Tenterhook: One of the hooks or bent nails set in a close row along the upper and lower bar of a tenter, by which the edges of the cloth are firmly held. OED.A good word to know. To be on tenterhooks is to be stretched or strained like cloth hanging from hooks.
I handled very old and not-so-old books today and printed many pieces of paper. And I am thoroughly sick of winter.
I finished reading Le Clezio's Onitsha and I'm sorry to say but I'm terribly underwhelmed. It's not that it's a bad book. The writing is fine and he follows through on the plot but overall it's incredibly superficial. The characters are practically cut-outs. He has taken an outline of a person and filled them with vague personality traits. Reading about his characters is like viewing a person painted with broad strokes in watercolor. You get an idea of what they might look like but you wouldn't recognize them on the street. You could argue that Fintan, Maou, and Geoffrey are not as important as the setting. The town Onitsha is the main character except that mainly you follow Fintan and his parents and you actually see next to nothing of the people who live around them. There is nothing in this book that shows you that here, there is a community here of folk living their lives under colonial rule and they are human. They bargain in the market, the play silly games, they quarrel and throw tantrums and fall in love. They dream. None of that is here. They are broad strokes; gently laughing women and faded warrior men with faces like African masks and superhuman expressions. That last part disturbed me. This book has a whiff of the "noble savage" genre about it with its proud race of people whose traditions go back to the days when their ancestors left Egypt, who see gods in everything and eat funny, exotic foods. The mute woman who shows up in town with nothing becomes the embodiment of the river goddess, of the black queen who left her homeland to found a new one. Yeah, no. She was much more interesting when she was just a wary, mute woman learning to make friends with Maou. Turning the African characters into nothing more than the last remnants of a displaced people denies them of ordinary human expression.
Another problem I had with the writing was the way it never let things truly develop. In the beginning Maou doesn't like Onitsha. Then we read about Fintan learning about how to fit in, then suddenly we're back with Maou and she loves the place. Show some change don't just say "oh yeah, this happened." Everything was a little disjointed like that. Geoffrey's obsession with the "black queen of Meroe" comes out of nowhere and just muddles everything up.
A few small things:
- The role Sabin Rodes plays in the town is never made clear but he has a surprising amount of power. Maou's dislike for him is never explained and the reveal about him at the end made no sense. I'm probably missing something but I care so little for all of these rather vague characters.
- I know the French had colonies in Africa so why did this French author decide to set his story (which is ostensibly about colonial rule although it's more a back drop than a theme) in an English one?
- The book goes on too long. It starts with the journey to Africa and it should have ended with the journey back, not gone on to show where they are twenty years down the line. The story was about their stay in a country vastly unfamiliar to them. The foreign-ness of their surroundings lends the book a dream-like quality that breaks abruptly with the description of Fintan's later life in England. It also becomes surprisingly maudlin. I spent about the last ten pages rolling my eyes.
Maybe the river was the main character. It rolls on throughout the story as a great changeable but ever present beast. It sleeps just under the surface of everything the characters do and think. However, it would still be nice if the people could engage my attention.
So that was tl;dr but I'm glad to get that down. I'm trying to read "literature" and I've discovered that just because an author has won an award doesn't mean he's particularly good. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe Onitsha is one of his more mediocre books. At least he knows how to use quotation marks.
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