‘A Sunday at the Pool’, etc.

I began reading Gil Courtemanche’s novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (translated from the French by Patricia Claxton) back in September. I picked it up from the Hamrelius bookshop in Malmö, not long before it moved from the Hansa centre to its new location on Stora Nygatan. The book recounts the experiences of Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian film-maker on assignment in Rwanda, ostensibly to work for the barely-functioning state-run TV station, but meanwhile attempting to splice together a film about AIDS. Valcourt is a guest at the Hôtel des Mille-Collines in Kigali, a bubble of luxury in a decidedly third-world city. He observes the obnoxious behaviour of his fellow-expatriates, laments the self-interested attitude of many of the diplomats and aid-workers he meets, makes a few friends among the local (mostly Tutsi) élite, and falls in love with a waitress at the hotel, Gentille, who looks like a Tutsi, but has Hutu blood. These events are played out in an atmosphere of thickening fear and hatred, as Rwanda skids towards the April ‘94 genocide. The book is a fictionalised memoir drawn from its author’s own experiences in Rwanda, and this doubtless serves to intensify its urgency and descriptive power. As a novel, it’s far from perfect, but the appalling, underlying story is told well enough to provide ample distraction from its defects. Despite his grisly subject matter, Courtemanche takes pains to point out, and to celebrate the ferocious, joyous lust-for-life in the Rwandans he knew and loved, and their insistence on living well in the face of poverty, disease and violent death. While I’d hesitate to claim that any book is necessary reading, A Sunday at the Pool merits such a description more than most. It is certainly a strong and a purposeful book.

By way of sharp contrast, there is nothing obviously necessary about Michael Cisco’s novel, The Tyrant, which I started reading at about the same time as A Sunday at the Pool. Indeed it is a splendidly superfluous book, a kind of lavish, unwanted gift. Where A Sunday at the Pool affirms Life in the jaws of death, The Tyrant glorifies Death in spite of life. It is defiantly morbid, and marvellously written in a peculiarly ornate, richly adjectival style that I found very much to my liking. The story concerns a fifteen-year-old girl named Ella, crippled by polio but academically and mediumistically gifted, who is invited to join an unorthodox research program run by the enigmatic Dr Belhoria. This program has as its subject an almost-catatonic patient who nevertheless posseses intensely powerful psychic abilities. The plot is rather weak, but the book is sustained more than anything by a persistent atmosphere of weird unease, skilfully maintained by its author, that unfolds like a succession of interconnected bad dreams. This is a ripe work of dark, literary fantasy that I would warmly recommend to any of you with a taste for this kind of thing.

Most recently, I read the latest of Haruki Murakami’s novels to appear in English, Kafka on the Shore (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel). Well, it won’t officially appear until January, but I was impatient to read the book, and bought an advance proof-copy of it (through abebooks), from a vendor able to overlook the Not for resale blurb on the front cover. The first of the novel’s two converging storylines introduces us to Kafka Temura, a 15-year-old boy who runs away from his home in Tokyo to a seaside town in southern Japan. The second storyline follows the adventures of Nakata, a man in his sixties, who, since a mysterious incident in his childhood, has been a simpleton (albeit a good-natured one). Alas, having gone to such trouble to obtain this book, and having paid a little over the odds for it, I was rather disappointed by it. The usual complement of fascinating weirdness introduced by Murakami’s deployment of supernatural incidents and individuals, is shadowed by a more awkward, and perhaps unintentional strangeness - the story’s flow seems forced in places, and the main narrative voice, Kafka’s, sounds a little too much like a man in his fifties unsuccessfully re-imagining life from a teenager’s point-of-view. The book has a discordant tone about it that I don’t recall sensing in any other of Murakami’s novels. Despite this off-key feel, it’s still an involving and readable tale, but I for one enjoyed it much less than I did Sputnik Sweetheart, say, or the stories in the collection After The Quake.