Colombia - One Hundred Years of Solitude

 Book 35: One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez  

                   

China - The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

Book 34: The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices - Xinran

In the late 1980s, Xinran hosted the first call-in show on state run radio. Her program, called "Words on the Night Breeze," focused on the lives of Chinese women - a topic rarely spoken of publicly before. The program was hugely popular, and Xinran received thousands of letters and hours of answering machine messages from women across China. This book contains the stories of some of those women. The stories are heartbreaking. These women tell their stories - arranged marriages, lovers lost to "the Party," children lost to war and natural disaster, and of their fight to carry on. Xinran left China in the late 1990s so that she could tell their stories to the world. Very much worth the read. 

Chile - The House of the Spirits

Book 33: The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

"In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the 20th century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. 

Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future." 

--

This book fits under many genres - fiction, magical realism, fantasy, classics, historical fiction...I grabbed onto the last one, particularly in the second half of the book. While the story itself is fiction, it's set against a very real backdrop. And I found myself pausing to Google the history of Chile so that I could understand the storyline more completely. The real characters are not named, nor is a definitive date given. But the book starts around WWII, which makes "the President" Eduardo Montalva, "the Socialist" is Salvador Allende, and "the General" is Augusto Pinoche. Salvador Allende, by the way, is Isabel's father's first cousin, which lends a whole new light to the story. 

The story is beautiful, violent, triumphant and tragic. I loved it. 

Chad - Told by Starlight in Chad

Book 32: Told by Starlight in Chad - Joseph Brahim Seid 

This book is a small collection of folklore that has been written down, passed on from the oral tradition. Each story is recognizable as the Chadian version of stories found in basically every culture. An interesting, though short read. 
 

 

Central African Republic - Batouala

Book 31: Batouala - Rene Maran

The Central African Republic is a land-locked country in, well, the center of Africa. It was colonized by the French in the 1890s, and gained independence in 1960. It has been engaged in an ongoing civil war since 2012. As of 2019, it ranked 188th out of 189 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI). 

Batouala was originally published in 1921, and it won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. It is thought to be one of the first works in the Negritude movement, a literary movement of the 1930s-50s that began among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule. 

The novel centers on the the lives of the chieftain, Batouala, and his nine wives. While there is certainly commentary about colonization - Batouala has much to say about the strange and lazy white people - most of the story focuses on his rivalry with Bissibingui, a young man in the village. Bissibingui is quite the ladies' man, and has gotten attention from all of Batouala's wives, but particularly favors Yassiguindja - who is also Batouala's favorite. Basically, this book is a soap opera, which isn't exactly what I was expecting. 

Canada - One Native Life

Book 30: One Native Life - Richard Wagamese

"In 2005, award-winning writer Richard Wagamese moved with his partner to a cabin outside Kamloops, B.C. In the crisp mountain air Wagamese felt a peace he'd seldom known before. Abused and abandoned as a kid, he'd grown up feeling there was nowhere he belonged. For years, only alcohol and moves from town to town seemed to ease the pain. In 'One Native Life,' Wagamese looks back down the road he has traveled in reclaiming his identity and talks about the things he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, attending a sacred bundle ceremony, or meeting Pierre Trudeau, he tells these stories in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese celebrates the learning journey his life has been."

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I loved this book. Simply loved it. It is equal parts heartbreaking and heart-healing. The essay that appears on page 30, "Upside Down and Backwards," is a good example. In this essay, Wagamese writes of his struggles as a young child. His teachers thought he was "slow, a difficult learner" and held him back for a year...and then put him in the back of the classroom and ignored him. As he entered Grade Three, he moved to a different school and the teacher wanted to introduce him to the class, so she had him write his name on the blackboard:

"I went to the board, leaned close to it, squinted and began to write. I heard snickers at the first letter and open laughter when I'd finished. 

I'd written my name upside down and backwards. To the rest of my classmates it was strange and hilarious, but it was how I'd learned, and I felt the weight of their laughter like stones. Walking back to my seat that day I felt ashamed, stupid and terribly alone.

But I had a teacher who cared. She walked me down to the nurse's station herself and waited while I got my eyes tested. Astigmatism, the nurse told her. Terrible astigmatism. Then the teacher listened closely as I explained why my writing was wrongly shaped. 

I had taught myself to write by squinting back over my shoulder. When we were taught to write in script, I wasn't given any attention, wasn't offered any help in forming the letters. So I watched the kid behind me and I mimicked what I saw. What I saw was upside down and backwards, and that was how I had taught myself to write." 

The teacher spent hours working with him to undue his self-taught method. To this day, he writes Gs and Ds back to front. But, he says, "Sometimes life turns us upside down and backwards. It's caring that gets us back on our feet again and pointed in the right direction."

Not all of Wagamese's essays have endings quite this nice or lessons quite this Hallmark-esque. But I learned something from nearly all of them. 

Yes on this one. Great book. 

Cameroon - The Poor Christ of Bomba

Book 29: The Poor Christ of Bomba - Mongo Beti

"In Bomba the girls who are being prepared for Christian marriage live together in the women's camp. Gradually it becomes apparent that the local church men have been using the local girls for their own purposes."

__

Sure, the book is about that. But first, you have to suffer through over 100 pages of the narrator talking about following the priest while he travels from village to village, judging everyone for not being pious enough (read: not giving the church/him enough money) and damning them all to hell. And throughout this journey, the narrator is fully supportive of the priest. So supportive, in fact, that nearly every sentence is an exclamation. But I digress. Eventually, the narrator tires of the priest. It happens sometime after a village woman gives the narrator a handjob and he falls in love with her. By the time they return to the main village, everyone has figured out that the priest is a sleaze who has been forcing women into slave labor in exchange for agreeing to perform Catholic marriages. 

This was not one of my favorites. To say the least.