D. Y. Bechard

This is a very tough novel for me to review because its goal is unattainable. Béchard, whose previous novels and non-fiction books alike have been frequent award winners or nominees, is delving in this book into the frustrating puzzles of identity, white privilege and often violent colonial attitudes even in the "post-colonial age," and the labyrinth of unintended consequences that derive from outsiders' attempts at conservationism in Africa.

Bechard gives his protagonist his own name. Both the real and the fictional Bechard are journalists who have reported from war zones and other far flung regions across the world. As the novel begins, Bechard is off to the Congo to do an investigative piece on Richmond Hew, a corrupt and ruthless "fixer" who helps environmental agencies trying to set up preservation parkland in the African jungle. The goal seems noble but the agencies' presumptive ways and Hew's methodology are not. Plus there are the complaints of Hew's sexual abuse of young girls. A ruthless, mysterious white man gone rogue and dangerous out in the far African wilderness will of course bring up images of Kurtz. And, indeed, the thematic similarities to Heart of Darkness are intentional and overt. Hew is not the only character referred to during the course of the story as "another Kurtz."

The storyline moves swiftly and well, here. Each interaction adds to the kaleidoscope effects of Bechard's knowledge (and new learning) about the roles played by race, and of the ways in which all relationships are fraught with that baggage. Bechard thinks he understands the issues, or at least understands the consequences of the incompleteness of his understanding. He has, after all, reported from Africa before. But he is endlessly brought up short by still another landmine of his own lack of insight.

A man, Baraka, who is to drive Bechard on his motorcycle into the jungle so Bechard can try to solve the mystery another conservationist who has disappeared, her truck has found riddled with bullet holes, first reads Bechard a poem he has written about UNIFCEF and asks Bechard's opinion. When Bechard replies that the poem is great but the last two lines possibly unnecessary, Baraka replies, "I'm no schoolboy and wasn't asking for corrections." A bit later Baraka says, "I have other poems. Poems of sadness for small NGOs that vanish before they start, or those that paint their acronyms on walls yet seem not to exist bur for the plump white poeple who eat in restaurants at night with prostitutes." Later still, Bechard asks Baraka if he can write an article about him. "I do not wish," Baraka answers, "to be a sad, comic figure for one of those evaporating internet articles that always appears to be new but is always the same" and then, "I do not care to be a fraught glimpse of my people's humanity, engrossed with the sort of futile romanticism with which your people, being so self-assured, can't be bothered."

Another Congolese man tells Bechard what he knows about Richmond Hew, much of which is horrifying. Bechard observes that the man does not seem bothered by the story:

He stared at me with a level, accustomed gaze, the way a man who has worked in a misty landscape all his life will stare through he fog, already seeing the shapes that will materialize when it disperses. "If I do not appear outraged," he said slowly, as if with great fatigue, "it is because I have worked not only with many men, but with many whites."

There are frequent memorable insights and perspectives along the way, often related as Bechard's own memories:

"Years ago I'd read an online article on how to prevent conflict. It said that people reflect back to us what we perceive in them and that we should picture the child our rival had been, focus on the good and grow that. I'd done this in war zones, approaching foreign soldiers not as terrifying spectacles of male power but as sons, brothers or fathers. I'd felt how we can injure others with our fear, since it presumes their inhumanity."

Speaking of his own childhood in Virginia, Bechard writes,

I was confused as to why white people, with the passion of injured honor, spoke of the War of Northern Aggression, of the harm done to their families and communities, and the destruction wrought on their lands, but almost never of slavery. Black hardship, on the rare occasions that whites spoke of it, was discusses as if it were divorced from history, not as a contextual trait but an essential one, an innate quality of blackness rather than the consequence of violence and oppression."

I've leaned on quoting from the text here much more extensively than is my usual practice. I'll finish up by noting that while the storyline of White is very engaging, and we are brought along smartly in Bechard's continuing advance towards Hew, we do not get, nor are we expecting, an "ah ha" moment where Bechard, fictional or real, provides a sudden unraveling or escape from the issues set forth at the outset: white privilege and white foreigners' paternalistic presumptions of supremacy over the Congolese in their own country, in terms of expertise and motivation and wisdom, to offer a short list. White is, really, a novel about humanity and quicksand.… (mere)

This is story of a family of French Canadian Herve Herve whose children are either born giants or runts. Many of the runts do not thrive or are given away. This is not a gentle book. The book is divided into Book One - the tale of the generations of the giants, and Book Two, the runts. In Book One Jude, one of Herve's sons, is taught to fight. His father places bets on how much pain he can withstand. At home Jude tries to protect his frail sister. At a certain point Jude flees the family home and heads south, following many French Canadians to the USA in search of jobs and luxuries. There his saga continues.

I really enjoyed Book One. Bechard writes beautifully and there is an element of mysticism that I enjoyed. Book Two follows the runts - I think. I say I think because I found Book two very disjointed and hard to follow. I would be reading a passage and then it would end, I would reread the last few phrases, still be confused, move on and the same thing would happen over and over again. Aside from that I just did not like the characters in Book Two and did not always find their connections clear. At the very end the two branches of the family sort of come together, but personally I would have been happy to have stayed with the characters in Book One for a longer period of time and never have bothered with the runts! Five stars for Book One, zero stars for Book Two!… (mere)