime. Rather as in 1984, the president expects not just obeisance, but love. When Taduno resists, he is thrown into prison and almost driven mad. Yet the brutality of his treatment only shows how fearful are his tormentors.

Taduno is thus forced to choose between his love for Lela and his love of country. Taduno yearns (as Vaclav Havel put it) to "live in truth." But he's not immune to the president's many enticements. Atogun doesn't reveal Taduno's choice until the last page of this compact, fable-like novel. But the conclusion shocks all the same.

The above comparisons to Kafka or Orwell aren't idle. Taduno's predicament is desperate. But Atogun is not without Kafka's often humane and comic touches. Like Orwell, Atogun excels in plain language, in reducing situations to their bare essentials. Yet the author resists reducing his characters to mere political symbols. They are compelling as people in their own right.

As Africa's richest country, Nigeria has lately become a cultural powerhouse. Its output runs the gamut from Nollywood films to books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And as a democracy, albeit a fragile one, it may resist the allure of its own Big Men. Atogun's novel is likely to become a small classic of protest literature. It is both a warning and a sign of hope.

When Europeans left Africa, many predicted their replacement by tyrants as bad or worse. Several nations found themselves under the thumb of a "Big Man," capricious and cruel. In his novel Taduno's Song, Nigerian author Odafe Atogun imagines such a post-colonial dystopia. Atogun also imagines efforts to resist it.

FictionShort Stories

History repeating

Review by Kenneth Champeon

There may be no unifying theme to Josip Novakovich's The Heritage of Smoke. But underlying the brilliant short-story collection is a pattern of man's inhumanity to man. And no wonder. Author of April Fool's Day, among others, the writer hails from Croatia. Two decades ago the fleeting republic of Yugoslavia came apart at the seams. The settings may range from placid Wyoming and Iowa to devastated New York or Srebrenica. But the tone throughout is a manic despair one associates with post-traumatic stress.

One of the New York stories, "Dutch Treat", centers on the events of 9/11. Surveillance cameras catch an innocent man grinning among some grinning "Arabic-looking" shopkeepers. The man also gave someone a sizable sum of money that landed in the hands of Mohammed Atta. The Kafkaesque storyline underscores the occasional absurdities of the American surveillance state.

Another story, "Acorns," relates the rape of an American aid worker in war-torn Bosnia. As in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, the woman becomes pregnant. Should she counter the violence of rape with the violence of abortion? Or counter with love by bringing the child to term? In "Be Patient," a child falls victim to a botched vaccination. It turns out that Big Pharma tests drugs in countries with scant history of suing for malpractice. America looms large in the Yugoslavia stories, a deus ex machina with dubious motives. So too does the UN, "a bunch of sex tourists and vultures."

Other stories are notable. "When the Saints Come" concerns a man saved from cancer who travels to the Holy Land. He finds it to be barbaric and ridiculous, only to die anyway. In "Tumbleweed," a hitchhiker flags a ride with an American thinking he's from "Yugoslavakia.” The hitchhiker's intoxication leads to a clash with the law. The title story, about someone tormented by his last cigarette, recalls Zeno's Conscience.

This collection has stories about rats, Nikola Tesla and cannibalism (though not all at once). The range alone suggests genius. The author's timing is faultless and the bathos hard-won. But the genius is never far from madness and nihilism. Gallows humor abounds, akin perhaps to Hemingway's "On the Quai at Smyrna." But Novakovich's voice is wholly unique and original. Antecedents don't spring to mind.

It's not uncommon for some to administer Last Rites to the short-story form. Novakovich is a promising, even an essential, refutation.

There may be no unifying theme to Josip Novakovich's Heritage of Smoke. But underlying the brilliant short-story collection is a pattern of man's inhumanity to man.

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