1) "Baking Cakes in Kigali" by Gaile Parkin
Colorful debut novel surrounds a cake-baking protagonist with a multinational cast of supporting characters.
Angel and her husband Pius tragically buried both of their grown children, son Joseph and daughter Vinas. Now the Tanzania-born couple are raising five grandchildren (two girls and three boys) in Rwanda’s capital city. Angel does her part to keep the family afloat by selling her cakes, which she decorates with bright colors and fanciful designs. Her skill has brought her a wide array of customers, including an ambassador and her neighbor Ken, a Japanese American who works for the United Nations. Ken is one of many foreigners who live in the same complex as Angel and Pius. Their lives intersect over polite cups of sweet, milky tea and conversations conducted in several languages, covering subjects that range from prostitution to HIV. The chapters, each one a little story unto itself, collectively develop the ongoing saga of Angel and her family. All the action takes place against a backdrop of social change, as African women in particular struggle to improve their lives and obtain educations. Angel functions as confidante to many; she’s a woman of immense compassion as well as a baker of extraordinary talent. This likable and interesting character, unfortunately, is not well served by cumbersome prose and glacial pacing. Parkin inserts back story by having characters repeat things they already know, a device that works once or twice but is ultimately annoying as well as contrived. In her dialogue, people constantly repeat each others’ names, something that rarely happens in real life.
Born and raised in Zambia, Parkin offers a fascinating personal glimpse into a culture unfamiliar to most Americans, but better editing could have transformed her slightly stilted effort into a book to remember.
2) "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison
This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecora. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecoras are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish--for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecora just might have been loved--for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
3) "The Famished Road" by Ben Okri
Like one of those populous medieval paintings of the Last Judgment, the African ghetto of the Nigerian-born Okri (Stars of the New Curfew, 1989), winner of the 1991 Booker Prize, not only teems with lives and spirits both sacred and profane, but contains profound truths--all described in rich, often lyrical prose. The narrator of this tale of life in a ghetto on the eve of independence is Azaro, a ``spirit-child'' who belonged to a group of spirit children who did not look forward to being born: they ``disliked the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longings of the world, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe.'' Tired of being born and dying so many times, Azaro chooses to live, perhaps ``because I wanted to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother.'' And live he does, but his name Azaro/Lazarus is not coincidental: he is constantly battling disease, disaster, and the spirits who try to recapture him. The ghetto itself is a harsh world of endemic poverty, crime, and political chicanery as local bullies vie to establish their political factions. Hovering in the background is the mysterious but helpful photographer; the enigmatic and powerful Madame Koto; and the malevolent blind singer, as well as a slew of good and bad spirits. Meanwhile, Azaro's parents' lives are a constant struggle; but as the election nears, Azaro's father enjoys a brief success, and in a subsequent vision proclaims that life is a road we're building that does lead to death but also to ``wonderful things'' for ``so long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use.'' There is at last a moment of serenity, and Azaro savors the sweetness that has dissolved his fears: ``I was not afraid of time.'' Long in the telling, like a great epic poem, Okri's tale is a beautifully rendered allegory, enriched by its African setting, of love powerful enough to defy even death and his minions.
4) "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela
5) "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer
As in the title story of A Soldier's Embrace (1980), Gordimer takes the South African dilemma that one step further here: it's the very near future, the black revolution has come at last--and what happens then to good white liberal Johannes-burgers like Barn and Maureen Smales? ""There was nothing else to do but the impossible, now they had stayed too long."" So architect Barn, wife Maureen, and their three small children must flee, must hide from the burning and killing in the streets and at the airports: in their ""bakkie"" (a small truck, a sporting vehicle), they escape deep into the country--to the mud-hut home village of their ""saviour,"" their longtime house servant July. And, with a Dostoevskyan instinct for nosing up intolerable situations, Gordimer teases out the tensions and nuances of the Smales' life as fugitive-guests--""July's people""--now completely dependent on a black man's generosity. There's the expected irony of soft middle-class folk forced to live a bottom-line existence: one hard bed shared by the family (much sleeping on car-seats); the children learning to use stones instead of toilet paper; the heightened awareness of smells and exposed bodies (""He would never have believed that pale hot neck under long hair when she was young could become her father's neck that he remembered in a Sunday morning bowling shirt""). But even more finely dramatic is the interplay between former masters and former servant--as roles reverse, new awarenesses emerge, and comforting premises become untenable. Maureen discovers that July--the most scrupulously well-treated of servants--has stolen useless little gadgets over the years. Barn writhes with stifled anger when July quite reasonably retains possession of the keys to the bakkie. The couple learns what it's like to be dependent on someone else--no matter how kindly that someone may be--for the basics of life. Maureen has a series of oblique confrontations with July--over seemingly petty matters--that culminate in the baring of his anger and the rising of her fear: ""How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself. . . ."" And with the politics, too, Gordimer catches the light from unexpected, convincing angles: the fearful white visitors are taken to see July's tribal chief--who, rather than ordering them to leave, asks them to help him repel the revolution (""When those Soweto and Russias, what-you-call-it come, you shoot with us""). True, the ending here seems a bit too abrupt; and the prose, often searingly exact, occasionally becomes artily self-conscious. But never before has Gordimer so perfectly balanced the political and the personal. With the help of a few symbolic-but-wholly-real totems--a set of keys, a gun, a bed--she has taken one of today's largest stories and has swirled it, as in a centrifuge, into one small, grippingly life-sized tale that's almost unbearably dense with feeling and import.
6) "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.
7) "Anthills of the Savannah" by Chinua Achebe
A superb new work from the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart (1959), his first novel in over 20 years. In the depleted, post-colonial West African state of Kengan, a military coup ushers a promising young officer into the role of president. Lucky, bright, but terminally afraid of a counterinsurrection, the President, a.k.a. His Excellency, fails in a referendum bid to install himself as President for Life. As his paranoia gradually chokes all remnants of due process, the slide to tyranny is observed through three key witnesses: Chris, the Commissioner of Information; Ikem, poet and editor of the National Gazette; and Beatrice, a senior civil servant. Cabinet meetings have been reduced to ritualistic gestures of subservience to the President, who lords it over his Ministers with the malicious glee of a chiding schoolmaster, but Chris at first can't summon the courage to resign his post. He does attempt, however, to warn Ikem that a storm is brewing, but to no avail: Ikem continues to caricature the President in National Gazette editorials, and His Excellency finds the right pretext to suspend his duties as editor when Ikem is seen drinking with delegates from a supposedly seditious province. Having no way of knowing just how out of control the President's anxiety has become, Ikem delivers a speech to a group of students--and the President raises the stakes by having the ex-editor arrested and ""fatally wounded in a scuffle."" Chris, sensing he's next in line, escapes through a chain of safe houses to a rural province, where he learns that a new coup has toppled His Excellency's regime. In a final ironic twist, Chris is murdered during celebrations of the President's fall before he has a chance to size up the threat of this new coup's emerging star. Tough, tight-lipped, and shrewd, this one reestablishes Achebe's place as a leading voice in African literature.
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