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Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa

I’ve just finished Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa. Which is a bit of a relief, because I found it quite hard work. The good stuff first: it’s a story that traces a couple of generations through the history of modern Uganda, with the arrival of Idi Amin and the collapse of his regime, the sequence of messy guerilla wars, the rise of AIDS and so on. The central character is initially brought up in a village before moving to Kampala, is from a Catholic background and is educated in a rather brutal seminary; his grandmother is a midwife; he ends up leaving Uganda to move to Holland. So there’s lots of good material. And lots of striking incidents and some strong (though not generally very likeable) characters.

Despite which, after reading a hundred pages, I checked to see how long the book was and had a sinking feeling when I saw there were still 400 pages to go.

The problem is the prose style. Quite apart from a tendency to cliché, it seems like Isegawa reacts to similes the way a small child reacts to candy. Everything is like something. These similes are sometimes quite good in themselves — he describes a priest at the seminary as having ‘an ego as large as a cirrhotic liver’ — but I found the overall effect distracting. And it’s part of a generally over-written, shouty kind of tone the book has which I just didn’t get on with; sometimes I’d get into it and be quite absorbed for twenty or thirty pages, and then some turn of phrase would snap me out of it again.

I did wonder whether it was a problem with the translation; but as far as I can tell from the title page, the book was written in English. I guess English must be the author’s second language, which is pretty impressive, but doesn’t alter the fact that I didn’t enjoy his prose.

Here’s an example of the kind of paragraph that would annoy me:

It struck him like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree down middle: Nakibuka! Had the woman not done her best to interest him in her life? Didn’t he, in his heart of hearts, desire her? Had he ever forgotten her sunny disposition, her sense of humor, the confident way she luxuriated in her femininity? The shaky roots of traditional decorum halted him with the warning that it was improper to desire his wife’s relative, but the mushroom of his pent-up desire had found a weak spot in the layers of hypocritical decency and pushed into the turbulent air of truth, risk, personal satisfaction, revenge. His throttled desire and his curbed sex drive could find a second wind, a resurrection or even eternal life in the bosom of the woman who, with her touch, had accessed his past, saved it and redeemed his virility on his wedding night. Sweat cascaded down his back, his heart palpitated and fire built up in his loins.

200 pages of this stuff would have been harmless enough, and I might have said that, despite a few flaws, it was still well worth reading; 500 pages was too much.

But I stuck it out to the end. Partially from stubbornness but mainly because I bought Abyssinian Chronicles as my book from Uganda for the Read The World challenge.

» The photo, ‘Headless‘, is © Dave Blumenkrantz and used under a CC by-nc-nd licence.

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Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

Metropole, by Ferenc Karinthy, was published in Hungarian in 1970.* This translation, by George Szirtes, was published last year. The blurb on the back from G.O. Châteaureynaud says

With time, Metropole will find its due place in the twentieth-century library, on the same shelf as The Trial and 1984.

which gives you an idea of the general literary area we’re in. It’s the story of Budai, a linguist who gets on the wrong plane and finds himself in a strange city. He gradually realises he is trapped there, not because some person or organisation is holding him against his will, but because despite speaking most major European languages, he cannot make himself understood or decipher any of the language around him.

Which is a nightmarish situation and the book did in fact give me nightmares. Well, not really; I couldn’t sleep properly because of my hay-fever†, and I was drifting in and out of sleep having peculiar Metropole-related dreams about being unable to read a piece of text. Can’t remember what it was.

The scenario — a man trapped in a mysterious world he doesn’t understand — makes Kafka the obvious comparison, but I’d be reluctant to reach too quickly for the word ‘Kafkaesque’ because that to me implies a certain very specific tone and atmosphere. It’s a long time since I read Kafka, but I remember it being much more relentlessly surreal. Metropole is played comparatively straight: it’s set in a very peculiar world but it has an internal consistency to it, and the story is told in a straightforward way.

In that sense I can see the comparison with Orwell, and the sprawling, grey, joyless city is certainly somewhat like the London of 1984, but otherwise I don’t think it quite works. The world of 1984 has to be a real place. A fictional real place, but still real; it’s a vision of the future. It’s not at all clear that the world of Metropole is real in the same way. It’s more like Budai has accidentally wandered into the wrong novel; nothing makes sense to him because him even being there means that something is fundamentally broken.

The other analogy that occurred to me is that it’s like a story from one of those Oliver Sacks books: someone is in a car accident or has a stroke, and they wake up completely unable to process language. The rest of their brain seems to be working fine, but somehow the ability to understand language has gone missing and all they hear is gibberish.

I have to admit that the book didn’t completely grab me, but I suspect that’s more to do with me being in the wrong mood than a problem with the book itself. I can see that it’s inventive and atmospheric and darkly funny, and if I didn’t get completely absorbed by it, well, perhaps I read too much of it while feeling like my head had been stuck in a bucket full of hairy caterpillars.

* OK, one procedural point here: when reading a book in translation, I don’t think it should be difficult to find out when the book was first published in its original language. It should be somewhere on the title page. I shouldn’t need to look up the author on Wikipedia. I suppose it could be strategy: perhaps the people at Telegram Books think I’m less likely to read it if I realise that it is *gasp* 40 years old. Probably not. But it’s annoying either way. The potential confusion is increased by the fact that the only copyright dates listed on the title page prior to the English translation are 1999 and 2005 in France. I would guess there’s some kind of added complication arising from the fact that it was originally published in communist Hungary? I dunno.

† I mean seriously, my eyes were really sore and I couldn’t breathe properly. Thankfully the worst of my hay-fever seems to fairly short-lived; there’s about a week or two when it’s rough enough that it can be quite distressing, then it calms down a bit. I don’t know whether it’s because there’s less of the relevant kind of pollen or because my immune system stops panicking as much.

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iPhone field guides, please

I was interested to read Chris Clarke enthusing about iBird Explorer Plus, a field guide to North American birds for the iPhone, because it’s just about the first application I thought of when the phone was released. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent piece of software for Europe yet, but hopefully it will come.

It also seems relevant to a discussion that has been rumbling on in various places (e.g. this post which I found via Daring Fireball) about pricing for iPhone applications, about whether all the crappy applications for a couple of dollars will crowd out better software and prevent people from paying a more serious price for them.

Well, I paid £17 (about $30 at the time) for this book, probably the best field guide ever written, and I would cheerfully pay the same again just to have exactly the same information available on my phone. I paid £35 for a 4 CD set of the bird songs and calls of Europe. And I bought an iPod Nano just so I could have those bird songs with me when I was birdwatching. For a really well-designed application for the iPhone that combined the information and illustrations from the Collins guide with added audio and photographic reference, I would pay £40 without thinking and would probably go higher.

And that’s despite the fact that I don’t think the iPhone is ever going to make an ideal field guide: the advantages like portability and multimedia will never quite compensate for the small screen size. For proper birding I would want the book as well. But to have that information with me at all times, I’d certainly pay good money. And why stop there? I also own field guides to British wild flowers, butterflies, moths, trees, fungi, and insects. Since I don’t want to break my back, I don’t normally carry them around with me; I would love to have iPhone versions of them.

The thing is, I have difficulty thinking of pure functionality that you could add to the iPhone that I would spend a lot of money on. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, just that I don’t have the imgination to think what it is. But I would certainly pay for content.

Another example: amazing though Google Maps is, for walking in the UK, it’s no substitute for the appropriate Ordnance Survey map with all the footpaths and pubs marked on it. And while it would be nice to think that OS could sell digital versions of their maps slightly cheaper than the paper ones, I would pay the full price, grumbling a little, if I could. I paid £6 for a buggy version of the London Mini A-Z, so I guess I couldn’t complain about paying the same for an OS map. For a package that gave me coverage for the whole of, say, Sussex, Kent and Surrey at multiple resolutions, £50 or £60 wouldn’t seem like an unreasonable price.

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The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna is my book from Finland for the Read The World challenge. It makes something of a change: it’s short (130 pages!) and rather light. Most of the books I’ve read for this exercise have been rather serious novels about post-colonialism, dictatorship, the collapse of traditional cultures, civil war, the refugee experience and so on. Mainly no doubt because that was the C20th experience for so much of the world’s population, but also perhaps because of a translation bias: it’s the Serious Books which are most likely to find their way into English editions.

durer_young_hare3

So, although I have a reasonably high tolerance for that kind of thing, it’s still a nice change to read something which is, at least superficially, lighter. The Year of the Hare is the story of Vatanen, a journalist whose car hits a leveret; he finds it, splints its leg, and essentially goes walkabout with the hare for company, leaving his job and his wife to go and work in the Finnish countryside.

The book has an episodic structure as Vatanen meets eccentric characters and gets caught up in mildly farcical adventures. People often come out rather badly, their chaotic and frequently ridiculous intrusions onto Vatanen’s life in contrast to the constant, quiet presence of the hare, and the book is clearly among other things a satire and a book about solitariness and being in Nature. But I don’t want to overburden it with interpretation: I enjoyed it. I recommend it.

» The picture is of course Albrecht Dürer’s A Young Hare, taken from Wikipedia. The most obvious choice imaginable, but it’s such a nice picture.