Welcome to Lagos

Several people in the Niger Delta are thrown together by chance. Two of them are army deserters, Chike and Yemi, unwilling to participate in violence against innocent people.

They encounter a boy with an AK47. He belongs to a militant group fighting for a share of Nigerian oil profits. His name is Fineboy and he is keen to be a radio presenter.

They are joined by two women, Isoken and Oma, one a young hairdresser fleeing the fighting near her village, the other fleeing her abusive husband.

The five of them form an uneasy alliance and travel by bus to Lagos where they end up sleeping under a bridge. By chance they discover a secret underground apartment, uninhabited but fully furnished. One night the owner shows up, a high-ranking government official named Sandayo. He too is in flight. Learning that he was about to be sacked and disgusted with government corruption, he absconded with ten million dollars.

The story takes a delightful turn when the group, after taking Sandayo prisoner, decide to spend the money on much-needed supplies for schools. Information is leaked to a local journalist, the story shifts to London where the BBC get involved, and a pompous newscaster is sent with a crew to Lagos.

I enjoyed the novel most when the focus was on the original five characters and the tumultuous day-to-day life in Lagos: the sights and sounds, the snippets from a newspaper that head the Lagos chapters, and especially the pidgin spoken by many. When Yemi, who has found work as a traffic warden, is asked where he learned the moves he makes while directing traffic, he replies:

“Nah me teach myself. I dey learn some new moves I go soon display.” 
“Chike doesn't see to dance,” Sandayo said.
“No o. You dey look him face think he's a small boy but inside nah old man.”

The result is a rich tapestry of life in contemporary Nigeria, as hinted at by the cover. If you take a close look at the hoarding, you'll see next to the author's name, Chibundu Onuzo, a thumbnail of the author herself.


BBC has a website in Nigerian pidgin.

Pushkin's Button

Russia's greatest poet received a fatal wound in a duel with a man who had been flirting with his wife. Yet such a bald statement fails to convey the byzantine events surrounding Pushkin's death.

D'Anthes

A handsome but semi-literate Frenchman with "a merry disposition, loose tongue, and ready wit." He was also "a tenacious and zealous flirt" who "preferred targeting married women." Above all he was an "impeccable inexhaustible dancer."

He was also lax in his duties as a cavalry officer, being “cited 44 times for lateness, unexcused absences, and other breaches of discipline.”

Baron Heeckeren

The Dutch ambassador took a liking to d'Anthes, supporting him financially and taking the unusual step of adopting him, even though d'Anthes's father was still living and they were not estranged. Subsequently Heeckeren made him his heir.

Described as "polished and shrewd” with "an elastic idea of truth," the Dutch ambassador's name after Pushkin's death became "synonymous with iniquity and deicide.”

Natalya

Pushkin was 36 when he died, his wife Natalya 24. Though she had given birth to four children, she was still the most beautiful woman in Petersburg and loved to dance. She was considered by many to be shallow and flighty.

Though it's true she and d'Anthes had been flirting, such behaviour at the time it was not considered improper. Pushkin on his deathbed told her, “None of this is your fault.”

Pushkin

Where d'Anthes was tall and blond, Pushkin was short and dark, the great-grandson of an African who came to Russia as a boy.

Vain, proud, aloof, volatile, and quick to take offence, Pushkin had already been involved in numerous duels and challenges. On one occasion he famously ate cherries out of a hat while waiting for his opponent to fire.

"A man under permanent special surveillance," he persisted in defying strict sartorial rules by wearing a coat with a missing button, an act that the author of Pushkin's Button says is hard not to see as "a mocking symbolic statement."

The Letter

The attention that d'Anthes paid to Natalya did not go unnoticed and became the subject of gossip, which Pushkin chose to ignore until he and several of his friends received a letter awarding him a cuckold certificate. The sender's identity is not known with certainty, but it is generally agreed that without the letters the duel would never have taken place.

Pushkin issued a challenge to d'Anthes, then withdrew it when d'Anthes agreed to marry Natalya's sister. A marriage ensued but the flirtatious behaviour between d'Anthes and Natalya continued.

Pushkin brought the matter to a head by writing an offensive letter to Heeckeren, accusing him of pimping for d'Anthes. If Heeckeren took the bait and challenged Pushkin, it would imply that d'Anthes was craven. This forced d'Anthes to issue his own challenge, which was exactly what Pushkin desired.

The Duel

A lane 20 paces in length was cleared in the snow. The first shot was fired by d'Anthes. Pushkin fell but managed to return fire, striking d'Anthes and knocking him down. The wound however was not serious. It was said that a button on his clothing deflected Pushkin's bullet. Pushkin's was a belly wound, and it took several days for him to die in extreme agony.

Pushkin's death is foreshadowed in Eugene Onegin and the short story "The Shot."

The Court Marshal

D'Anthes, Pushkin, and Pushkin's second were found guilty and sentenced to death. The judgment was a formality. Instead, d'Anthes was stripped of his rank and ejected from Russia. In Pushkin's case, the ruling was "a farcical black comedy," his hanging suspended "on account of death."

Heeckeren was recalled without being offered another posting.

Serena Vitale

The author is an Italian professor of Russian literature. The book was first published in Italian in 1995. The English translation by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild appeared 1999.

Pushkin's Button is packed with excerpts from contemporary correspondence imparting an immediacy to the story, and the author uses a engaging personal style, making such comments as:

• For the first time we feel a twinge of pity for d'Anthes... 
• A mischievous urge inclines us to consider... 
• We dissolve in laughter, unable to read on. 
• And here we were wracking our brains! 
• Instead of giving up let us reread the invaluable text yet again...

Grey Owl

Born an Englishman, he came alone to Canada at the age of 16. From that point on, he constantly tinkered with his identity and seldom went by his real name, Archie Belaney. He was a poseur, a bigamist, and a drunkard, but what he is best known for is his role as a conservationist.

He wrote four books, three of which appear in this volume, Collected Works of Grey Owl:

The Men of the Last Frontier (1931)
Pilgrims of the Wild (1934)
Sajo and the Beaver People (1935)

Sajo is a children's book. The rest -- including his last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) -- are memoirs that fall somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, for much of what he wrote about himself was made up. 

The book I enjoyed most in Collected Works is Pilgrims of the Wild, the first half of which is about the beaver kits that he and Anahareo adopted. He touched upon them in a chapter of Men of the Wild Frontier, but in his second book the writing is much more assured and a masterpiece of nature writing. His portrayal of the kits is tender enough to melt anyone's heart.

Biography

From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (1990) by Donald B. Smith is the definitive biography, its name derived from the title of second chapter in Men of the Last Frontier. The footnotes alone take up 70 pages, yet it's not a tedious book.

Earlier contributions came from Thomas Raddall, who wrote a perceptive essay in his book Footsteps on Old Floors (1968), and from Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl's publisher, who wrote Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (1973).

It was Dickson who arranged two wildly successful reading tours in England. Grey Owl was a gifted speaker, as was no more evident than when he gave a command performance for British royalty, and which so delighted young Princess Elizabeth that, as the talk drew to a close, she jumped up from her seat, clapped her hands, and urged him to continue. He took his leave of the king by touching his shoulder and saying, “Goodbye, brother.”

Anahareo

Anahareo deserves to be more well-known. She persuaded Grey Owl to save the kittens, McGinty and McGinnis, who so won their hearts that Grey Owl began his crusade to preserve the beaver, which had nearly been trapped out during the Depression. It was not until after his death in 1938 that she learned he was English.

Her memoir My Life with Grey Owl was published in 1940 by Lovat Dickson, who asked her to avoid mentioning the issue of Grey Owl's identity. Later this bothered her enough that she took to visiting libraries and tearing out the first chapter of the book.

In 1972 she published a revised version, Devil in Deerskins. In it she writes: "When finally I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling that I had been married to a ghost."

Though wounded by the deception, she defended his legacy as a conservationist. At first glance the book's title seems like a rebuke, but in fact is a tribute, as Grey Owl planned to use that title for a final book in which he planned to reveal the truth about himself.

Later she married a Swedish count and in 1983, two years before her death, she received the Order of Canada.

Images

Collected Works, Land of Shadows, Wilderness Man, and Devil in Deerskins all contain several pages of B&W plates.

Two vintage film clips, both named "Beaver People," can be viewed at the National Film Board's website. One, at approximately 9 minutes in length, shows Anahareo interacting with beavers. The other, at approximately 16 minutes long, shows only Grey Owl and the beavers.

A 1999 movie, Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, was less than memorable, in part due to the miscasting of Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl.

Casterologia

Many years ago I wrote a whimsical short story about a beaver family that meets up with Grey Owl and McGinnis. Entitled "Casterologia," it was published in the 1997 Spring issue of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, along with this delightful illustration by James Beveridge.

The story concludes with a list of references, only one of which is made up:

Dallman, J.E. 1968. Giant Beaver from a Post-Woodfordian Lake. J. Mammal. 50: 826-830.

Heter, E.W. 1950. Transplanting Beaver by Airplane and Parachute. J Wildli. Manage. 14: 143-147.

Huey, S.W. and W.H. Wolfrum. 1956. Beaver-Trout Relations. Prog, Fish-cult. 18: 70-74.

Martin, H. 1892. Casterologia: Or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver. Wm. Drysdale Co., Montreal.

Owl, G. 1933. Sajo and the Beaver People. Macmillan, Toronto.

Studios, U. 1957-63. Leave it to Beaver. CBS and ABC.

Shakespeare, W. 1603. Hamlet, Prince of Beavers. Ling & Trundell, London.

Yellowknife

Recently I came across some promotional material that accompanied the publication of my novel Yellowknife, and liked it enough to revisit it here.

Oblomov

Usually I disregard the blurbs plastered on the covers and inside pages of books, but two on this one deserve notice.

Tolstoy on the front cover: "I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it."

And Chekhov on the back: "[Goncharov is] ten heads above me in talent."

Oblomov is a Russian couch potato, a flabby landowner who seldom leaves home and spends most of his day dozing in bed. Meek and gullible, he is an easy mark for his friend Tarantiev, who is as grasping and venal as any character in fiction.

His manservant Zakhar, who has dressed him since boyhood, is lazy, clumsy, petty, and loyal. Though he constantly complains about Oblomov, he defends him passionately if anyone else speaks ill of him.

Stolz is Oblomov's one true friend. Active, vigorous, hard-working, and well-travelled, he constantly urges Oblomov to get up off his butt and introduces him to a young woman named Olga. Love blooms and for a time Oblomov is transformed, but his inability to manage his own affairs dooms the relationship.

Though Olga ends up marrying Stolz, both remain devoted to Oblomov for his innocence and purity of heart.

Oblomov's Dream

One of the finest passages in the book is Oblomov's dream of his pampered youth and the simple happy lives of peasants on his family's estate. It describes an idyllic picture of Russian rural life.

Since Stolz and Oblomov grew up together, we also get a picture of Stolz's early home life and how different it was from Oblomov's. Stolz was taught to be self-reliant from an early age.

Analysis

It seemed obvious that the novel was intended as a criticism of the slothfulness of Russian nobility. In an Afterword novelist Mikhail Shishkin indicates this was the usual Soviet interpretation, but argues otherwise.

He states that the marriage of Stolz and Olga is doomed because Stolz is too preoccupied with material advancement. The part-German Stolz lacks the Russian soul that Oblomov and Olga share. Oblomov resists Stolz's advice because it is directed only at personal advancement. There is nothing noble or ideal in it, no higher cause to serve.

Translation

The translation by Marian Schwartz is a recent one and based on the 1862 version, whereas previous ones were based on an earlier edition.