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September 30, 2005

GUEST: HAITIAN VACATION, OR HAITIAN DIVORCE

My friend Bill Wright asked me last year, “Why does every damn male novelist feel they have to write a book set in Haiti?” Bill writes nonfiction – easy enough for him (Bill’s new book, out next month I believe, is Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals…fascinating and scary stuff).

Anyway, I hadn’t really thought about it before I set out to write this. My book began with tiny germs, like most of my stuff begins. In this case, I’d been to Haiti, seen some things, wanted to write about it. When a story popped into my head that could use this Haitian cache in my head as a vehicle, I began writing. But yes, there is a healthy Haitian library in the English language, fiction and non. Robert Stone was most recent (although he didn’t call it Haiti) with his Bay of Souls. Greene’s The Comedians, of course, is a classic. Wade Davis’s Serpent and the Rainbow is not to be missed – the book, of course, not the movie. I mention the movie in Voodoo Lounge, but the movie is a horror movie which while fun has nothing to do with the book. Davis’s book is a serious (and extraordinarily well-written) travel through Haiti and Voudun. The work of Edwige Danticat needs, I am sure, no introduction here. She rocks.

As far as I know, there have been only two nonfiction books written about the 1994/95 US occupation of Haiti. Stan Goff’s Hideous Dream (pubbed by Soft Skull) should be read side-by-side with Immaculate Invasion by Bob Shacochis. Together they present a fairly accurate portrayal of the events…but they need to be read together. Goff was a Special Forces master sergeant who was kicked out because he began rebelling against the idiocy of the American mission and chain of command. His book is very telling, very real, and very important, but also a little uneven and perhaps a bit too biased. Shacochis is a good writer and tells a good story, but (as Goff actually points out in his book, but any soldier who read Shacochis’s book could tell you) he fell in love with the troops he was hanging out with and his bias in the other direction lessens what could have been a really brilliant book. Read them both, though, and you’ll walk away with a fairly balanced grip of what went down when the Americans took over Haiti.

Posted at 03:51 AM in Virtual Book Tour |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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