L'Appel de la lune

Abstract

spreads throughout the city, sowing fear on top of the terror that stalks the streets. But as with any great literary work, this novel doesn’t just tell a story. Rather , it unfolds across multiple dimensions, each layer peeling back to reveal something new: the structure of the novel itself (stories within stories, references to the “author” as a character); buildings that, when damaged by bombs, reveal archaeological treasures; and identities that turn out merely to be covers for other (perhaps still false) identities. Exquisitely translated by Jonathan Wright, this novel breaks through the superficial news stories and helps us see more clearly what the American invasion has wrought, how violence begets violence, and how tenuous is the line between innocence and guilt. Brilliant and horrifying, Frankenstein in Baghdad is essential reading. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Tidiane N’Diaye. L’Appel de la lune. Paris. Gallimard. 2017. 223 pages. The Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye is known for such historical works as Le Génocide voilé (Gallimard, 2008) and Par-delà les ténèbres blanches (Gallimard, 2010). L’Appel de la lune, set in nineteenthcentury South Africa before and during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, is his first novel. The “call of the moon” depicts a multiracial , though rarely tolerant, South Africa, before complete British military domination , and long before apartheid. This historical novel’s main plotline sets up a love story that is in some ways worthy of a fairy tale. The idealistic romance, however, develops against a backdrop of widespread and clearly depicted racial, religious, and generational strife. Marc Jaubert, a descendant of exiled French Protestants whose family runs a vineyard, falls in love with the beautiful Zulu princess Isiban, whom he first glimpses as she dances alone at night, illuminated by the moonlight. This unlikely love story leads to an even unlikelier marriage , mediated by the couple’s respective grandfathers. N’Diaye’s background as a researcher often shows during the narrative , which includes succinct but frequent background information on Zulu social norms, British colonial policy, religious beliefs among the Boers, and the history of Protestantism in France. The expository historical digressions sometimes take precedence over the storytelling, but the author never loses sight of his narrative thread for long. Around Isiban and Marc gravitates a cast of characters that N’Diaye has clearly sought to make as diverse and representative as possible . Isiban’s sister Pampatha disapproves of her marriage to a white man. Marc’s brother François similarly resents his brother for marrying a black woman. Kuzayo, the Zulu spy and translator, plays a vital role as intermediary between the extended families of the two lovers. A Boer family uses the Bible to justify its vicious racism. The aristocratic British army officers exhibit their own smug level of “civilizational” superiority. By contrast, the small community of family, friends, and colleagues who gravitate around Isiban and Marc seem to prefigure the sort of multiracial community that is the stated goal of postapartheid South Africa (the novel ends with a call for “a true rainbow nation”). There is an unambiguously didactic element to this novel. The author wants his readers not only to learn about history but to learn from it, to understand the mistakes of the past and to avoid repeating them. That said, N’Diaye also knows how to tell good stories and how to tie various subplots together. This is an immensely readable and informative first novel. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Daša Drndić. Belladonna. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New York. New Directions. 2017. 378 pages. Belladonna’s title is a deadly plant; its Latin epigraph warns a society on a suicidal path: “Today it’s me, tomorrow . . . you. Who can escape?” This densely intertextual, selfreferential historical metafiction, its scope and power remarkable, employs Sebaldian techniques to probe the Holocaust, the end of Yugoslavia, and neocolonialism. The protagonist of this apocryphal “manuscript,” its sixty-five-year-old author, Croat Andreas Ban, seeks to “cobble up a whole” from his “fragments.” His targets all too timely, Ban’s psychic odyssey charts our violent century “of cleansing . . . of erasure,” where form has eclipsed content, community the individual, ethnocentrism fellow feeling, dogma and...