ISBN: 006079867X
List Price: $16.95
Amazon Price: $11.53
Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy this book
from amazon.com
or from
amazon.co.uk
|
Avg Cusomer Rating: 3
Reviews:
Summary: Interesting idea, but not perfect
Trying out a debutante author can be a huge step into the unknown but, with praise from Rushdie, Ghosh, and a number of British broadsheets adorning the cover, it's a step I decided to take with Beasts Of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, an unsentimental study of war through the eyes of a child soldier. And it doesn't disappoint, providing a detailed series of events that add background to the stories of civil war in Africa that we often see in the news, although its arching tale of chilling conflicts and unspeakable acts is somewhat let down by a somewhat fortunate conclusion - for the character, that is, and not the reader.
Agu, our narrator, tells us not where he is from or how old he is but begins by giving an account of how he became a soldier when his village was raided and he ran from the scene into the clutches of a band of rebels. Then, before he knows it he is following the command of two men (early twenties, at most) called Commandant and Luftenant as they lead their band of boy soldiers across the nation for the cause.
The cause itself is never mentioned; Agu doesn't actually know what he is fighting for. He is only able to differentiate between the time before war came (which becomes more and more a faded memory) and now. But, to aid the cause, Agu's troop find themselves killing at random, raping women, burning villages to the ground, and stealing. Beasts Of No Nation is a catalogue of man's inhumanity to man in the time of war and its lists expands to include prostitution, cannibalism, and child sexual abuse. While never explicit in his description, it's the suggestion of these acts, as described by Agu, that resonate.
As a soldier, Agu doesn't know what he is meant to be doing. In fact, the only soldiers who seem to have a clue are Commandant and Luftenant:
"Commandant is yelling, TENSHUN and I am seeing that now all of us is standing here and all of us is forming tenshun very quickly. Then, Commandant is saying to us that we should be behaving ourself and looking sharp and resting well well that we will be knowing what is happening in some time. Everybody is listening, but nobody is really understanding what he is saying about moving to the front and fighting the enemy in this place or that place because I am never seeing this place or that place for my whole life. Anyway, it is not mattering too much because I am just following order and not having to do anything else. After he is shouting on us like this, he is telling us to dismiss and make camp."
Rather than be soldiers, the kids are more interested in looking like soldiers. They carry guns or machetes and wear uniforms to show status. Uniforms, itself, becomes a loose term since any clothing they can find - soldier, policeman, etc. - is taken from the dead and wore with pride.
As you can tell from the quote above, Agu's narration is given authenticity by mixing tenses, incorrect use of plural and singular terms,. The effect, at times, can be poetic and his voice assumes a wonderful rhythm. There were a couple of times where I had to read the sentence again to work out what had just been said. My only criticism of using this style is that Agu has a limited vocabulary and I noticed him using the same similes (like bullets; like ants) on multiple occasions. Fair enough, given that it's the character's voice, but it felt like the narrative could achieve more with some extra vocabulary.
If I was to have any major criticism of Beasts Of No Nation it is that Agu is surplus to requirements within his own narrative. The conclusion of the novel (or, at least, the penultimate conclusion) is perpetrated by another character which renders Agu as observer and not master of his own destiny which one would hope for in a character study.
Of the aforementioned reviews on the cover of the book, the one that rings true most is Rushdie's, when he says "this guy is going to be very, very good". It's a good little novel, it shows some truth about conflicts we rarely think of when war is mentioned, and gives a voice to the images of child soldiers splashed occasionally on the news; but it's not quite perfect.
Summary: the power of the story over the style of the storytelling
By the time Beasts of No Nation was published it was the subject of mass critical acclaim. I had read reviews that had nothing but good things to say about the novel that that it was an important work by a new author. Because it is a novel set in Africa the first association is automatically Achebe, because any African set novel written by an African will always be compared to Achebe. Beasts of No Nation was called a very strong debut. I'm of two minds. The first mind is totally and completely impressed by Iweala's work here. He has written a brief novel with very raw power about something we in America almost never read about in fiction or non-fiction: How is it that a young man or even a boy would join one of these militia's in Africa and go on killing rampages and act as a private army? What drives these men to do such barbaric things? Beasts of No Nation gives us one possible answer and as brutal as the militias are to the commonly perceived victims, the brutality extends to the militia itself. There is a veneer of a haven that the militia extends, but it is tenuous at best and Uzodinma Iweala shows all sides of the brutality where the humanity is stretched as thin as it could possibly be and still call itself human.
My other mind is far less impressed by the actual craft of writing employed in this novel. The book reads as if it were written in the voice of an African who does not speak English very well and so is stating things in a broken English that feels appropriate to the character and the story, but is also distracting. Because the author is a Harvard graduate with honors for his writing, I choose to believe that the style of the novel is a conscious choice rather than his own broken English. It is fully appropriate on one hand, but on the other it is very distracting and pulls me, as a reader, out of the story. I would hate to suggest to an author to not use dialect because many very fine books use dialect to great effect. In the case of Beasts of No Nation I felt the story was weakened by the overuse of dialect.
Beasts of No Nation is, at the surface, a novel about a young man who is quite intelligent and wants nothing more than to learn and go to school. Life does not quite go the way he would like when war comes to his country and militias start forming and roaming around attacking anyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist gets involved in one such militia, but not because he believes in its cause. His involvement is completely selfish: it is to save his own life. Thus begins the examination of these roaming militias and the damage they cause to the people they come in contact to as well the people who comprise the militias.
If I consider Beasts of No Nation in terms of the story it is telling I will quite willingly admit that it is superior. The raw power and pain contained within the 140 pages is very real and it is a case of the story far overshadowing the storytelling. It is the execution of the storytelling that I find fault with. Iweala has written a very powerful novel, there is no question about that. But the overuse of dialect was so distracting to me that I feel just a little bit of pulling back on the dialect would elevate this novel quite a bit. Rather than simply portraying the protagonist as an intelligent and thoughtful young man who has not had nearly as much eduction as he deserves and speaks in broken sentences, it rather feels like Iweala is the one who is lacking. I do not mean this as a personal attack because I know Iweala is a Harvard graduate and thus quite intelligent and skilled. Considering that the protagonist would not be speaking or narrating in English during this novel, there is no reason why his thoughts wouldn't translate into full and well crafted sentences like I am positive Iweala can write given the collegiate awards he has won.
So, Beasts of No Nation is a novel where the story rises above the manner in which it is told. It is worth reading and Uzodimna Iweala surely has a fine career with excellent novels ahead of him, but I hope that years down the line this will be viewed as a worthy first novel and not the best he was able to produce.
-Joe Sherry
Summary: This Is Africa
All one needs to do is read today's headlines: the Congo, Sudan, Darfur, and one finds the precise models for this novel's child narrator, Agu, and his sad autistic companion, Strika. Like a short, powerful punch to the midsection, this story takes one's breath away as it delivers the first-person vision of Agu's terrible life as a child warrior. Ruined by war in an unnamed country, Agu constantly tries to comfort himself with memories of his mother and father and sister before the government disappeared and chaos took its place. Cringing in a shack, Agu is found by Strika, who slaps and beats Agu and then drags him into the street for the ragtag bunch of warriors to see. This group of utterly dehumanized and orphaned boys and men is led by the violent and crazed Commandant, who enlists Agu into his band. It is Agu's only chance of surviving.
Iweala takes some chances with this book. Agu speaks in a kind of pidgin English. His word choices at times are inconsistent with the character. And Agu's memories cut in and out of the present as we attempt to appreciate what Agu and his family has lost. The reader is just as bewildered by the madness everywhere as Agu is. We know nothing about who is fighting for what. All we know is the immediacy of the moment and the desperation, hunger, and blood lust that have seized what once were human beings but now are nothing more than beasts with no nation.
I find myself overwhelmed by the whole issue of child warriors to the point where judging this work as literature is completely irrelevant. Those who have written reviews here and who indirectly accuse the author of formulaic writing or who point out his mistakes are myopic and somewhat amoral. Here are 10-, 11-, and 12-year-old boys killing, being sexually abused, and losing their innocence and humanity. We all KNOW this is happening right now, every single day. The brilliance of this work is its attempt to express this experience to us, the comfortable western audience who cannot appreciate the thorough horror and decimation such chaos has brought into the world. I expect we will hear more from Iweala, and when we do, I will be listening.
Summary:
|
,
amazon.co.uk
,
google.com
