Alphabetical Africa (New Directions Books)

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But this time the narrative has already been established and its momentum helps push the characters and their escapades successfully through the difficult terrain of the closing chapters. This makes it bit more difficult to take the endeavour entirely seriously (maybe it should be An Almost Alphabetical Africa ? Afterwards, only a missing word starting with a T or, towards the end of the book, an “I” make you notice the gimmick (and kind of take you out of the story, though I guess that doesn’t matter that much in this kind of book). Problem solved The problem is that, of the 36 African alphabets that have been identified,11 or nearly one-third are not represented on the QWERTY keyboard which means that the characters are written with rather inelegant approximations. In the end, it seemed to me that this is a lighthearted spoof about American attitudes to Africa in the 1970s, placed, for reasons I think the author himself never entirely analyzed, into the "terrifying and irrefutable" Procrustean frame of a linguistic game.

Photo by Michael Wolf Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird. To me this idea of artistic constriction/restraint reminds me very much for example of what Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine were doing in some of their films under the ideology of Dogma 95, or in literature this form reminds me of what authors such as Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud were doing in some of their books under the ideology of Oulipo.Narrative covers many aspects - murder, loot, chase, battles, ant extermination, colonization, foreign investors, changing African landscape and culture, amorous escapades - and much more. He is interested in Africa's politics ("But can Alva's claims also cure Americans bombing Chad beaches.

On highbrow literary critics in India, Abbas said they "have sometimes sneeringly labelled my novels and short stories as 'mere journalese'.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Post modern way of creative writing, this way could inspire, but also, I feel my imagination is as well constrained. Once I found one mistake I tracked another 23 (mostly prepositions, why his editor didn't catch them or tell him is beyond me) over the course of the 152 pages, which is still astounding. House of Leaves, for instance, has taken a ton of abuse for allegedly being a hollow shell of a novel whose shallowness is disguised by its carnival of textual formatting, though I disagree vehemently (as I digress) and believe the artifice of House of Leaves only enhances its uniquely imaginative artistry . This structural device is a central element of the novel and is reflected in the title, "Alphabetical Africa," which hints at the book's linguistic playfulness.

Throughout -- even as the book grows -- there is always the awareness that Africa is shrinking, vanishing. Don Webb makes a homage to this work in the short story "After Abish" included in his A Spell for the Fulfillment of Desire. It was initially developed in 1928 by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures from a combination of the English alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Thus J and Y are pronounced [ d͡ʒ] and [ j] as in English, while Ɔ, Ɛ and Ŋ are pronounced [ ɔ], [ ɛ] and [ ŋ] as in the IPA. The story reaches maximum freedom at the midpoint of the book; then, in strict accordance with the overall constraint, the frame begins to become more rigorous again.There is a flow to novel, a definite build up as more and more becomes possible and expressible until the apex (or rather: the zenith) is reached.