Been thinking about this book after I read it a few years ago. Personally the “plagiarism” claims are the least interesting (and I lean towards it being a beyond brilliant collage, or just novel in its own right) ones to me. So when the discussion, like here, centers on that, I feel like it robs the book yet again. But I suppose that has to be talked about.
When discussing the book itself, one can see why many hated it.
“And Bound to Violence is shockingly negative in its derisive descriptions of pre-colonial west Africa. Bucking the trend of its contemporaneous postcolonial writing, it notoriously attacks Négritude, specifically its purely positive representations of African culture, to the extent that Senegal’s poet president Leopold Senghor described it as “appalling”. ”
Indeed, the one other person who had read it, mentioned that to me. As if it were meant to say okay to European colonialism. It would seem that many people in today’s world, like yesterday, want simple stories instead of something more nuanced and closer to the truth. Indeed, more so than many other books of its time, it does seem closer to truth in in turn seems to have better predicted how easy it was for many revolutions in Africa to be betrayed.
I think that and it’s sarcastic look at almost all of humanity and its cruelty really lends the book a lot of the weight that it manages to gain (in my mind at least) and makes it one of the best books of the previous century. Good enough that I will reread it soon.
Anyone else read this book? What were your thoughts?
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Been thinking about this book after I read it a few years ago. Personally the “plagiarism” claims are the least interesting (and I lean towards it being a beyond brilliant collage, or just novel in its own right) ones to me. So when the discussion, like here, centers on that, I feel like it robs the book yet again. But I suppose that has to be talked about.
When discussing the book itself, one can see why many hated it.
“And Bound to Violence is shockingly negative in its derisive descriptions of pre-colonial west Africa. Bucking the trend of its contemporaneous postcolonial writing, it notoriously attacks Négritude, specifically its purely positive representations of African culture, to the extent that Senegal’s poet president Leopold Senghor described it as “appalling”. ”
Indeed, the one other person who had read it, mentioned that to me. As if it were meant to say okay to European colonialism. It would seem that many people in today’s world, like yesterday, want simple stories instead of something more nuanced and closer to the truth. Indeed, more so than many other books of its time, it does seem closer to truth in in turn seems to have better predicted how easy it was for many revolutions in Africa to be betrayed.
I think that and it’s sarcastic look at almost all of humanity and its cruelty really lends the book a lot of the weight that it manages to gain (in my mind at least) and makes it one of the best books of the previous century. Good enough that I will reread it soon.
Anyone else read this book? What were your thoughts?