"Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I'd witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune."
I'm kind of feeling that Dreams From my Father would have been better as an essay. Or, if the editor had left well alone. We get episodes, episodically, all of which mean something meaningful. Nonetheless, where are we? Only making a foray into chapter three (still in the section named 'Origins', the young Obama has made it to Indonesia, where he suspects that power is not always a good, or morally straightforward thing, and that his mother's 'position paper liberalism' and 'needlepoint mid-western values', may not be all that. Not least in a land where even the teachers are corrupt, the US embassy is stuffed with 'caricatures of the ugly American', and where he gets lessons in life from the taciturn, manly Lolo, who wanders the streets at night, nursing a bottle of whisky. More excitingly, perhaps for the 7-year old Barry, he gets a pet monkey on arrival, learns to box, and, as the quotation above notes, sees a chicken getting its throat cut before chomping it down for supper.
So, looking promising so far, although you have to make it through sentences like 'It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow. Words, and the sentiments words carried'. We're not talking about Bush here, but the whisky-swigging Lolo. But still, do we need this spelled out, and then restated? And words are more than the dress of language, they are that wherewith we cannot speak without, etc. All thoughts you don't need when you're reflecting on how cool it would be to have a pet monkey.
I've also had to christen this week the longest week of the year. It seems to have lasted a month - all chill January skies, mass colds, and silly things at work - as well as some background reading on witchcraft for a lecture due next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment