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Geschiedenis Van Een Gevallen Engel (2011)

by Henning Mankell(Favorite Author)

3.47 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

9044521187 (ISBN13: 9789044521184)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

De Geus, Breda

review 1: This book bars no punches - yet, it's lyrical, sensitive and powerfully carried off. There is clarity and beauty in the way Mankell delivers what is in fact quite an atrocious story: that of the experience of blacks under the power of colonial whites, in Portuguese East Africa in 1905. The lens through which the reader sees and feels is the persona of Hannah, a young Swedish woman who unexpectedly finds herself 'there'. An amazing read with a strong call out for righteousness in what is now known as Mabuto, Mozambique, where the author spends much of his time.
review 2: (Note to the reader: I am interested in fiction about Africa. I embarked on Henning Mankell’s A Treacherous Paradise because it was recommended to me as about Portuguese East Africa. ... more I have not read any of Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries that apparently have a devoted following.)Swedish novelist Henning Mankell, who improbably spends half of each year in Maputo, Mozambique, came upon an improbable seed for a novel there. In the early 1900s the most lucrative brothel in Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East (now Maputo), was owned and run by a Swedish woman. A Treacherous Paradise is what resulted from his growing and nurturing that seed. His heroine Hanna (aka Ana Branca) goes from rural poverty in Sweden to signing on as cook on a freighter hauling lumber to Australia to marrying the ship’s third mate. He quickly dies causing her to jump ship in Lourenço Marques. She shelters in the hotel O Paraiso, a front for LM’s most profitable brothel, miscarries, marries Senhor Vaz, the brothel owner. He proves to be impotent and shortly dies, bequeathing O Paraiso to his widow. Complications ensue. In one sense the book is a catalog of the pairings that grow out of a racially stratified society: white colonials exploiting black locals; bestial white men exploiting downtrodden black women; and a variety of turnings on this theme. There are great potentialities here. Even some for magical realism. But Mankell sets up a perplexing situation. A Treacherous Paradise puts a repressed, uncommunicative Ingmar Bergman character out of the frigid north in the hot, sensual, expressive magico-realist country of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Understandably, Hanna has trouble adjusting. But she has no friends (and therefore no confidants to whom she can reveal herself). And she has no sense of humor and so no capacity to find amusement in the ironies that abound. Moreover, Mankell removes her from much of the action. She lives on a slope above the town and watches the brothel through binoculars (instead of being there). When an abortive rebellion breaks out, she witnesses it from afar; other authors would have placed her in the thick of it. The only being with whom twenty-year-old Hanna has an ongoing relationship is Carlos, a chimpanzee – half-human, half-animal – who wears clothes, counts money, occasionally shares Hanna’s bed and grabs her breasts. Carlos is clearly a symbol although it’s not entirely clear for what. At one point Hanna muses: “Perhaps I see Carlos as a reflection of myself.”Anyone who’s read James Jones’ From Here to Eternity knows that clients can have fun in a brothel. But not in O Paraiso. If there’s singing, dancing, laughter and riotous living, Mankell never tells us about it. How can it possibly be the funnest place in town?A lively style would have made this a much more interesting book, a good read along with all those racial ironies and odd pairings and the magical realism more magical. Has the translator badly served the author? The writing is flat, repetitive and awkward (“a half-asleep soldier”). It is also littered with clichés; here’s a collection from less than 20 pages: “she sat for ages in front of her open diary;” “what he said was the truth and nothing but the truth;” “something every sensible soldier is scared stiff of:” “At last the penny dropped for O’Neill.”In the book’s last fifty pages it becomes more obviously a work of magical realism. It’s still trying to resolve the complexities of colonial racism. To do this Hanna/Ana feels attracted to the black brother of a woman she’s tried vainly to help. They have sex; she hopes she’s conceived. She talks to the white captain of the boat taking her away from LM and recognizes him as a frequent patron of O Paraiso. She asks about his preferred partner; he says he wishes he could marry her. Oh, if we could all have sex together and marry improbable partners! Maybe that woul d solve everything in a magico-realist world. less

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