Sunday Salon: Chinua Achebe

I have been trying to catch up with the (modern) classics from my TBR list - so the other day I picked up Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

It is a peculiar coincidence that I am reading this book not long after Ondrok gödre by Imre Oravecz: the similarities between these two novels are almost spooky (can you tell I am already in Halloween mood?). Same topic (farmers' life), same characters (Okonkwo and István - both are very frail and human, both are very careful not to show any "weak" feelings and emotions to the outside world and even to themselves, both are obsessed with the land and its farming, both have secretly a favorite child among their children, both live in an extremely strong patriarchal community, etc.), same writing style (that certain emotional distance-keeping and the unbelievably meticulous description of everyday life on the farm and around, the mosaics that add up the whole picture) and so on, and so on.

However I must say I cannot see as much coherence in Achebe's book as much I experienced in the Oravecz-novel. I have finished about two-thirds of Things Fall Apart, and it still seems to me as if the Nigerian writer had compiled a (thorough) ethnographical list of the Ibo people (traditions, rites, environment, etc), and gone through each item one by one, trying to make up an individual story around all the collected data. There is not a common storyline or concept (apart from the fact that everything happens with and around Okonkwo and family) that you could string these totally loose events onto. As opposed to the Oravecz-novel, in which from the very beginning you are clearly aware of the writer's intention to present the slow but inevitable process of the decline of the Hungarian agriculture in the first decades of the 20th century and the mosaics of István's life communicate this message perfectly smoothly and in a wonderful, symbolic way.

Nevertheless, it is a very enjoyable (and sometimes pretty sad) novel, quite easy to read, and if nothing else I can learn a ton about a world that is so far away from where I grew up.

Sunday Salon: DFW

I wanted to write a decent review on The Scandal of the Season or a much less decent (but much more enthusiastic) review on Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, but then I read the news.

At this point I cannot write about literature at all - I am shocked and hurt too much.

Maybe next week.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cool on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and i the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can't believe comes from anyting you made inside you.

The smell is, more than anything, like this swimming pool: a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals. The pool has a strong clear blue smell, though you know the smell is never as strong when you are actually in the blue water, as you are now, all swum out, resting back along the shallow end, the hip-high water lapping at where it's all changed.

Around the deck of this old public pool on the western edge of Tucson is a Cyclone fence the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glittering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions' downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops' sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, an EKG of the dying day.

---David Foster Wallace