Daily Grind Of Still Water

Harry Hole, a heavy-drinking policeman with his life in pieces, steps out of line and is transferred to a desk job monitoring resurgent fascist groups. Others are disturbed by the apparent uselessness of the act.But, as the realisation of the loss sets in, the friends come to understand that B’s suicide was an act almost of heroism: my life is mine and mine alone to take. Meanwhile, Kingbitter’s quest for the vanished novel has become complicated; it emerges that B had been conducting an affair with Kingbitter’s companion, Sarah, while Kingbitter himself had flirted brazenly with B’s former wife, a doctor named Judit. Disturbingly, it was from Judit that B had procured sufficient morphine with which to kill himself.Judit’s motives for dispensing the drug remain obscure; Kert? likes the mystery of the unresolved. His novel of the camps, Fatelessness, likewise eschewed trite explanations. Liquidation, suspenseful and bleakly comic, reads like a treatise on the mystery of the end of life and the mystery of suicide.

I found it a compelling if deeply unsettling work.Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi (Vintage) won the Heinemann Award. Madick?ives on the Senegalese island of Niodior, where life goes by on a traditional basis. He hero-worships Italian football star Paolo Maldini, whose progress through the European championship of 2000 he follows on the one television that works. The television’s owner, nicknamed Barb? fuels Madick? dreams of becoming a football success in France with tales of a land of plenty, where “even the ones picking up dog mess on the streets” are wealthy. Barb? however, is a poor braggart, his own experience of France nothing but a series of humiliations at the hands of racist employers. On Niodior, though, Barb?enjoys more authority than Ndetar?the local teacher. Marxist Ndetar?an’t seem to convince Madick?nor his sports-mad pals, that most African footballers are human bone and meal ground up in the cogs of cynical European business interests.

This he illustrates with the tale of Moussa, a talent whose football dreams go sour in a French club, where he is the victim of locker-room racist jibes. Callously dropped, he returns home penniless and drowns himself, unable to endure the bewilderment and scorn of his family.
Ndetar?an’t puncture Madick? enthusiasm, but he has an ally in Salie, Madick? sister and the narrator of Fatou Diome’s novel. Writer Salie, exiled in Strasbourg, will offer her brother a large sum of money, but only if he forgoes football success and opens a shop on Niodior.The Belly of the Atlantic isn’t only immigrant despair. Exiled to Niodior for his politics, Ndetar?inds love with the beautiful Sank?. But as Sank?’s father has promised her to the supposedly successful Barb? the covert affair brings shame on the family, and her love child is drowned in a plastic bag.Elsewhere, Diome takes up African issues such as the pillage of the continent at the hands of the World Bank and other institutions, but she is more angry about the way that backward Islamic patriarchy controls mores and hampers personal development African fertility is a problem, too. When Ndetar?blaming underdevelopment on too many children, says, “even the Pill will have to be introduced in genetically modified rice”, it comes across as only half a joke.Some might contend that the humblest lives can’t turn Africa’s problems around, and that to risk all for a better life abroad among strangers, win or lose, has something noble to it. But Diome seems to argue that only intellectuals like Salie should take the risk.

This didactic novel is entertaining, though, because her writing has undeniable power and wit, well served by the translators Roz Schwartz and Lulu Norman.Gerry Feehily’s novel ‘Fever’ will be published next year by Parthian. On my shelf is the 13th edition (published in 1942) of Begamat ke Aansu, a collection of chronicles of what befell members of the Mughal court during and after the Indian Uprising of 1857. Unrelenting and spare, the book is all the more compelling for its simplicity. Known to several generations of readers of Urdu, and part of oral lore as well, its plain tales of arbitrary punishment, displacement and uprooted lives record the devastation of a thriving culture. They provide a compelling alternative to the views of official historians of the Raj, whose perspectives on the so-called Mutiny are inevitably those of the victorious. Hasan Nizami, author of these chronicles, is only one among the many indigenous and vernacular sources referred to, and often echoed or endorsed, by William Dalrymple in his diligently researched and densely informative new book. Secret archives are now open; collaborators are being exposed.

Norway is generally reckoned to have had a “good war” – gallant resistance, defiant king – with what we tend to think of as the singular exception of the eponymous Quisling. Yet the Norwegian struggle with the darker forces of its Scandinavian heritage is the principal theme in this engrossing yet flawed novel, which cuts back and forth between modern times and the Second World War. We begin with millennial celebrations and the security arrangements for Bill Clinton’s state visit to Norway. The furore surrounding G?r Grass’s war record is symptomatic of the problems arising from the re-examination of recent European history.