The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

A book that I’ve had on my shelf for ages (clearly!). And, to be honest, had I also owned a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I would have probably started with that (which would have been a bad call, considering that I quickly came to dislike Tom Sawyer in this novel).

Am I at ease with the way in which Jim is portrayed? Not always.

Do I think Huckleberry really escapes civilization? Not fully, just see so many of his moral dilemmas regarding Jim’s future (and past).

Do I think this is a work of art? Absolutely.

Huckleberry Finn combines the sense of adventure of the best Verne, Stevenson and Conan Doyle with what is ultimately a great moral depth (sure, so many of the comments on slavery make – and well they should! – people cringe, but it’s undeniably a step in the right direction for late-19^th century white Americans).

But, to go back to my first few lines, I honestly disliked Tom Sawyer a lot – and I think that all the ordeals he made Jim go through in the last few chapters were just too mean, gratuitous and so not funny. So, despite liking Huckleberry Finn so very much I am not going to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer anytime soon…

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

A book given to me for Christmas by a close friend, and one that all the fancy native English speakers in my high-school had to read for their courses.

Now, I didn’t quite know how to approach this book from a philological point of view: I am quite sure that as a rich white European I am not exactly the target audience for the novel, but at the same time I have the feeling that most of the very few readers left in the world are, like me, rich white Europeans – so who really should be reading this book?

To me the novel is very much divided in two (and not in three, as the chapters would suggest). The first part, full of Nigerian folklore, is the one that interested me the least (not because it’s Nigerian, but because it’s folklore, and I often have very little time for it – unless it’s Jewish folklore, I have a soft spot for that…) and I did not think too much of what I suspect would appear “barbarian” to many Western readers. I saw a lot of the descriptions of violence as either acts of war – which we are so much more scientific and classy at carrying forward, not sacrificing the defeated enemies but simply mistreating POWs even in the 21^st century – or plain and simple marital abuse – again,  I don’t think we are that much better than 19^th century Nigerians from this point of view.

The second part of the novel is the one that really got my interest though, when the white European settlers finally arrive. And probably the evil ones scare me less than the supposedly well-intentioned ones… Needless to say we are ultimately savages, but we all knew that didn’t we?