Reading can be the perfect form of escapism. Life might be serving you up some real shit pies – work might be banal, your love unrequited – but not REALLY, because if you just flip open that wee book next to you, you can be a whole new person in a whole new place. Fuck you, boss man, I’m actually an evil genius, and YOU, Dapper Dave from down the road, you love me so much your skin hurts. Sorry, no arguments – it’s all written down right here.

Lately though, we’ve been revisiting a different type of reading: reading that changes your understanding of the world and, like, teaches you things. No, we’re not talking about straight-up non-fiction (baby steps please – we’ve only just moved on from covers!), we’re talking about novels based on real life facts – intimate portraits with an epic background, if you will. And in this instance, we’re talking about Africa. Join us as we dissect two books that did more than just distract us from ourselves for a minute.

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, read by Alice Fenton.

Some authors have a talent for turning boredom and banality into something meaningful, or at least fleetingly pretty. Adichie succeeds in what I think could be a more difficult challenge – taking an experience too huge for most of us to understand and making it real and present. She works with the type of facts that are usually dryly recited and rarely understood, and creates an emotionally tangible tale by presenting them through the medium of lived lives, of actual aching sensitive experiences.

The facts are those of Nigeria’s vicious civil war, and the lives we experience it through are those of a houseboy, a privileged beauty, and a shy Englishman who comes to think of himself as Biafran. As the war progresses, their actions and reactions are presented with a loving but undeceived eye. We judge them, and are then made to re-judge and re-evaluate as each is revealed to be nothing more and nothing less than human, in a war that seems dedicated to stripping them of their humanity.

The details of this nightmarish chapter in Nigeria’s history are fearlessly researched and recreated, without losing track of the personal. Love and politics are entwined to a degree rarely seen in modern literature, as the underlying message becomes clear: that love, if strong enough, can overcome pretty much anything.

This book is full of awful happenings but the whole is somehow oddly uplifting. Its characters become stronger than they (and we) ever imagined they could, and we’re left feeling that we have some small but legitimate understanding of what the nation they represent has experienced.

Youth – J.M. Coetzee, read by Angela Bennetts.

J.M. Coetzee is an uncompromising author. His novels, including the Booker Prize winning Disgrace (1999) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983) are both scathing appraisals of South Africa pre- and post-Apartheid; the smallness of human life, the rupturing effect of violence, the rampancy of exploitation. All universal themes, cast in the iron-like intellect of Coetzee’s writing, set against a time and place where atrocities were common and manifold. His writing does not swell with bitter compassion or heavy-handed political overtures, and it vividly portrays them all the better for it. In both of these books, the protagonist is a man who loses everything. In the case of Disgrace, it is a professor suffering the consequences of a seamy scandal. Michael K is also an anti-hero of sorts; a simple, hare-lipped gardener struggling to survive during the turmoil of civil war.

With interest I approached Coetzee’s fictionalised memoir, Youth (2002) – would I find another man bereft, with nothing but a pure, animalistic force to propel him forward? Like the protagonist in Youth (who is narrated from the third person – a detachment that perfectly suits Coetzee’s notoriously reclusive reputation), Coetzee studied English and mathematics at a Cape Town university. And similarly, he then travelled to England to become a computer programmer, to live the life of the colonial (unseen, unheard), and escape the tyranny of a war-torn country.

But the real overarching drive is art; the lofty, the pure, the strict. And attached to art, the life of the artist; lover and liver of life. But in a world where no English girl will look at the foreign youth, his words facing a wall of silence, nuclear destruction imminent, these ideals become impossible. Coetzee seems to be saying, what value does art have in a world devoid of meaning? Can words ever adequately capture the deep chill at the heart of humanity? He answers through example, with fierce works of fiction that get as close to that heart as possible.

++ even books ++

Posted by Even Books in Gatecrashers, Words

Tags: africa, chimamanda ngozi adichie, coetzee, dapper dave, even books, even books gatecrash, half of a yellow sun, j. m. coetzee, youth