Words for Worlds - Issue 97
Hello everyone and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
The summer issue of the British Science Fiction Association Review has a lovely review of THE SENTENCE, by Andrew Openshaw - in fact, the most glowing one yet. I particularly liked this bit at the end - “The Sentence is speculative fiction at its most potent - a novel that uses the lens of a fractured future to interrogate questions of justice, history, and human fallibility.” Yes, I’ll take that! Over on Twitter/X, I have an updating thread about critical responses to the novel, here.
Speaking of which, I’ve mentioned before about the effort to have THE SENTENCE available beyond India, and in the global market. This week, things might finally be moving on that; and I may have some news to share by the next issue of this newsletter, so stay tuned. In the meantime, of course, if you’re in India (or willing to pay shipping costs), you can of course get the novel here.
On May 28, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the great Kenyan writer, passed away. I wrote an obituary for him, which was published today in The Hindu (here). By my account, in the last twelve months alone, we’ve lost Elias Khoury, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and now Ngũgĩ. I know these claims are often over-determined, but it does feel something like the passing of an era.
What I’m Reading
By now, I’ve read a few works of fiction set in Algeria. There has been the visceral devastation of Algerian White. The incandescent rage of Tomorrow, They Wont Dare to Murder Us. Before that, the masked colonialism of The Stranger and the misfiring anti-colonialism of The Meursault Investigation.
A Bookshop in Algiers is a different kind of story altogether, a story of quiet tragedy and unmentionable loss. The novel traces the history of Edmond Charlot’s audacious attempt to open a bookshop in Algiers in 1936, at the height of French colonialism. Under Charlot’s watch, the bookshop (which Camus, among others, frequents) becomes an unstated centre of anti-colonial resistance, even as Charlot struggles with the daily grind of acquiring books, keeping the bookshop afloat, and even chancing upon gems that nobody else is willing to publish.
But now it is the present day. In long-independent Algeria, the bookshop, which has been closed for a while, is finally being shut down for good, and the books slated for physical destruction. This task is to be done by Ryad, a young man who has come over from France, and who does not - at least in the beginning - care about books. But bookshops - as Ryad realises - have afterlives of their own, long after their time is done.
There are different ways in which you can talk about the death of the anti-colonial dream, the vision of liberation occluded by the ravages of successive post-colonial regimes. There is the way of Algerian White, which offers you an unsparing view of the internecine violence that bathed the revolution in its own blood. Elsewhere, there is the way of Dust (Kenya), which weaves a story around a singular act of destruction that came to symbolise the betrayal of the revolutionary promise, the way of Tower in the Sky (Ethiopia), which narrates the step-by-step unravelling of the liberatory vision, or the way of Bitter Fruit (South Africa), which uses the emotions of bitterness and recrimination to illumine the slow decay of a promise of freedom.
The way of A Bookshop in Algiers is to show us the death of a revolution by showing us the death of the words that were integral to the revolution. And it is not death by firing squad, or an execution (even though the books - many of them - are physically destroyed). It is death by indifference. The bookshop - once so bound up with the revolution - no longer belongs in the post-revolutionary era. Long before Ryad arrives, it has died of neglect and un-belonging. The tragedy of the end of the revolution in A Bookshop in Algiers is not the tragedy of the gunshot and the forced disappearance, but the tragedy of an ending where what once mattered no longer matters. It is a quiet tragedy - almost imperceptible - but for all that, no less devastating.
This quietness is reflected in the style and form of A Bookshop in Algiers: there is a softness to the language and a softness to its characters (from Charlot to Ryad). Their acts and gestures are not redolent of great stakes or intense meaning, but everyday acts that nonetheless make up the fabric of the world in which they are in. Charlot’s opening of the bookshop is not portrayed as revolutionary - he’s just a young enthusiast trying to give life to his passion for books - but for all that, it is. Ryad’s actions are not portrayed as bringing the curtain down on the revolution - he’s just carrying out a job that he has been tasked to do - but for all that, they are. It is in the everyday that the great - and tragic - moments of history play out.
A Bookshop in Algiers is a book best read in company: a slow, gentle read, pausing at lines and sentences between conversation, allowing meaning to seep in - and then, at the end, to let it linger awhile.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
For our May non-fiction week, I really enjoyed editing and publishing Will Shaw’s excellent essay, “Neither Girls Nor Friends: the Artificial Woman in American Science Fiction.” The title is pretty self-explanatory as far as the subject of the essay goes, and it is a very good - if, at times, challenging - read.
The Indian Scene
Nothing stirring this week.
Recommendations Corner
I don’t think you’ll ever find Wizard of the Crow in the speculative fiction shelves in a bookshop, but once you start reading it, I think it’s hard to draw any other conclusion than that it is a work of speculative fiction. Here is a summary of the novel from a review I wrote when I first read it, almost a decade ago:
Set in the fictional, post-colonial African dictatorship of Abruria, The Wizard of the Crow is a 768-page long mock epic, featuring a sprawling cast of characters: the unnamed “Ruler”, his coterie of ministers, a real estate agent with pretensions to power, apparatchiks and functionaries, bystanders, an opposition movement called The Voice of the People, a radical feminist activist, and of course, the eponymous “Wizard of the Crow”, an unemployed man who becomes a famous witch-doctor in a fit of absent-mindedness. The Ruler has grand plans of embarking upon a (literal) Tower-of-Babel project called “Marching to Heaven”. Abruria is not Babylon, however, and funding for the project must come in the form of loans from the (unsubtly named) Global Bank. And so the scene is set: even as the Ruler and his Ministers attempt to show to the Global Bank Mission (and its unsubtly named “Missionaries”) that Abruria is a stable and peaceful country and an attractive investment destination, chaos begins to spread around the country, with the Wizard of the Crow and the mysterious Voice of the People at the heart of everything.
There’s probably an element of sadness to the fact that the passing of a writer is often what generates interest in their work. But if the passing of Ngũgĩ has gotten you interested in his work, then I’d say Wizard of the Crow (notwithstanding its length) is the best place to start, because this novel is Ngũgĩ at his absolute best: witty, ironic, irreverent, but also deadly serious in his defiance and in his unsparing opposition to power.