Soyinka's new book etc.

[Mark Kohut]

I read an early and highly praised Soyinka and could not feel---get---it.
No imaginative sympathy from this white privileged empire dweller. I knew
it was me, not it.

It can be hard to edit a Nobelist; because they are and because they often
have readers before their pass-it-thru editors....

On Sat, Oct 9, 2021 at 5:22 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Chronicles from the Happiest People on Earth,  by  Wole Soyinka
> So from what reviewers say, his earlier works were better. No knowledge on
> that,  but there are parts of Chronicles that are very potent, moving from
> surreal dark comedy, to the extremes of political bullshit, to real inner
> human struggles of conscience. The cast of characters could not be more
> lively for this kind of satire and the story line could be very engaging.
> Nevertheless It gets sucky fast. In a novel that should move along fast and
> furious Soyinka belabors plot details to the point of repetetive boredom
> and instead of spicing the narrative with comic exaggeration and cultural
> clues offered through the thoughts of the characters, he weighs it down as
> though the reader were hungry for ever more more half risen bread dough.
> The sad thing is that It could have been made quite sparkly with an editor
> who knows how to cut the crap.
>
> Just my opinion
>
> The Anarchist Prince: Peter Kropotkin,  by George Woodcock and Ivan
> Avakumovic, both Canadian Academics and History writers
>
> I am in the middle of this biography published in 1950 about Peter
> Kropotkin. I got interested through some quotes I came accross by Kropotkin
> which led me to the Wikipedia article which got me further interested in a
> period of Russian and European history about which I had only the roughest
> outine. The book sticks to known and remarkably complete sources and has
> good narrative drive keeping me interested in Kropotkin’s human story  as
> an important geographic scientist,  turned activist and theoretician and
> about the growth of this branch of libertarian/anarchist socialism which
> parted ways early on with marxist and bolshevist leaning socialists.  I had
> no Idea that Switzerland was an important center for gathering and
> publication of these theoretical founders of a major stream of western
> dialectic.
>    I have no idea if others would have any interest but it is great
> background information for Against the Day and there are numerous events
> and characters  that would fit any Pynchon novel or could be the basis for
> some good and very relevant storytelling.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>