2006 books

30) Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance, 2002
The title comes from the Haitian saying "After the dance, the drum is heavy", meaning that during their annual carnival Haitians must forget about all the things that are weighing them down. This is a memoir/travelogue that also functions as a piece of cultural anthropology, looking behind the hedonism of the annual carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, seen from the point of view of a native Haitian who in her youth was kept away from all the fun. Scholarly and a little too dry with not as much colour, flavour and atmosphere as the cover illustration and blurb led me to expect.

2006 books

31) Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story, 1991
A Dutch teacher and classical scholar goes to sleep in Amsterdam and inexplicably wakes up the next morning in Portugal, in a hotel bed in which twenty years before he slept with another man's wife. But this Kafka-esque premise goes in a very sardonic direction and is delivered with a sharply observant humour, as the protagonist roams back and forth in his life seemingly searching for clues. The Following Story covers a lot of ground in its brief 97 pages but there seems to be no place at which you can say with certainty "ah, so that's what the author is getting at" as it is constantly moving on to the next thing, never chronologically, but evidently with Nooteboom's own sequential thought processes, perhaps making it an analysis of fulfillment by taking the reader through a game of join-the-dots in prose – one in which if you haven't arrived at a clear picture by the end, makes you want to start again for another try. Very enjoyable, despite Nooteboom's habit of disorienting the reader, which almost seems careless at times.