Reading list

Recent books: Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Devastating, lyrical, poetic account of three generations of musicians surviving the various disastrous and violent reforms of Twentieth Century
China.

Children of the Revolution. Sad, poignant story of an Ethiopian immigrant eking out a living in a poor Washington, D.C. neighbourhood as it undergoes gentrification.

The Golden Door. A.A. Gill’s compare-contrast essays about the U.S. and the U.K.

All three of these came to me via the literature class that I took at Queen’s, I think I wrote about them at the time of the lectures. I’m going to grab random quotes from two of the books--the first I’ve loaned out.

Sepha, from Ethiopa, has two friends, Kenneth from Kenya and Joseph from the Congo. The latter finds metaphors for Africa in everyday life--chess, sports, poetry. This irks Kenneth who tells Joseph that Joseph would “rather miss it comfortably from here instead of hating it every day from there.”

“Joseph had no response. For once his symbolic grandiloquence was too big even for him. ... (For Joseph) there wasn’t a sport played in the world that couldn’t be better grasped by the African mind. And as for politics, who understood its weight, capriciousness, and value better than the citizens of a continent devastated by coups, and tyrannical old men?”

A.A. Gill’s name is a tribute to his alcoholism and the role AA played in getting him straight. One chapter in his book, prior to him getting sober, is called Moonshine and is about time he spent in Kentucky. “The folk who lived up here lived half on credit and half on hindsight. Their nostalgia was the Scottish kind. ... Scottish nostalgia is all downward-looking; it’s about hardship and sustained disappointment, not overcoming troubles but wrestling them to a standstill. ... The people here were constantly obliged to their community, a belonging that was like predestination: it couldn’t be joined halfway through, and could never be shrugged off. The generations locked together like the teeth of a great mill that ground out the corn of small, brave lives.”

Although he was an excellent writer, I didn’t really enjoy the book. He is a blinkered fan of America, which he found energising and forward looking (Kentuckians aside), compared to a worn out, worn down Europe. A) I don’t think it’s that simple and B) I find the US more morally compromised by failures in its democracy than Europe. I generally find European cities more attractive and interesting than American ones. Also much greener. I read recently about the tons of carbon emissions generated per person in different countries. The ratio was 16.5 for the US, 7 for Europe, 1.5 for India. SUVs, air conditioning, oversized houses. It all adds up.
April 20