September 01, 2009
A Basket of Leaves
My friend Geoff is interviewed in The Quarterly Conversation about his book, A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa but this is interesting, where he talks about his current project:
But as far as my own projects go, I’ve changed course. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Thoreau’s Journal, which I first read in college, and particularly with his writings on animals. I’ve actually put together two manuscripts. One of them includes nearly all the four hundred or so creatures that he wrote about. The other focuses on the animals that had a spiritual meaning to him and organizes the excerpts by day of the year. Thoreau thought of the song of the cricket, for instance, as the earth’s pulse. The relationships he saw between nature, the seasons, and the cycle of death and resurrection become apparent when you key what he wrote about crickets and other animals to the time of the year.
The first thing that grabbed me about Basket of Leaves was seeing that Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky took place in Algeria, not Morocco as I had always thought. Although The Spider’s House, which is set in Morocco, is not in the Basket is really the book of the outsider looking into a culture. Geoff says this in his interview:
“A visitor to a country doesn’t get the whole picture, even if he or she lives in a country for many years. But it’s also true that someone who is born and raised in a country misses things, because they’re too familiar. A Basket of Leaves is about the literature of Africa, not just African literature per se, and part of what I wanted to convey was the flavor of a place to someone who might be coming to it for the first time.
In many cases, I thought the perspectives of outsiders and insiders complemented each other, and I was especially pleased when I could include a book by a traveler along with one by a native of a country.”
So true, yet I have to say that most of my reading from or about Africa has been through the eyes of non-Africans. At any rate, if you’re thinking of reading the world at all, you should check out Geoff’s book and visit his Website.
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