THE HEART OF THE MATTER, a book that had the opposite of its intended effect on me

THE HEART OF THE MATTER
GRAHAM GREENE
Penguin Classics
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Graham Greene's masterpiece The Heart of the Matter tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West African coastal town. Scobie is bound by strict integrity to his role as assistant police commissioner and by severe responsibility to his wife, Louise, for whom he cares with a fatal pity.

When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he finds vital passion again yielding to pity, integrity giving way to deceit and dishonor—a vortex leading directly to murder. As Scobie's world crumbles, his personal crisis makes for a novel that is suspenseful, fascinating, and, finally, tragic.

Originally published in 1948, The Heart of the Matter is the unforgettable portrait of one man, flawed yet heroic, destroyed and redeemed by a terrible conflict of passion and faith.

My Review: An excellent book. Simply magnificent writing, as always, but more than that the story is perfectly paced (a thing Greene's stories aren't always, eg The Power and the Glory) and deeply emotional (another thing Greene's stories aren't always, eg Travels With My Aunt).

Greene himself didn't like the book, which was a species of roman à clef. I suspect, though I don't have proof, that he was simply uncomfortable at how much of his inner life he revealed in the book. Scobie's infidelity and his fraught relationship with the wife he's saddled with must have been bad reading for Mrs. Greene. But the essential conflict of the book is man versus church, the giant looming monster of judgment and hatred that is Catholicism. Greene's convert's zeal for the idiotic strictures, rules, and overarching dumb "philosophy" of the religion are tested here, and ultimately upheld, though the price of the struggle and the upholding aren't scanted in the text.

Stories require conflicts to make them interesting, and the essential question an author must address is "what's at stake here?" The more intense and vivid the answer to that question is, the more of an impact the story is able to make. Greene was fond of the story he tells here, that of an individual against his individuality. He told and retold the story. The state, the colonial power whose interests Scobie/Greene serves, is revealed in the text to be an uncaring and ungrateful master; the rules of the state are broken with remarkably few qualms when the stakes get high enough. It is the monolith of the oppressive church, admonishing Scobie of his "moral" failings and withholding "absolution of his sins", that he is in full rebellion against...and in the end it is the church that causes all parties the most trouble and pain.

Greene remained a more-or-less believing Catholic. I read this book and was stumped as to why. The vileness of the hierarchy was so clear to me, I couldn't imagine why anyone would read it and not drop christianity on the spot. But no matter one's stance on the religion herein portrayed, there's no denying the power of the tension between authority and self in creating an engaging and passionate story. A must-read.

THE LOOTING MACHINE, outrage upon indignity after robbery

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THE LOOTING MACHINE: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth
TOM BURGIS
PublicAffairs Books
$2.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have transformed their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.

In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline.

This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa’s past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010, fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger alone, the former French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it is not beholden to them. A score of African countries whose economies depend on resources are rentier states; their people are largely serfs. The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force. What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names.

My Review: The statistics are appalling: Two percent of the entire planet's gross domestic product, 13 percent of its population; a whopping 80 percent of the planet's platinum ore; 15 percent of its petroleum reserves...and 69% of the planet's people living in extreme poverty.

It's enough to make a decent human being into a raving lunatic-level, bomb-throwing, anti-capitalist revolutionary.

The scale of this appalling criminal enterprise beggars the imagination. There is no conceivable metaphor for the sheer scope of it. The number of companies and countries involved is shocking, but not remotely the most revolting datum; the volume of money is stunning, but not outside human comprehension; what makes every other data point irrelevant, unimportant, is the fact that a mere handful of human beings—fewer than two thousand—control this machine.

Think about that.

We allow it. We know it's going on. We allow a small town's population of kakistocrats, kleptocrats, scumbagarchs to perpetrate this immense crime every single day without any significant impediment being put in their way. How can that be allowed? What happened to the merest whiff of that antique virtue, morality?

Nigeria, on paper one of the best candidates for wealth in Africa, is mired in poverty and factionalism that drew the author to two inescapable conclusions: he was part of a system that cared nothing for the people it used to perpetuate its privileges, and he was alive in large part at the expense of some of those people whose fate he witnessed firsthand:

I arrived in a village on the outskirts [of a Nigerian city] not long after a mod had set fire to houses and their occupants, among them children and a baby. I took pictures, counted bodies, and filed my story. After a few days trying to understand the causes of the slaughter, I set off for the next assignment. Over the months that followed, when the images of the corpses flashed before my mind's eye, I would instinctively force them out, unable to look at them. ... I felt that I ought to suffer as those who died had—if not in the same way, then somehow to the same degree. The fact that I was alive became an unpayable debt to the dead.

PTSD in textbook case form. Survivor's guilt is damned near unbearable. How come I'm here and that one isn't? How can I keep going when bearing witness is the only power I possess?

Journalism to the rescue, in a way. Reporting the facts is one thing an observer can do that does, in fact, have force and effect in the world. Nigeria's problems, like any and every country's, have many facets and roots and reasons. The heinous kleptocratic regimes aiding and abetting the amoral-by-design corporate exploiters. The exploiters hiding their vileness (not least from themselves) behind the soulless, bodiless legal fiction of corporations with legal responsibility solely and entirely to their shareholders:

What has happened to Nigeria is not the result of some innate facet of the African spirit, as some observers suggest with a shrug of casual racism. British members of Parliament have shown themselves willing to sell their right to ask parliamentary questions, and the pork-barrel politics of Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, looks very much like a patronage system. Lobbyists in every major capital inject money into politics on behalf of vested interests. The difference between a corrupted resource state and a state that can still call itself a place of representative rule is the extent to which such subversion of public office for personal benefit is the scandal or the norm. It is the degree to which the institutions of state -- legislative bodies, the police, the courts -- serve as instruments of the mighty or as checks on arbitrary power.

This isn't an accident. It's a careful design. Think about it: How else can a person, a living one with a heartbeat, live with the inevitable consequences of a resource-extraction economy on the extractees' lives? Distance is the only option. The fiduciary responsibility of corporate officers is solely to the shareholders. By law. Not the environment, not the community, not the stakeholders like employees or citizens of a foreign country. The shareholders' profits are legally ALL that can be considered. Makes sleeping at night a lot easier: "I was just following orders," say multinational Eichmanns in their SS uniforms tailored in Savile Row and Bond Street and Hong Kong, sold at Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus.

But then there's another group of criminals whose participation in the crimes is vital to making sure the spice keeps flowing (Dune reference, go look it up): The banksters. Oh my yes. The banksters are in it up to their pear-shaped hips. The author's a financial journalist by trade, he should know. And he explains in this concise example of the financing of a Ghanaian mine that cyanide-poisoned an entire town:

When the International Finance Corporation announced in 2005 that it was planning to invest in Newmont's development of the Ahafo mine, Newmont's market capitalization, the total value of all its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, stood at $17.5 billion, twice the size of Ghana's economy. Its quickly rising annual revenues were $4.5 billion, and it made $434 million in profits from operations on four continents that produced 9 percent of the gold mined worldwide. The Ahafo concession alone was sitting on gold worth $12 billion. The following year the IFC approved a loan for the Ahafo mine from its own account of $75 million and arranged a further $50 million from commercial banks, including Rothschild and Royal Bank of Scotland. The total package represented a modest 7 percent of Newmont's $1.9 billion total debt.

You don't need a finance degree or a business background to see that a minuscule fraction of debt owed by a profitable enterprise like 7 percent could easily be financed on the open credit market. The risk isn't enormous, when the underlying asset is valued at a sum like $12 billion. The IFC was founded to finance high-risk loans to corporations involved in socially desirable but economically risky activities. Mining $12 billion in gold from a tiny economy's land while poisoning its people doesn't meet a single one of those criteria.

The examples and analyses just keep coming. The book's cumulative effect is much like a dermabrasion treatment for your conscience. How could you not have known? How could anyone who did know not shout the iniquity, unfairness, abusiveness, from the rooftops? And how can you, wired netizen that you (and I) are, possibly disconnect from this system?

Can't. There's gold in each and every device you use at home, in your car, at work. Microscopic amounts, irreducible contributions to the iniquitous resource-extraction economy that stain our collective hands. How to deal with this particular "survivor guilt?"

Don't stuff your ears. Read about it. Talk about it to others because if you don't, who will? When the time comes to vote, look into the stances your candidates take on environmental issues. When the time comes to sign up for a retirement plan, sign up for or switch to a "green" one. Will it save the world? No. But that icon of charity, Mother Teresa, said:

BAKING CAKES IN KIGALI, a pleasure to read about Rwanda in a fun and engrossing vein

BAKING CAKES IN KIGALI
GAILE PARKIN
Delacorte Press
$17.00 trade paper, $12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

2016 Comment: I can't figure people out...this book is a pleasure to read, offers revealing and touching and amusing comments on the reality of growing older in an era of chaotic change that I can't imagine NOT being of interest to a very wide readership and yet..nothing! It's a lovely story. Seek one out, give it a try, this is good stuff here.

The Publisher Says: Once in a great while a debut novelist comes along who dazzles us with rare eloquence and humanity, who takes us to bold new places and into previously unimaginable lives. Gaile Parkin is just such a talent—and Baking Cakes in Kigali is just such a novel. This gloriously written tale—set in modern-day Rwanda—introduces one of the most singular and engaging characters in recent fiction: Angel Tungaraza—mother, cake baker, keeper of secrets—a woman living on the edge of chaos, finding ways to transform lives, weave magic, and create hope amid the madness swirling all around her.

In Kigali, Angel runs a bustling business: baking cakes for all occasions—cakes filled with vibrant color, buttery richness, and, most of all, a sense of hope only Angel can deliver.…A CIA agent’s wife seeks the perfect holiday cake but walks away with something far sweeter…a former boy-soldier orders an engagement cake, then, between sips of tea, shares an enthralling story…weary human rights workers…lovesick limo drivers. Amid this cacophony of native tongues, love affairs, and confessions, Angel’s kitchen is an oasis where people tell their secrets, where hope abounds and help awaits.

In this unlikely place, in the heart of Rwanda, unexpected things are beginning to happen: A most unusual wedding is planned…a heartbreaking mystery—involving Angel’s own family—unravels…and extraordinary connections are being made among the men and women who have tasted Angel’s beautiful cakes…as a chain of events unfolds that will change Angel’s life—and the lives of those around her—in the most astonishing ways.

My Review: This book should have been a shoo-in for the bestseller lists. If the popularity of Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe books is any index to American willingness to embrace African women as heroes, I can think of no earthly reason this tome won't light up the charts.

I found Angel and her husband Pius to be entertaining companions. The five grandchildren they are raising in post-genocide Rwanda reflect the realities of life in Africa...orphans everywhere, no matter where you look, and only the very lucky have a place to go where they are loved and nurtured.

Angel and Pius should, by the lights of their Tanzanian upbringing, be preparing for their ascent into elderhood, being looked after by the children they carefully raised. The children are dead, and the elders are thrown back into parenthood. This central tragedy is the spine of the book.

It's not a tragedy to Angel, in the sense that she revels in the life of a society cake-supplier, something she began as a home-based business to support the grandkids and has become a passionate addiction. Angel is famous in Kigali for the creative splendor of her cakes, ordered by the best and the brightest of the city to commemorate the milestones of life. Angel gets to hear all the gossip worth hearing and involve herself in all the doings of her world.

The book is a sure-fire pleasure read for many, if not most, fans of domestic fiction. It's something that readers should make a point of browsing in the local bookery.

THE EPIC OF ASKIA MOHAMMED, a poetic translation of an African foundational myth

THE EPIC OF ASKIA MOHAMMED
NOUHOU MALIO (tr. Thomas A. Hale)
Indiana University Press
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Askia Mohammed is the most famous leader in the history of the Songhay Empire, which reached its apogee during his reign in 1493-1528. Songhay, approximately halfway between the present-day cities of Timbuktu in Mali and Niamey in Niger, became a political force beginning in 1463, under the leadership of Sonni Ali Ber. By the time of his death in 1492, the foundation had been laid for the development under Askia Mohammed of a complex system of administration, a well-equipped army and navy, and a network of large government-owned farms. The present rendition of the epic was narrated by the griot (or jesere) Nouhou Malio over two evenings in Saga, a small town on the Niger River, two miles downstream from Niamey. The text is a word-for-word translation from Nouhou Malio's oral performance.

My Review: 1,602 lines of oral foundation myth. I was afraid to take it on, really, but was seduced by the sheer spoken beauty of it. And I can't stress "spoken" enough: Don't read this book, speak it!

As with any cultural record of a time and place unknown to me, and likely to most people raised in the USA, there was a learning curve to be surmounted before I could really understand the sounds I was making of the poetry. In fact, I found it most useful to read the line references in the Annotations section immediately after reading the Preface and the Introduction. These were all indispensable steps to appreciating the world that was unfolding before my mental eye. It's an astonishing fact that American students are simply not introduced to non-European information about Africa to this very day. I can't begin to fathom that, until I realize that the purpose of this is to make Africa "ours" by appropriation yet again.

The best way to push the veil of ignorance aside is always to read. Reading the foundation myths of a culture is a necessary step to becoming a well-educated person. This epic poem is a great piece of literature, and as such a great window into the West African world of the past thousand years. The fact that the Songhay Empire was a vast, sophisticated political unit and is unknown to most of us outside Africa is unnerving; that we have the nerve to place the people of Africa in the "developing nations" category is breathtakingly arrogant, given the gorgeous culture that unfolds in The Epic of Askia Mohammed. It is in no way acceptable to dismiss the Songhay Empire as "pre-European" since the Empire was formed and maintained without even a nod to European purposes and ruled through a sophisticated apparatus that owed no debt to any Eurpoean model or purpose. This culture was its own unique self. That shouldn't even need to be said, but the English-language references I've found to the Songhay Empire now that I know to look for them tend towards a tone of condescension and dismissal.

The reader, or performer, of this epic poem will quickly see the folly of that attitude. Translation is an imperfect art. The translator of The Epic of Askia Mohammed relied on many generous African colleagues to get it right. That the job was done well is most apparent as one speaks the phrases, finds the rhythms of the lines and the flow of the underlying dynastic narrative. It's a very good job, although I have no way to know for myself how faithful it is to the original epic. As with all translations, I'm left to glean accuracy and veracity from the feel, the texture, the sensation of the whole as I experience it first and latterly remember it. An imperfect gauge, yes, but it reads "excellent" to my eye and ear so I'm satisfied.

I am very grateful to Indiana University Press for sending me the review copy I requested. I appreciate the fact that I had the opportunity to experience this tale for myself, and I'd encourage you to do the same.

BEASTS OF NO NATION, art of a high order and indictment of an entire species

BEASTS OF NO NATION
UZODINMA IWEALA
HarperCollins
$13.99 trade paper, available now

This title is one of 2021's Olive Editions and it's a whopping $10!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact.

In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, inventive, and deeply affecting novel.

WINNER OF Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction–Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction–Los Angeles Times Book Award

My Review: Men writing in the voice of a child are at a disadvantage because childhood is traditionally thought of as a woman's preserve. Iweala writes about a boy who is only nominally a child, though; one of the thousands of boys who are compelled to serve in the civil wars and rebellions of Africa's troubled states.

He does this with force, beauty, and horror.

This moment is the narrator's first moment of joy:

Nobody is seeing me as I am getting up and walking through the tree right to the road. I am feeling breezes to my back that is pushing me to walk far far away from here and I am moving quickly quickly onto the road where I am just walking walking walking to where the sun is setting. I am looking at it and wanting to catch it in my hand to be squeezing until the color are dripping out from it forever. That way everywhere it is always dark and nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world.

I can't stress enough that this first novel is To Be Read! The passage above, in the context of the story, brought me to tears. It's a lovely piece of writing no matter what...but coming where it does in this wrenchingly infuriating story, it's got a wallop that must be experienced.

Beasts of No Nation was published in 2005. It's written by a Nigerian man of (then) some 23 years of age. Jamaica Kincaid acted as his advisor. Someone explain to me, that all being said, why the Adichie (of similar background and age) cult got rollin' and there was not an Iweala cult...?

This author deserves your attention. Please read his work. It's not flawless, but it's head and shoulders above most things that clutter our shelves!

Strongly recommended.

AMERICAN HIPPOPOTAMUS
JON MOOALLEM
The Atavist
Kindle Single, $2.99

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1910, the United States—its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted—was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

The only thing stranger than the hippo idea itself was the partnership promoting it. At its center were two hard-bitten spies: Frederick Russell Burnham, a superhumanly competent frontiersman, freelance adventurer, and fervent optimist about America’s future—Burnham would be the inspiration for the Boy Scouts—and Fritz Duquesne, a.k.a. the Black Panther, a virtuoso con man and cynical saboteur who believed only in his own glorification and revenge. Burnham and Duquesne had very recently been sworn enemies under orders to assassinate each other. They’d soon be enemies again. But for one brief and shining moment they joined behind a common cause: transforming America into a nation of hippopotamus ranchers.

In American Hippopotamus, Jon Mooallem brings to life a historical saga too preposterous to be fiction—a bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos, but also of a conflicted nation on the threshold of a bewildering new century, deciding what kind of country it would be, and what beasts it would eat.

My Review: This Kindle Single, produced by The Atavist...which company creates quite a few of these not-quite-enough-to-make-a-regular-book very long articles...was a whimsical purchase. American HIPPOPOTAMUS and Teddy Roosevelt and the Original Boy Scout?! It's like they mapped my brain and found all the crannies that need filling before putting this, and many of their other, projects out.

Mooallem (great name, don't you think?) found this weird little footnote in history heaven-knows-how, but I am glad he did. The more-or-less 70pp of the story don't give him all that much latitude to develop the sheer blinding weirdness of his tale into tedious show-your-work detail. He hits the high points and moves on, following the two central characters of Burnham and Duquesne from sketchily traced origins to endings. The men are documented fully in other books, as they deserve to be. This isn't intended to be a dissertation on either of them, or of their weird plot to introduce hippos to the swamps of the Gulf Coast...HIPPOS! they kill more people every year than sharks!...to solve something I'd only very glancingly heard tell of, "The Great Meat Crisis" that was afflicting the US a hundred years ago.

I know for a fact that the water hyacinth problem the hippos...hippos! can't get over that...were meant to help solve is ongoing, and the importation of exotic animals to help solve it is still bandied about. Austin, Texas, was all gung-ho to introduce sterilized Asian carp into one of its lakes to eat the damned weeds. A scary, scary prospect. Those are some very nasty fish with no local predators and no food value that I know of.

Anyway. Mooallem was obviously struck by the audacity of such a plan, and by the world that could imagine such a thing working well. He sums up the appeal of this read quite well and succinctly:

I'm not arguing that America would be a better or more beautiful place if it had imported hippopotamuses in 1910. But there is something beautiful about the America that considered importing them--an America so intent on facing down its problems, and solving them, that even an idea like this could get a fair hearing; where the political system and the culture felt so alive with possibility, and so confident of its own virtue and ingenuity, that elected officials could sit around and contemplate the merits of hippo ranching without worrying too much how it sounded; where people felt free and bold enough to imagine putting hippopotamuses in places where there were no hippopotamuses.

Somewhere along the way, our politics, and maybe our psyches, too, became stunted by a certain insecurity--by the fear that someone is quietly sneering at us, just waiting to skewer and betray us if we take a bold chance.

Well, well, well. Someone other than me noticed! Of course, the advantage to that timorousness is the guarantee of the supine acquiescence of our potentially rich populace to the damnable and insufferable rule of the banksters and plutocrats. Know what finally killed the hippos-in-Dixie plan? (Other than good fortune, can you even imagine the horrors of hippos charging through New Orleans?!) The nature of harvesting the meat (don't get that image too stuck in your heads) meant that the gigantic meat-packers couldn't use their huge slaughter houses and assembly-line methods to cut and pack the meat.

That, obviously, cannot be allowed. No more than could the egg farmers afford to acquiesce to the proposal, made around the same time, to replace fragile, quick-to-spoil hen's eggs with turkey eggs that have a larger volume of albumen, more yolk, thicker shells, and a vastly longer unrefrigerated shelf life.

Such, laddies and gentlewomen, is the nature of life in a "democracy" that's run for the benefit of the few against the interests of the many: pay more for less, and be grateful you're allowed to have it at all.

Ahem. The cost of this good evening's read is $2.99, and it's a darn good investment in an amusing side-light onto American history and human nature.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

WHO FEARS DEATH, AfroSF

New review posted on Shelf Inflicted!

I loved WHO FEARS DEATH by Nnedi Okorafor in spite of myself. She's a sorceress! I swear I will step on her foot if we ever meet. Post-apocalyptic Africa plus gorgeous sentence-crafting equals excellent reading. Don't miss out.

Read it here: Shelf Inflicted