Book 4 of 10 African novels!
The author, Ondjaki, is quite prolific, and I’d never heard of him before specifically seeking out African authors! In my search for African authors and novels, I’ve found it’s pretty easy to find novels about the immigrant (Africa-to-US) experience, but harder to find accessible (and English!) novels by Africans who still live in and write about their home country. So I was glad to find this little novel, which is unlike any other Africa-related books on my list.
This is the short (just over 100 pages) story of an almost-teenager, Ndalu, in Luanda, Angola, in the 80s. It reads a little like a journal–the tone is colloquial and breezy. Ondjaki does a great job of capturing that young teenage feeling of obliviousness, where AK-47s are just as important to the narrative as a birthday party where one of their friends ate too much.
The story is bookended, sort of, by the visit of Ndalu’s aunt from Lisbon, and Ndalu’s conversations with her in which he has to explain the peculiarities of life in Luanda to her–only, of course, they aren’t peculiarities to him, they’re just normal life. Through this relationship, and through Ndalu’s matter-of-fact descriptions of his daily life with his diverse group of friends, his family, and his Cuban “comrade” teachers, we get just a little taste of Luanda. Ndalu, teenager that he is, doesn’t give background. He just tells us what happened, and what he thinks about it. There’s not much of a plot, per se, although the story takes place at the end of the school year, at the end of the war: it’s more of a glimpse than a plot.
I honestly was only vaguely familiar with the timeline of the Angolan war; helpfully, the kindle version of this book had a brief history lesson at the end, and it put this story in context and, actually, made me like it more. Ondjaki has cleverly made the story both hopeful — with his breezy young narrator — and poignant–with the Angolan crisis looming a few years ahead.
Rating: 4/5 stars. It’s such an easy, colorful read, and the length is perfect for a story like this–much longer and I would have lost interest, but shorter and it wouldn’t be a novel. And as I think about it longer, I like it more.
However, I kept wondering if some music was lost in the translation to English. Often, the phrasing and vocabulary seemed pretty advanced for a teenaged narrator, and I am sure that some of the dialogue sounds better in the original Portuguese–I don’t speak Portuguese, so this is only a guess.
I also wanted there to be a little more there there. A little more background of this group’s friendship, a little more of Ondjaki’s lovely descriptions of his environment.
That said, this was a great introduction to Angola, a lovely little story, and I recommend it.
