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Jim Elkins's Reviews > Under the Frangipani
Under the Frangipani
by
by
A Different Postcolonialism
The strength of this book is the author's capacity to imagine what it might be like to be dead, if that were to mean resting comfortably, and somewhat sadly, underground. (A bit like Graveyard Clay or Lincoln in the Bardo. Nominally the book is written by a dead man; by itself that wouldn't be remarkable (The Third Policeman also comes to mind), but here the narrator is content. He tells us all sorts of things that aren't grisly, melodramatic, or macabre: he doesn't dream, but the frangipani tree above him sometimes dreams of him; he has a pet spiny anteater, which burrows down to him and speaks to him in a kind of inner monologue as if it were his dog; he doesn't remember much of his life, but that doesn't often bother him.
Partway through the novel -- which is a mainly unsuccessful series of vignettes framed as a detective story -- I realized why Couto feels so at home with the idea of being forgotten, buried, suspended in a state of more or less permanent amnesia. It's because he sympathizes with people who live, as he has, in an isolated and impoverished corner of an isolated and impoverished country. Their lives are mainly forgotten, and their sense of themselves is tenuous: they are linguistically and racially mixed, and they do not always have any good way of matching ideas to words (as one of Couto's characters says).
There are some good pages on the hopelessness of feeling at home in such a postcolonial world (pp. 41-46) but that theme is familiar: what's new is the way these characters are partly happy, mainly reconciled, slightly drifting, virtually isolated, somewhat dreamlike: it's the qualifiers, the lack of absolutes, that make Couto's way of thinking so distinctive. His sense of the postcolonial experience is the opposite of Frantz Fanon or any number of occasionally polemic or strident writers (Helon Habila, Chris Abani, Aminatta Forna) and theorists of hybridity and dislocation, and it is also miles from the usual ghost story in which the ghost pines for life. There's no passion and little introspection in this postcoloniality. This ghost likes his six days above ground, but in the end he is more or less as content in the earth, vaguely content, vaguely uncertain about what he has forgotten.
By the end it seems attractive to think of lying underground, with most of your memories gone, with no sense of smell, no light or color, and very little sound. Like the very similar life above ground.
The strength of this book is the author's capacity to imagine what it might be like to be dead, if that were to mean resting comfortably, and somewhat sadly, underground. (A bit like Graveyard Clay or Lincoln in the Bardo. Nominally the book is written by a dead man; by itself that wouldn't be remarkable (The Third Policeman also comes to mind), but here the narrator is content. He tells us all sorts of things that aren't grisly, melodramatic, or macabre: he doesn't dream, but the frangipani tree above him sometimes dreams of him; he has a pet spiny anteater, which burrows down to him and speaks to him in a kind of inner monologue as if it were his dog; he doesn't remember much of his life, but that doesn't often bother him.
Partway through the novel -- which is a mainly unsuccessful series of vignettes framed as a detective story -- I realized why Couto feels so at home with the idea of being forgotten, buried, suspended in a state of more or less permanent amnesia. It's because he sympathizes with people who live, as he has, in an isolated and impoverished corner of an isolated and impoverished country. Their lives are mainly forgotten, and their sense of themselves is tenuous: they are linguistically and racially mixed, and they do not always have any good way of matching ideas to words (as one of Couto's characters says).
There are some good pages on the hopelessness of feeling at home in such a postcolonial world (pp. 41-46) but that theme is familiar: what's new is the way these characters are partly happy, mainly reconciled, slightly drifting, virtually isolated, somewhat dreamlike: it's the qualifiers, the lack of absolutes, that make Couto's way of thinking so distinctive. His sense of the postcolonial experience is the opposite of Frantz Fanon or any number of occasionally polemic or strident writers (Helon Habila, Chris Abani, Aminatta Forna) and theorists of hybridity and dislocation, and it is also miles from the usual ghost story in which the ghost pines for life. There's no passion and little introspection in this postcoloniality. This ghost likes his six days above ground, but in the end he is more or less as content in the earth, vaguely content, vaguely uncertain about what he has forgotten.
By the end it seems attractive to think of lying underground, with most of your memories gone, with no sense of smell, no light or color, and very little sound. Like the very similar life above ground.
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