...thus prompted, the audience shouts "So what have you been reading?"
Well, since you asked... I can't recommend highly enough this translation of Dante's Inferno. The book's format is what really made it for me – the side-by-side original and translation allowed me to exercise my feeble Italian skills, and capture at least an echo of the feel of the original; and the incredibly thorough line-by-line notes at the end of each canto eliminated the tedious flip-to-the-back-of-the-book-and-back routine that endnotes impose. And the notes themselves, as I said, are incredibly thorough. (Hollander & Co.'s translation of Purgatorio is quite tasty, as well.)
But wait, there's more! Impelled by forces that I myself can't explain, I've been working my way through Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time duodecology — yes, that's right, twelve, count 'em, twelve volumes of mid-20th Century upper-middle-class British ennui. I can honestly say I am not enjoying it; after the first two volumes, I thought, "This is the literary equivalent of eating uncooked dry oatmeal." After the third (The Acceptance World), I revised my simile to "uncooked dry oatmeal with a nice ripe strawberry sliced in". With three more volumes down (I'm now on The Valley of Bones), the former, pre-strawberry version is becoming more accurate again. Reading the encomia that the series has received, I can only conclude that the praisers are reading a different series, or have seriously different ideas about what qualifies as "brilliant literary comedy". There is comedy here in the same homeopathic quantities as there is vermouth in an extra-dry martini. And yet I persist...
But I have to take breaks, and I just finished Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari. Nobody writes travel like Theroux; his The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific managed to catch, absolutely perfectly, the experience of living on a Pacific island, even though depression occasionaly clouded his judgement (we found New Zealand a much happier place than he did, for example).
Theroux spent time in Malawi as a Peace Corps worker, and in Uganda as a faculty member; Dark Star Safari is a record, in part, of his return to those places some forty years on to visit old friends and see old haunts. His main discovery is that all his work was for naught; the institutions he helped staff are crumbling away, the projects he aided abandoned and forgotten. Though I've never been to the places Theroux goes to in this book, the descriptions resonate to anyone with experience with third world governments:
You could not spend a more wasted day than in an office of the Tanzanian government... This waste of time suggested what might be wrong. Tanzanians complained of unemployment -- in the capital almost half the adults had no jobs. But those with jobs did next to nothing, if the Office of Immigration was anything to go by. I had my passport, my fifty U.S. dollars in cash, my filled-out application for a tourist visa, and I stood the requisite hour in line. I was no one special. Everyone else in line was encountering the same obstacles in the open-plan office of twenty employees: apathy, then rudeness, and finally hostility.The crowd I was among just watched and waited. The office was dirty, the desks messy: one civil servant was eating a hunk of cake; another one, a woman with curlers in her hair, was reading the morning paper at her desk; yet another, a man, simply stared into space, drumming his fingers. I tried to detach my personal urgency from this charade (in fact, I needed this visa and my passport to buy a train ticket) and watched as though it were a comic documentary. "You come back later," a surly woman said. But I wanted to monitor my application as it proceeded through all the stages, moving from desk to desk, getting cake crumbs on it from the gobbling man, tea stains from the fingers of the cup sipper. Six people examined and initialed my form. And then it was put in a tray, where it remained for twenty minutes. It was then handed through a slot in the wall, a side office.
If I had complained, they would have replied, with justification, "What's the hurry?" "Who are you?" "What does it matter?" "Why should we care?" Nothing had ever worked in Tanzania. All Tanzanians had ever known was failure, empty political rhetoric, broken promises. True, the unemployed in Dar es Salaam looked desperate. but the workers, too, looked cheated, envious, and angry.Following my passport, I sneaked over to the side office door and opened it, apologizing -- pretending to have entered the wrong office -- and saw the visa officer in a white shirt and blue necktie with a tin tray on his desk, a hunk of bread in his hand, tucking into a big bowl of meat stew, slopping gobs of gravy on the stack of visa forms.
Theroux heaps great piles of scorn on charity workers and African governments together; charity unintentionally aiding brutal, uncaring kleptocracies. Here's another vignette:
Fiona and Rachel worked for a British charity. What Kurtz was trying to accomplish on the Congo, and Mrs. Jellyby on the Niger, they were attempting in the region of Marsabit. The were on their weekly trip up from the south. They were in their mid-twenties, damp-faced from the heat and their long drive. They had a driver, however, and a high-tech vehicle that was worth a fortune. Am I imagining that the logo on the side showed a weeping continent and the slogan 'Shed Tears for Africa'?(I can't help myself, I start quoting and I can't stop!) While the aid workers appear deeply concerned and motivated, they seem unaware of any possible ramifications of their actions, or indeed unable to question whether their actions are necessary, and if so why."We have a wet feeding tomorrow," Fiona said.
Rachel said, "Ninety underweight children, some of them malnourished, infants up to four-year-olds."
"What's a wet feeding?"
"That's porridge. Unimix for nutrition -- maize, beans, oil, some sugar and fat. Americans call it Corn-Soy Blend."
"You are going to a village to dump Unimix in a trough for people to eat."
"I wouldn't put it that way," Fiona said.
I said, "We used to say, 'Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.'"
"The rains have been unreliable," Rachel said.
"Maybe they should relocate. If they relocated they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren't feeding them."
"We save lives, not livelihoods," Fiona said, and it sounded like a phrase from a brochure that might have been drafted by Mrs. Jellyby.
I said, "Or family planning advice -- you could give them that."
"We don't discuss family planning," Rachel said. "We feed children under five and lactating mothers. Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I don't know," I said. "Something about 'supervising a wet feeding.' It sounds like something you'd do in a game park." [...] I said, "In a game park, in a bad year, the rangers might spread some bales of alfalfa near a water hole to help the hippos make it through the season."
They looked at me, unhappy to be challenged.
I said, "And what would happen if you just sent the food?"
"Their parents would steal it and let the kids die."
"The farmers in Kenya are very demoralized, because the government does not support them," Mr. Maina said. "In so many places the farmers have torn up their coffee bushes to grow cabbages and maize for subsistence."The Kenyan government is quite satisfied to let the NGO's and other charities take over the burden of feeding much of the rural population; it leaves more aid money available for graft."Why doesn't the government care?"
"Why should they care? They get money for the World Bank and the IMF and America and Germany and everyone else."
Theroux provides no prescriptions of what should be done. He mainly records how current aid practices aren't helping, and suggests that the whole concept of foreign aid to Africa is fatally flawed; that African governments haven't got the will to help themselves out of their current mess, and that without that, foreign aid is, at best, futile. The sense of futility comes out again and again:
Before I left Finland I understood the problem of AIDS in Zambia and I thought I had some good solutions," Ursula said... "After I got to Zambia I realized that it's more complicated than I thought. Now I don't understand the problem so clearly. It is all some complicated, and I don't know about any solution.""What did you find out in Zambia that you didn't know before?" I asked.
"The behavior," she said, and rolled her eyes. "There is so much sex. It is all sex. And so young!"
"How young?"
"As if you don't know," Kelli said, teasing me.
"Ten years old is common," Ursula said.
"But with their own age group", I said, repeating what I had learned in the Chalbi Desert from the Samburu man.
"Not with their age group. Almost with anyone," Ursula said. [...] "It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS, and everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it. But people in the villages said it was shameful -- too indecent -- and so it was withdrawn. What could we do?"
"Did you talk to them about it?"
"I tried to."
"And what happened?"
"They wanted to have sex with me." [...] "The men follow me. They call me muzungu. I hate that. Always calling out to me, 'Muzungu! Muzungu!'"
"Racial profiling," Conor said, trying to lighten the mood. "Shouldn't stand for it, if I was you, not a bit of it." But Ursula did not smile. For her it was more than outraged decency -- it was despair, a recognition of futility, a kind of grief even, along with anger.
—
muzungu – n. "white person".