Sphinx, by Anne Garréta

Sphinx was the next selection for my Women In Translation book club. It is touted as, among other things, the first novel by a woman writer from Oulipo to be translated into English. I've read books by a handful of Oulipo members: Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino, but before this one I'm not sure I'd read a book written specifically with an Oulipian constraint. If on a Winter's Night A Traveler would be the closest, and I can't tell (in a very rushed search at least) whether it's considered "official" Oulipo canon. 

I'm going to be very vague as I write about Sphinx, out of respect for the introduction of my copy, written by Daniel Levin Becker, which advises the reader who does not already know the unspoken constraint in Sphinx "to do everything in your power to stay ignorant for a while longer: sheathe the front and back covers of the book in kraft paper, avoid discussing it with booksellers, and don't read any reviews unless you're confident that they were written by lousy inattentive critics.*" (Fwiw, the front cover of my edition is harmless; the back cover not.) And, with this injunction to say little, I fear I won't be able to say much at all. 

I did like the book quite a bit. I somehow expected it to be a slow or difficult read – it was not, at all. It's a first person narrative about love, and loss, and grief, and coming to terms with loss eventually. It's also about the one-sidedness of relationships, how we can sometimes fail to really see the people we love. This part spoke to me especially. 

The translator's note at the end is a must-read as well. The book was written with a constraint that manifests differently in French than in English. The translator's explanation of how she handled this was fascinating (at least to me).

*This last is a jab at the reviewer who read Perec's La Disparition and failed to notice the complete absence of Es.

The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen

I thought the Elizabeth Bowen recommendation came from Molly Young's newsletter, Read Like the Wind, and perhaps it did – but if so it must have been one of the "Why Don't You..." suggestions, because I can't seem to find her mentioned elsewhere. In any case, I picked up The Heat of the Day as well as The Death of the Heart some time ago. Last month, I was in Baltimore for the day with my dad where we met up with one of my oldest friends and drove around looking at different neighborhoods and visiting various bookstores. As we browsed the fiction shelves at Normal's, my friend pulled down a copy of The Heat of the Day. "Hey, I have that book and I keep almost reading it," I said. This friend was part of one of the book clubs that I joined during the pandemic; a book club that recently sort of fizzled out. And so, we thought, why not revive the book club and read this? I heard from my friend that she started the book in late June. Meanwhile, I was traveling for 2 weeks and not reading much. And furthermore, we hadn't actually set a date to read it by or, as far as I know, communicated to anyone else that it was the new book club selection. But, in any case, I went ahead and started it last week and finished it this afternoon. 

It's odd that this book is called The Heat of the Day when nearly all of it seems to take place at night – and in mid- to late Fall at that. There is, I thought, mostly a sense of chill throughout this book. Set in London in the midst of World War II, the book bears witness to the falling away of social norms and constraints as those who remain in the city live through the bombings, the constant fear that a loved one will be killed, the decay of trust. The book mainly centers on Stella, a widow of about 40, who has been told that her lover Robert, a slightly younger former Captain wounded at Dunkirk, has been accused of giving secrets to the enemy. We are with her in her dilemma, unsure what to believe. Other characters, the man who has made the accusation, Stella's son – a young soldier, a young woman named Louie who chances to meet the accuser, float in and out of the book, often on tangents unrelated to the main narrative. Or, perhaps, Stella and her lover are not the main narrative at all. Rather, it's wartime London and these are the characters that inhabit it.

The Fortune of the Rougons, by Émile Zola

It was several years ago now that I decided I wanted to read Émile Zola's 20-book Rougon-Macquart series. I had already read two of them (Au Bonheur des Dames and Nana), but I wanted to start at the beginning and read the whole series in the recommended order. For years, I collected the editions one by one as I found them at bookstores, but there were a handful that never seemed to turn up on shelves. In February of this year, I decided to just order the six books I was still missing directly from Oxford University Press. With all 20 books in hand, it still took me a few months to finally start the whole thing. La Fortune des Rougon was both the first published and the first in Zola's recommended reading order. 

The series follows a split family as it branches out over five generations. This book detailed the origin of the divide: Adélaïde Fouque, a/k/a Aunt Dide, married M. Rougon, had one son with him, and was then widowed. Following Rougon's death, she took up with M. Macquart, without marrying him, and with him had a son and a daughter. Though the three children grow up together, when they reach adulthood Pierre Rougon, who sees himself as the only deserving heir, cheats his siblings out of the wealth they might of inherited and distances himself from his mother. While the entire family history is told in this book, it's not exactly what the book is about. The main subject of the book is one week in December of 1851, as Republicans mobilize in the south of France and the bourgeois reactionaries try to seize power in the fictional village of Plassans. The divide in the family reflects the divide in the country, with some family members supporting and joining up with the Republican cause and others supporting the coup that led to the Second Empire. 

Nearly all the characters in this book are scheming and selfish, particularly Aunt Dide's two sons. A pair of young, idealistic Republican martyrs (one of whom is the grandson of M. Macquart) are the only heroes in this book, with Aunt Dide as practically the only other sympathetic character. Doctor Pascal was also an outlier, which made me look forward to reading the book about him (a long time from now, I'm afraid, as it's book number 20).

While I enjoyed parts of this book, it was also kind of a struggle to read. It's rather disjointed because it seems to be taking on two tasks at once: (1) introducing the entire back story and cast of characters for the 20 book series, and (2) telling the story of this particular struggle during 1951. It does a good job of both, but they don't really blend together. The book starts with a short history of a particular spot in Plassans where two young lovers meet (the martyrs mentioned above), then follows these lovers as they join the Republican uprising. That's chapter one. After that, we meet Pierre Rougon, and from there the book goes on what is, in essence, an extremely long aside on the entire family history and members of the extended family. Then, 100 pages or so later, it picks up the narrative again of the events in 1951. I imagine that the long aside will be helpful to understanding the whole series -- and indeed, it was helpful for understanding the family dynamics in this book -- but it felt largely outside the main narrative. 

Anyway, next up is His Excellency Eugene Rougon. Eugene is the eldest son of Pierre and a supporter of the Empire, and I gather it picks up in the early days of the Second Empire, so I assume it will involve more selfish scheming. I won't be jumping right into it, but hopefully I'll get there before long.

Think Again, by Adam Grant

As anyone who follows my reading at all knows, this is not my usual type of book. Think Again was selected by my company for our work book club. The book club started during the pandemic, and I haven't participated before now. I hadn't intended to participate this time, but two things motivated me to give it a go: (1) this book was selected by a consulting firm we're using to help with our DEI efforts and I do DEI work at my company; and (2) I happened to find an advance reader copy at my local Little Free Library. 

I have to admit I have a bias against this type of book (whatever it is; the back of the review copy categorizes it as "Business & Economics—Motivational), but I enjoyed reading this more than I expected to. The only other time I've read books that I would describe as broadly in this category was in grad school (specifically this book), where I had a similar experience. For one thing, it was easy to read. It served as a surprisingly nice break from the heavy novel I was reading. I'll also confess that while reading this book, I did sometimes reflect on my own willingness (or lack thereof) to rethink my assumptions from time to time. I wouldn't describe myself as the most open-minded person; I'm aware of at least some of my biases, and I'm not always willing to check them. (I do make an active effort to reflect on and explore my biases when it comes to people, but less so my biases when it comes to, say, books like this one. I'm not apologetic when it comes to some of my opinions, and I don't believe I should be.)

The book makes a distinction—one that I actually think is important—about not conflating your values with your opinions or beliefs. You can stay true to your values, but change your opinions and beliefs as you get new information. The idea of reflecting on your values and your beliefs, and understanding that your beliefs may evolve, is a good one. But despite the emphasis on values, the book spent little time talking about them; its focus was on the changeability of opinions and beliefs. The book rankled me when it sometimes seemed to imply a sort of equivalence between various positions on a topic. There's a section devoted to predictions that particularly bugged me. It talked about how predictors improved their predictions by regularly reassessing them and not getting too attached to their original prediction. The predictions in question were mostly about presidential elections. The emphasis of the whole argument was on how to predict better, with the accuracy of the prediction being given more weight than the outcome of the election. (Granted, I do see that with better predictions, perhaps there are actions that could be taken to affect the outcome—it just felt like the whole emphasis was on the wrong thing.) Similarly, a section about getting people with opposing views to reach some level of mutual respect and possibly even agreement, the topics are things where I don't think mutual respect or agreement should be the goal. This reaction of mine is precisely what the book is trying to dismantle, but when Grant came out with a suggestion that, for instance, people on opposite sides of the case for the death penalty might reach some agreement, my own defenses shot up because I don't see this as a place where there is any center that I could move toward: the government should not be in the business of killing people. 

On Father's Day morning, while hanging out with my dad in West Philadelphia, I was telling him about the book. It really wasn't about diversity, I said. I thought it had been recommended to our company with a particular audience in mind: old white guys. We can all get stuck in our beliefs and ways sometimes, but it seemed to me that what the book was counseling: breaking cycles of overconfidence, practicing humility, and even (seriously) the benefits of impostor syndrome, was not a message for the marginalized. When, for instance, lack of humility is a criticism frequently leveled at Black athletes (and Black people celebrating their own greatness generally), this advice can sound dangerously close to the rhetoric white people have been preaching forever. Women and others who have experienced impostor syndrome know that one effect is that might make one work harder (which is, in effect, the supposed benefit touted in the book). It's a truth that's become a cliché that Black people have to be twice as good to do half as well as white people in America. This isn't to say that humble self-reflection couldn't benefit everyone, but the message of this book seems calibrated to people who have not been told their whole lives to know their place.

Sweet & Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah; The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai

Aside from Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s, I wasn't much aware of Italian colonial presence in Africa. What I remembered from the African history class I took in college was that Italy tried and failed to colonize Ethiopia in the nineteenth century – putting Ethiopia among the only two countries on the continent not to be colonized during the European division of Africa. What I had only faintly remembered was that Italy did have other colonies in East Africa, so I was surprised when reading Sweet & Sour Milk to find signs of a lingering Italian influence in Somalia. In the book, which takes place decades after the end of the Italian control, the central characters were educated in Italy; another is half Italian, half Somali; Italian restaurants populate Mogadishu (which is spelled the Italian way in the book: Mogadiscio).

Sweet & Sour Milk is the first book in a trilogy called Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. It centers on Loyaan, whose twin brother Soyaan has been murdered; poisoned, he suspects, by the government. Soyaan worked for the dictatorship, but wrote memoranda critical of the General in charge. And yet, on his death, the government claims him as its own and celebrates him as a hero, a martyr who died serving his country. This, it turns out, is the most effective way of neutralizing and undermining everything Soyaan worked for. Loyaan risks his own life and others' to bring out the truth about his brother, how he died and who he really was. He doesn't know whom to trust, while Soyaan's former allies don't know whether their friend in fact betrayed them. This is a beautifully written and heartrending book.

I found The Great Believers in a Little Free Library by my apartment. I knew it had received much acclaim when it came out a couple years ago, but I didn't know anything else about it. I took it with me on a recent trip, thinking I might be in the mood for something different than Sweet & Sour Milk. As I always seem to do when traveling, I carried both books with me and barely touched either. I did start The Great Believers on the flight home and I finished it three days later. (It is, as the cover promises, a page-turner.) The book alternates between events in 1985 in Chicago's gay community just as AIDS is taking root and beginning to kill people off, and Paris in 2015 where the younger sister of one of the young men killed by AIDS back then has come to reconnect with her daughter and finds herself retreading some of her past. This book came out in 2018, but it was interesting to read it with post-pandemic eyes. Now and then during the current pandemic I would come across comparisons to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and reading this book crystalized some of the parallels I hadn't seen clearly before. 

Dance of the Jakaranda, by Peter Kimani

It was my mother who recommended Dance of the Jakaranda to me. I think she discovered it at the library. I started reading it after finishing Ambiguous Adventure and The Gloaming with the idea that I'd stay in Africa for a bit. But then I interrupted my reading twice to read other books; books not connected to Africa. 

Dance of the Jakaranda is set in Kenya, in two distinct periods: just after the turn of the century during the construction of the railroad from Mombasa to a port on Lake Victoria, and in 1963 on the eve of Kenyan independence. It could certainly be described as a multigenerational family drama, though oddly the generation in the middle is mostly absent from the book. The book centers on Babu, a worker from Punjab who came to Kenya to work on the railroad, and on his grandson Rajan, a popular singer. Events that took place in Babu's young life have effects that only become clear 60 years later.

The role of race, particularly as it was used during British colonial rule to pit its subjects against one another, is a central theme. One of the things this book did really well was remind me of the way Empire created new and frequently shifting routes and lands. In this respect, it reminded me a bit of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy. While I was on some level aware of it, I remember those books – particularly Sea of Poppies – really driving home the realization that movement wasn't just two way: from and to Europe/the West/the center of colonial power. The Ibis books are set several decades before Dance of the Jakaranda, but the boat at the center of the book (the titular Ibis) is transporting laborers from India to Africa, and has crew members hailing from Baltimore to southeast Asia. The characters in Dance of the Jakaranda are living through the waning of the British Empire and the changing maps that resulted. Babu came to Kenya from Punjab but at the time of Kenyan independence he's stateless.

I'd read five other Kenyan novels before this one, but all my the same author*: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (who actually blurbed this and is thanked in the acknowledgements). Two of the Ngũgĩ books I've read actually cover the same period (the eve of independence), but – the Ngũgĩ endorsement aside – Peter Kimani is from a different generation and it was good to read a different voice.

* This is true for me for a lot of countries: I've read 3 Turkish novels, all by Orhan Pamuk; 3 Salvadoran novels, all by Horacio Castellanos Moya; 3 Nigerian novels, all by Chinua Achebe; 3 Portuguese novels, all by José Saramago. There are some pairs too, but I won't list them. Anyway, it's hardly my top priority, but I do sometimes ask myself: should I be letting one author stand in for a nation?

Death of an Englishman, by Magdalen Nabb

Yesterday I went on a 5 mile walk. Ostensibly, my purpose was to pick up some film I'd dropped off at a darkroom that's a bit more than 2 miles away from my home. After I'd done that, I decided to visit BIG Reuse, a sort of mega thrift store that mostly sells appliances and furniture but also has a surprisingly large and well-organized book section. If you cut out just that corner of the store, it would be a pretty decent stand-alone used bookstore. Along with Magdalen Nabb's Death of an Englishman, I picked up The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble and I was especially excited to find a very nice edition of The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth. (They also had a copy of his The Emperor's Tomb, which I seriously considered buying but it was the older translation rather than the 2013 Michael Hofmann translation and I didn't quite trust it.) When I finished my shopping at BIG Reuse I'd been on my feet for probably two hours. I thought I might just catch the subway home, but I really didn't feel like getting on the subway. My feet were hurting badly. I'm sure I'm not alone in this: during the pandemic, my feet have become unaccustomed to nearly all my shoes and I keep discovering shoes I once considered comfortable are no longer comfortable. So, by some twisted logic, I decided to keep walking and to visit a shoe store that I like that was about a mile further on. I got to the store and bought a pair of sneakers (time will tell if they'll be comfortable for long haul walks, but I'm optimistic). I considered wearing them out, but from there it was just a few more blocks to a bus I could take home, so I thought I'd be okay (having endured three hours on my feet already at that point). However, when I got to the bus stop my transit app said the bus was 25 minutes away. Another bus that would also take me home was just another half mile on, so I kept walking. At the second bus stop, I sat down in the bus shelter, where the other woman sitting there told me she'd been waiting for an hour. (I don't know what was up with the Brooklyn buses yesterday!) Luckily, I only had to wait about ten minutes. Because in my mind I was just going out for a walk, I'd left the house pretty much empty handed; just my phone and keys and a tote bag to bring my negatives home in. Before leaving, I thought about bringing the book I was reading, but I didn't want to carry more than I had to. 

When the bus is running an hour behind, you know you have a long ride ahead of you even once it arrives. There will be people waiting at every stop, and people who need to get off at every stop. I had gotten on at the first stop, so was fortunate to get a seat before the inevitable rush, but I knew it would probably be close to an hour before I got home. (I could have been home in probably 20 minutes if I'd decided to take the subway rather than the bus, and I truly can't account for my decision; I have a weird partiality to the bus.) Fortunately, though I hadn't brought my own book, I had picked up three books while I was out. Being that I was already in the middle (nearing the end, in fact) of another book, I thought I should start the book I would likely finish fastest – the Magdalen Nabb was the obvious choice.

I'd read one other book from the Marshal Guarnaccia series back in 2016, but I was pleased to find that Death of an Englishman was the first book of the series because I've accumulated a few of the others over the years with the intention of starting from the beginning. (A bias of mine that I have written about before.) Set in Florence, circa 1980 this book describes an Italy that is still feeling the effects of the postwar period. I'm much more familiar with the period in the two decades or so following the end of World War II (in fact, I'm much more familiar still with the decade or so before the war than I am with the decades after), and I was surprised in this book to find those kind of aftershocks still present. The mass migration of the poor from the south of Italy to the north (and beyond into other parts of Europe) is subtly at the center of this book. (Now, sometimes, things go the other way. In Sardegna, I met a cameriere who came from Liguria to work there in the season.) Magdalen Nabb was an English expat living in Florence, and she likes to poke fun and the English and the Italians – and, at the center, how the two cultures are foreign to one another.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong

I'd seen a handful of people I knew post about Minor Feelings on social media, and I suppose that's how I came to be aware of it. I'm not sure why I remember this particular post so distinctly, but I specifically remember one acquaintance posting a photo of her hand holding the book on a plane, so it must have been before the start of the pandemic in the U.S., and so it also must have been just after the book was released. I made a mental note. A few weeks ago my father was visiting and on a stroll through Crown Heights we came across a stack of books on a stoop. My dad is always on the lookout for books, so we stopped to look. Several were ARCs or review copies, which I usually avoid. (When I was younger, I used to love getting my hands on galleys; they made me feel like an insider. But somewhere along the line I lost interest in that feeling, and at the same time started to be put off by the incompleteness of galleys, the low quality cover images, the missing pieces.) But seeing Minor Feelings, I decided to grab it even though it was an ARC. In fact, there's also a certain upside to books that I don't care about as objects. Last month, I took a trip and brought two books with me: this and Senselessness (my edition of which, as I mentioned when I wrote about it, is terribly marked up). I thought if I read them and finished them while I was away, I wouldn't mind leaving them behind. (Of course, as it turned out – as it nearly always turns out when I bring books on trips – I didn't read either, and I brought both back home with me.)

This weekend, I went on another trip. I took the train to upstate New York to spend Mothers' Day with my mom. I was only going to be away for about 24 hours, but it's a two-hour train ride each way, plus another hour or nearly an hour on the subway to and from Penn Station, and I do sometimes read when I'm at my mom's house, so – to be safe – I thought I had better bring a second book in addition to the book I was already reading. On the train up, I read one chapter of the novel I was reading and found I wasn't really in the mood, so I switched and read a couple chapters of Minor Feelings instead. On the train back, I read a few more chapters, and on the subway home from Penn another chapter still. By the time I got off the subway, I had just 50 pages left to read. I was just two chapters short of being able to leave it behind at the Tiny Free Library between the subway and my apartment (though having carried it upstate and back, those last three blocks can hardly be called an additional burden). I got home and hoped to finish it before an evening meeting, but I was still 10 pages shy of the end when I had to set it aside to take my call. I finally read the last few pages around 9:00 last night.

Minor Feelings is divided into seven chapters, each of which is or is almost a stand-alone essay. There are threads that weave through the whole book, but also some of the essays seem to stand so much on their own that they forget or don't acknowledge they're part of a larger book. (This isn't really a criticism of the essays; just something that I noticed in reading them back to back to back.) A couple of them are really wonderful. I was particularly struck by the chapter called "Portrait of an Artist" about the artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her book Dictee is one I remember seeing around from my time working in bookstores more than 20 years ago; that must have been around the time of its re-release. I read an article about her again much more recently and decided to seek out a copy of Dictee. I've had it for about a year now, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Hong's exploration into Cha's murder, her insistence on telling the story (and her interrogation into why it hadn't been told), was eye-opening. The chapters called "Stand Up" and "Bad English" also really stood out for me. In the chapter called "An Education" Hong goes deeply into friendships she had at Oberlin College, where it seems she and I must have overlapped. She mentions having attended Oberlin in the first chapter, but it was only when I got to "An Education" that I seemed to remember having heard earlier that she went there, and now I see that we're the same age. There was a passing mention in that chapter of someone I immediately recognized from my own time there, and suddenly I realize that we must know some of the same people. Her two friends, who have been anonymized, must have known my closest friend while I was there who, like Hong's friends, was a woman of color and art major (a department, as Hong points out, that was dominated by white men). I spent three miserable semesters at Oberlin before dropping out, and reading this chapter brought back everything I hated about it. I couldn't read it from any distance.

The particular strengths of the individual essays aside, this book feels important because of its voice. The titular "Asian American reckoning" has been a long time coming. The idea that Asian Americans are doing just fine has been belied in the last year with the dramatic rise in violence against Asian Americans, but I don't think it's changed the sense that Asian Americans don't face the same challenges that other people of color in the U.S. do. This is something I've seen up close in my professional life. Years ago, when I was in grad school, I remember a conversation about diversity in which a professor of mine actually said out loud, "We don't have to worry about Asians; they're doing even better than white people." I was furious, but struck dumb. I went home that day and found all kinds of data to dismantle my professor's statement and I typed it up coolly into a short little essay and shared it with her and my whole class. She never responded. That was 2012, but I still come across that attitude regularly. In the field I work in, Asian Americans are overrepresented, relative to their population in the U.S. There's a widespread belief that we don't have "to worry" about Asian Americans in our diversity efforts. But even as they're "overrepresented" in the field, taking that representation into account, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership roles. And furthermore, Asian Americans aren't equally represented; the group of people who can be described as Asian American is incredibly diverse, and the wealth and education gap within that group of people is huge and persistent. This book speaks with a fury that was absolutely refreshing. I'd like to send a copy to my old professor.

The Gloaming, by Melanie Finn

I wrote a little about how I ended up purchasing The Gloaming back when I wrote about Seeing People Off. Having finished it today, I just went back to the Two Dollar Radio site and purchased both other Melanie Finn books they publish (they have a great deal they call the "Double Exposure Sale" where you get a steep discount when you buy two books by the same author, but I would have been happy to pay full price based solely on how much I loved The Gloaming! Actually, just check out all their sales; I'm sure it will be worth your while.) 

I almost don't know what to say about this book. It was astounding and beautifully crafted. It centers on Pilgrim, who has been left by her husband for another woman, and who was the driver in a deadly car accident in a Swiss town where she has no connections. In the wake of these events, she leaves for Tanzania on what can only be described as a whim. She takes up residence in a remote village on the Kenyan border, but trouble seems to follow her. The Gloaming is suspenseful and filled with an ominousness that leaves the reader right on the edge of doubt, wondering if the apparent threats to Pilgrim are real, or if the sense of a threat is a product of her own guilt and grief. The book takes several unexpected turns, and just continually hovers in this place where you don't have quite a firm grasp on what is real – in the most wonderful way. It's incredible.

Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane

When I reorganized my fiction collection early on in the pandemic, putting my books in order by the author's birth year, I discovered that Cheikh Hamidou Kane was the oldest living author in my collection. I think I must have done the reorganization right around the time I read The Dark Child by Camara Laye because I remember thinking I should read Ambiguous Adventure just after finishing The Dark Child. It took me a year to get around to it. The two authors sit right next to one another on my shelf; both were born in 1928 in villages of what was then French West Africa, Laye three months earlier (if Wikipedia is to be trusted*) in the interior of modern-day Guinea and Cheikh Hamidou in the far northeast of present-day Senegal. But while Laye has been dead for more than 40 years, Cheikh Hamidou is evidently still alive (and well I hope!) in Senegal. 

Besides their age and relative proximity, there are some parallels between the stories in The Dark Child and Ambiguous Adventure – and some interesting contrasts. Both are coming-of-age stories of boys born in villages where they receive their early education before going to modern colonial schools, and eventually to France. The Dark Child is more strictly a memoir an ends before Laye arrives in France, while Ambigious Adventure covers its protagonist's time in France, as well as his return to Africa. But the more interesting difference is their childhood experiences. Laye came of age in a village where traditional African religion was practiced. While he did attend French school, the influence of the colonial authority feels remote in his book. Cheikh Hamidou's protagonist was raised in a strict African-Islamic community, and the tension between the local traditional education and what is being offered by the colonial schools is the first example of the fundamental tension that runs through the whole book. When the protagonist begins his studies at the French school and particularly after he leaves for France, he begins to feel cut off from his childhood and his faith. His detachment can't be repaired, even by his return home.

While Laye and Cheikh Hamidou are only five years younger than the great Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène**, there's an important generational difference that came up in Ambiguous Adventure. Sembène, who was born in 1923, left Senegal in 1944 and fought in a colonial infantry regiment during World War II. In Ambiguous Adventure, there are Africans who have returned after having fought in the war. The stories from those who, like Sembène, went away and returned contributed to the local understanding of France and the larger world. Sembène left again to live in France in 1946, and only returned to Senegal when it became independent in 1960. After his education at La Sorbonne, Cheikh Hamidou returned to Senegal in 1959 as part of the French overseas government, and on Senegalese independence quickly rose in the Senegalese government***. Laye, for his part, returned to Africa in 1956 and to Guinea when it became independent in 1958, where he too became a government official.

* I only question this because Laye's birth date is listed as January 1, and when I looked up Ousmane Sembène's birth date, which is also listed as January 1 (though 1923 in his case) it gave me some pause, but perhaps they really were both New Year's babies.

** As an aside, I feel very fortunate to have gotten to see Ousmane Sembène in person in his lifetime. I guess he did an American tour on the release of his film Faat Kiné. I saw him introduce it with a Q&A at the Harvard Film Archive when I was living in Boston in 2001 or 2002, though I didn't get around to actually reading one of his books (God's Bits of Wood) until 2018.

*** If you want to know anything at all about Cheikh Hamidou Kane, I hope you read French because his English-language Wikipedia page is 3 sentences long. Camara Laye's and Ousmane Sembène's French Wikipedia pages were also somewhat more helpful than their English-language counterparts.