More Treasurers; I Love Used Bookstores!
They recently opened a used bookstore in the Country Plaza Mall in Carmichael, right where Gottschalks is located (my reason for visiting the mall). The first time I browsed in the bookstore I didn't find anything likable, but I prices looked good, 99 cents for most paperbacks and $1.99 for hard covers. This is even better than Goodwill.
So I went back to the bookstore today, and, what do you know, I found Before the Birth of the Moon by V.Y. Mudimbe, a paperback, so you know what I paid. I have known Mudimbe as a historian, philosopher, critic, but not as a novelist. But he has written more than four novels in French.
Sometimes when we talk about African literature, those of us from Anglophone Africa tend to think only of African lit in English, forgetting that we have works that were published in French at the same time Things Fall Apart came out. Anyway, I now know Mudimbe is a novelist and a poet too.
According to the blurb, Before the Birth of the Moon is a story of romance of a statesman and a prostitute caught in a web of sincere lies [as opposed to insencere lies?] and manipulations...set in Kinshasa, Zaire....[It] lays bare the consciousness of post-colonial Africa."
Oh, earlier I had passed by Goodwill where I got a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I like that it is about a father and a son, journeying through America. As a father I can relate, and my son and I discuss literature often (he's twelve). A colleague of mine said the book is a quick read, a bit unconventional but it makes exceptional use of fragments. Fragments; okay, I always tolerate them in artistic works, but don't try to use them in your college composition course!
I also got a copy of Waiting, by Ha Jin. he has won awards like the National Book Award, and recently I read something of his, perhaps a short story in one of Best American short story collections. Yes, it was a short story about a Professor who got arrested in a small town of China because he had been provoked the police by doing, as far as I could tell from the story, nothing. You watch him becoming more useless and desparate by the minute, and the young lawyer who is sent to rescue him is tied to a tree and thrashed for bragging about his being a lawyer to the police. But when the professor is released, he makes sure he spreads some type contagious disease that will kill a lot of people. Then the story ends and you are thinking, is this right? But that I can remember the story means that it won my heart, a criteria that most editors use to determine if they should accept or reject a story. But I have the feeling that it was written before the novel Waiting, and after reading such a powerful story, what agent would ignore Ha Jin's work?
I love first sentences, and here is Waiting's prologue: "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Waiting was published by Vintage International in 1999.
The biggest discovery of the day was Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, which is 768 pages long. I had a taste of Silko's writing when I was a graduate teaching assistant in a class called American Identities in which the more than 90 students read five authors representing the ethnic groups of the United States, not all of them, of course. Silko represented Native American literature, and the students read Storyteller. That's when fell in love with Native American literature for its relatability to some aspects of African literature. Someone then recommended that I read Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. I got Ceremony alright, but I looked everywhere (my everywhere) for Almanac but could not find it....until today, when I was not looking for it, for $1.99.
Larry McMurty described this novel as "a brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. In a long dialectic, tinted with genius and compelled by a just anger, Leslie Silko dramatizes the often desperate struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep...the core of their cultures...."
Good books, which have to wait until I am done with One Hundred Years of Solitude and the other five or so books I am reading already.
So I went back to the bookstore today, and, what do you know, I found Before the Birth of the Moon by V.Y. Mudimbe, a paperback, so you know what I paid. I have known Mudimbe as a historian, philosopher, critic, but not as a novelist. But he has written more than four novels in French.
Sometimes when we talk about African literature, those of us from Anglophone Africa tend to think only of African lit in English, forgetting that we have works that were published in French at the same time Things Fall Apart came out. Anyway, I now know Mudimbe is a novelist and a poet too.
According to the blurb, Before the Birth of the Moon is a story of romance of a statesman and a prostitute caught in a web of sincere lies [as opposed to insencere lies?] and manipulations...set in Kinshasa, Zaire....[It] lays bare the consciousness of post-colonial Africa."
Oh, earlier I had passed by Goodwill where I got a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I like that it is about a father and a son, journeying through America. As a father I can relate, and my son and I discuss literature often (he's twelve). A colleague of mine said the book is a quick read, a bit unconventional but it makes exceptional use of fragments. Fragments; okay, I always tolerate them in artistic works, but don't try to use them in your college composition course!
I also got a copy of Waiting, by Ha Jin. he has won awards like the National Book Award, and recently I read something of his, perhaps a short story in one of Best American short story collections. Yes, it was a short story about a Professor who got arrested in a small town of China because he had been provoked the police by doing, as far as I could tell from the story, nothing. You watch him becoming more useless and desparate by the minute, and the young lawyer who is sent to rescue him is tied to a tree and thrashed for bragging about his being a lawyer to the police. But when the professor is released, he makes sure he spreads some type contagious disease that will kill a lot of people. Then the story ends and you are thinking, is this right? But that I can remember the story means that it won my heart, a criteria that most editors use to determine if they should accept or reject a story. But I have the feeling that it was written before the novel Waiting, and after reading such a powerful story, what agent would ignore Ha Jin's work?
I love first sentences, and here is Waiting's prologue: "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Waiting was published by Vintage International in 1999.
The biggest discovery of the day was Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, which is 768 pages long. I had a taste of Silko's writing when I was a graduate teaching assistant in a class called American Identities in which the more than 90 students read five authors representing the ethnic groups of the United States, not all of them, of course. Silko represented Native American literature, and the students read Storyteller. That's when fell in love with Native American literature for its relatability to some aspects of African literature. Someone then recommended that I read Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. I got Ceremony alright, but I looked everywhere (my everywhere) for Almanac but could not find it....until today, when I was not looking for it, for $1.99.
Larry McMurty described this novel as "a brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. In a long dialectic, tinted with genius and compelled by a just anger, Leslie Silko dramatizes the often desperate struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep...the core of their cultures...."
Good books, which have to wait until I am done with One Hundred Years of Solitude and the other five or so books I am reading already.
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