LESS Than the Best

SONG FOR NIGHT by Chris Abani

Nick DiMartino — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 17:51:48 +0000

After being mentally scarred forever by Dave Eggers’ monumental What Is the What, I swore I’d had enough. No more hair-raising child soldier carnage tales for me. No more mothers eating their babies, children as mine detectors, twelve-year-old rapists, rivers of corpses, you know, that kind of thing.

Let’s be clear: I may be no Dave Eggers fan, but his book is the artistic mountain to measure by, a stunning achievement – and all the others have created a somewhat familiar genre (They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, Beasts of No Nation, A Long Way Gone) and now the newest entry, Chris Ajani’s mercifully short descent into Nigerian hell, Song for Night.

It’s handsomely produced by Akashic Books as a $12.95 paperback original, with a heartbreakingly touching cover. The story, however, is blunt and brutal.

The novella is the first-person account of a fifteen-year-old named My Luck who has developed an unsavory fondness for shooting people. He hasn’t spoken in three years since his vocal cords were snipped by the military. He’s separated from his unit of children mine detectors, and spends the entire novella searching for them, tramping through a landscape only Hieronymus Bosch could love to find them. His girlfriend dies in pieces in his arms. His sadistic military commander, sixteen-year-old John Wayne, entertains himself with brutalities that leave the reader gasping, until My Luck shoots him, unfortunately taking out a seven-year-old girl at the same time.

As a narrative structure, Song for Night is structured like a video game. Encounters mean killing. Ajani employs some fascinating original spins, most prominently My Luck’s fondness for hiding in crawlspaces and crocheting. But otherwise, this is a road trip with the grimmest companions imaginable – a teenager holding his intestines in his arms, a woman toting her own coffin.

Unfortunately, Abani not only has a gift for swift, electrifying nightmare images – he also has a propensity for corny poetic touches about morning dew and angels. Still, if he has first-hand knowledge of any of this human butchershop, poor guy, I’ll tip my hat to him for just getting the horrors down on paper.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

HOW I BECAME A NUN by Cesar Aira

Nick DiMartino — Sat, 19 May 2007 14:25:28 +0000

Cesar Aira’s HOW I BECAME A NUN ($13.95) is a weird, tiny novel from Argentina, only 117 short pages. Evidently Aira has written dozens of these mini-books, and is super popular in his home country. I’ll say one thing: this cute little book (the cover shows a child with a giant strawberry ice cream cone) has the most intense, mind-blowing opening of any novel I’ve read in years. A triple surprise in the first thirty pages. Pure narrative whiplash, and all using the simple device of a strawberry ice cream cone. Really, the sequence is brilliant.

Unfortunately, from there the story doesn’t know where to go. It wanders through hallucinations, tries this, tries that, and then Aira brings the whole thing to an abrupt halt with a cartoonish murder ending, in which the narrator is killed.

Unique, yes. Satisfying, no. One of the book’s trippy aspects is that the narrator refers to herself as a six-year-old girl, while everyone around her acts like he’s a boy and addresses him as little Master Cesar. This is never resolved.

Same goes for the title. No one ever becomes a nun. It has nothing to do with anything. In the end, this little novel suffers from the same problem. It’s a clever doodle going nowhere. But I’ll never, ever, ever forget those first thirty pages.

AMERICAN VISA by Juan de Recacoechea

Nick DiMartino — Sat, 19 May 2007 13:56:34 +0000

Juan de Recacoechea’s AMERICAN VISA ($14.95) is the most popular novel ever published in Bolivia, and it has a lot to recommend it. The narrator has a sense of humor and a sharp eye. His sentences have sting. He captures the teaming life of La Paz in scene after scene, and creates tension by subjecting a genuinely nice guy, an ex-school teacher trying to get to Florida to live with his son, to tense obstacles on his road to a visa.

Then, midway through, out of nowhere, Mario Alvarez, the hero, decides without a moment of forethought or the briefest moral quandary that he needs to commit a robbery and murder, and without another mention of his son, changes into a ruthless asshole. I bailed on page 141: “I had a single window for finishing Arminda off with a crushing blow to the neck…”

Hey, is this the guy I’ve been worrying about? A school teacher? I hope he doesn’t get his visa.