It is hard to feel sympathy for Isa ad-Dabbagh, as it is always hard to feel sympathy over an extended period for anyone who feels relentlessly sorry for themselves. Naguib Mahfouz's AUTUMN QUAIL begins with Egypt's 1952 Revolution. Isa is dismissed from government on corruption charges and arrives home to his mother's questions:

Fortunately she did not know anything. Walking slowly around the house, he thought about how expensive it was. He couldn't possibly keep it now. Two years' salary, even added to what was left in the bank of the umdas' gifts, wouldn't last longer than two years. All those objects decorating the entrance, the reception room, and the library were "gifts" too. Certainly the crooks outnumbered the people who had been dismissed for crookedness. He was guilty, though, and so were his friends: what had happened to the good old days? Gifts were forbidden, after all, a mark of corruption. But this sudden loss of everything, just when he was on the threshold of a senior position, which would have led to the minister's chair! How could you live in a world where people forgot or pretended to forget, where there were so many others who gloated over the whole thing with unfeeling malice, where hard-won honors were being stripped away and vices trundled out and exposed, unfurled like so many flags? (p.60)

And so he goes one: whinge, whinge whinge through page after page. Don't get me started on corrupt and bullying (or worse) officials, South African history is littered with them. I have no time for the oft repeated excuses of "I didn't know" or "It wasn't me." Isa describes it as "...the harsh circumstances which often forced us to do things we didn't like doing" and pointing out that everyone around him did the same.

As his life spirals out of control, mirrored by political events in the country (the nationalization of the Suez Canal; the invasion of Egypt), Isa slouches from gambling table, to drinking den, using up his savings and in the process treating women abominably and generally irritating friends and family who are baffled by his behaviour. He is unable to make decisions about his future because he is so mired in the past and his perceived unjust dismissal (even though he is the first to admit the corruption charges are justified) both from work, but also by his fiancee's family. Just as we begin to lose patience, Mahfouz delivers an understated masterstroke to the plot. It would spoil the book for anyone who might read it (nor, to be honest, am I sure I could adequately describe it) so I won't discuss it here. Let's just say that instead of feeling I'd like to deposit the book at the first charity shop I came to, I now want to read it again. Immediately.

Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 and died in 2006. Hisham Matar recalls attending a soiree with Mahfouz here.

I selected this book for the Africa Reading Challenge.

Thanks to the Africa Reading Challenge hosted over at siphoning off a few thoughts, I've finally managed to prioritize reading the fantastically named MY MERCEDES IS BIGGER THAN YOURS by Nkem Nwankwo. Onuma in fact swans around in a gold Jaguar, rather than a Mercedes, but that's just nit-picking - the Mercedes appears several times throughout the book in the hands of other drivers as a status symbol. At one point Onuma, sans Jaguar, refuses to take public transport because of the drop in status he feels this shows, and a lift he is offered in an aquaintance's Mercedes rankles hugely. Nwankwo's satirical take on changes in Nigerian civil life was published in 1975 and is long out of print. It has a couple of psychedelically orange-coloured ladies on the cover looking heavenwards towards a floating Mercedes emblem (if I can ever figure out how to scan and upload images, I'll be sure to show you this one!). Nwankwo produced two books of stories for teens and his first novel DANDA (1964) before this title. His third novel THE SCAPEGOAT (1984) was, I understand his last. All of these books are now out of print.

I must admit the opening page nearly put me off the entire experience, and is frankly well deserving of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award (look away now if you think you might be offended!):

Once upon a time a young man was savouring the pleasures of a new car. He was thinking that there were really occasions when a car seemed to drive itself as it were, seemed to respond to some remote stimulus independent of the driver. It had its moments of cursedness, of course, when it whined and snorted for no particular reason, then there were moments of heavenly smoothness when it floated on the crest of some intangible wave.
It was like when you have gone into a woman. Some of the time is taken up with clumsy flopping about; trying futilely to find the perfect position and rhythm. Then there are moments of complete synchronization of limbs which seem to come about without effort. There is then an access of energy and the two bodies seem to fuse into one through some mysterious alchemy of blood. Desire and the explosions of joy in tidal waves originating from impulses as mysterious as they are arbitrary. (p.1)

Okaaaay. A little over the top! Judicious editing would have helped this book along - unfortunately for the reader there are similar passages dotted about throughout the book although I suppose these serve to remind us that all Onuma is interested in (other than accruing wealth and status) are cars and women. The quotation above continues:

He would soon be home. Already familiar landmarks were flashing by: occasional clusters of giant trees, the scene of childhood escapades, wooden stores and brothels that stood where once, in his memory, had been wide lawns and friendly trees. Hard-boiled as the young man was, or thought he was, the prospect of the clearing in the forest he knew as home never failed to move him deeply. Involuntarily he broke into a song of praise to home.The song and the exhilaration of spirits and the effortless drive through the balmy twilight almost brought tears to his eyes. He waved to a number of naked children who were grubbing about by the wayside. He failed to notice their nakedness and squalor. He saw them only through the haze of his happiness. My people! My country! he thought. His sense of well-being seemed an augury of a happy return. (p.2)

Why not have left out the first sexed-up bit and simply opened with the second quotation? The latter quotation illustrates why the book is worth reading, capturing homecoming after years of living elsewhere perfectly.

So it is that Onuma, having made some money in the urban metropolis, returns to his home village after a fifteen year absence, to prove how well he has done to both the family and the extended community. Pride (as always) comes before a fall, however, and the story follows what happens as Onuma gets caught up in showing off rather than simply enjoying the pleasures of home. Nwankwo's descriptions of rural village life are grittily observed and make the book worth reading. Local politics rears its ugly head, as do issues related to family ties, and of course all of this is tied up with the fate of the golden jaguar...

Thanks to Ex Libris for drawing my attention to an Africa Reading Challenge being hosted over on Siphoning Off a Few Thoughts. Admittedly, this is the area in which I tend to focus most of my reading anyway, but I'm only too happy to sign up - it will force me to pay a little more attention to some of the titles in my TBR pile that have come my way over the past year. I've chosen (as always, descriptions taken from cover blurbs):

AUTUMN QUAIL - Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
...a tale of moral responsibility, alienation, and political downfall featuring a corrupt young bureaucrat, Isa ad-Dabbagh, who is one of the early victims of the purge after the 1952 Revolution in Egypt. The conflict between his emotional instincts and his gradual intellectual acceptance of the Revolution forms the framework for a remarkable portrait of the clash between past and present...

BURN MY HEART - Beverley Naidoo (South African author/Kenyan setting)
Two boys living on the same Kenyan farm but they share an uneasy friendship. They live in a time when white and black means rich and poor - and a secret society, called the Mau Mau, want their land and freedom back.

COCONUT - Kopano Matlwa (South Africa)
...about growing up black in white suburbs, where the cost of fitting in can be your very identity...

MARU - Bessie Head (South African author/Botswanan setting)
Margaret Cadmore, an orphaned Basarwa girl, comes to Dilepe to teach, only to discover that in this remote Botswanan village her own people are treated as outcasts. Her presence divides the village...

MY MERCEDES IS BIGGER THAN YOURS - Nkem Nwankwo (Nigeria)
Onuma returns to his village after fifteen years. He makes a big hit, especially with the girls, in a Jaguar the colour of gold...

THE SUNS OF INDEPENDENCE - Ahmadou Kourouma (Cote d'Ivoire)
Fama is the last of the Dumbuya, the ruling dynasty of Horodugu. The colonial era deprived him of the chiefdom; the 'suns of independence' have reduced him to living on alms, and the toil of his much-enduring wife Salimata, in the teeming capital city of the Ebony Coast.

Go on over and sign up for the Africa Reading Challenge yourself - you know you want to!