Vincent Eri

An interesting read. I don't think it's the greatest novel ever, but it is a good story with lots of insight into local culture. (The exact culture/language group Hoiri belongs to is never mentioned, at least as far as I noticed. The region is mentioned, though, which for people in the know about Papua New Guinea is probably enough to know.) There are many observations of white people (especially white Australians) from an indigenous perspective.

One interesting aspect of this book was its handling of time. It was linear as most novels are, but time would pass in big uneven chunks. In one paragraph, Hoiri would be working and it was described as if a couple of days' labor, but later the author would make a passing comment about it being a period of months or years. It took a little getting used to but it made for an interesting read.… (mere)

Let me first say that The Crocodile isn’t a great book. It lacks narrative flow and the dialogue is clunky and often expository. The book follows its central character from the age of seven until some time in adulthood. It starts and ends at seemingly random places, and there is no real plot—no more thematic consistency than might occur in an actual life. Eri also employs none of the cues that Western novelists use to indicate the passage of time (though to be fair I wasn’t entirely sure if this was a deficit, a stylistic choice, or perhaps simply a cultural difference in traditions of storytelling) so that months and years go by unremarked, in odd leaps and bounds. These defects notwithstanding, however, the novel provided a good complement to Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime: A New Guinea Autobiography, exploring many of the same issues and bringing up several important concepts and events in the history of the colonization of Papua New Guinea.

I've published a longer review of this book (exploring the above-mentioned concepts and events) on my blog, Around the World in 2000 Books.… (mere)