An overwhelming tumult of language, something like being pulled under by a big ocean wave and sent tumbling. The story itself was secondary to the feeAn overwhelming tumult of language, something like being pulled under by a big ocean wave and sent tumbling. The story itself was secondary to the feeling. It's a very male book. Also overwhelming was the endless stream of women's commodified bodies being described by their parts--women were defined in the story by what men see, what men touch. I was in turn riveted, repulsed, bored, amazed, wrenched around. ...more
Hochschild picks the perfect narrative voice for this harrowing story--his writes with an unassailable flatness, laying out one fact after another in Hochschild picks the perfect narrative voice for this harrowing story--his writes with an unassailable flatness, laying out one fact after another in a deliberate way and allowing the story to tell itself with a minimum of editorial interjection. He apologizes frequently along the way for having so little access to the voices of the Congolese victims, and then does all he can to allow them to speak through what evidence we do have. He spends careful pages of the book explaining how the truth was suppressed, denied, controlled, or buried. By detailing the way powerful people tried to rewrite the facts, and how he and others have pieced those facts together again, Hochschild gives the reader a lesson in historiography as well as history.
Hochschild pulls his punches sometimes--for example in refusing to call the deaths of ~10 million people an act of "genocide," and also, in insisting that "it is an oversimplification to blame Africa's troubles today entirely on European imperialism." I almost feel he doesn't believe his own equivocations, based on what he wrote elsewhere. What happened to the Congolese during the time of King Leopold seems to bleed through the next century in the most horrible ways. But it also feels that, by pulling back from obvious conclusions, Hochschild succeeds in writing a book that needs to be reckoned with, a book that is extremely difficult to accuse of politics or subjectivism....more
Loading...
