Little Bee: A Novel
14 Mei 2010 oleh naciknzor
Trite, unbelievable and hard to read - Mimi - NYC
There’s a famous story about Laurence Olivier’s response to Dustin Hoffman’s attempts at method acting on the movie ‘Marathon Man’. “Try acting, dear boy” he’s purported to have said — and the same might be true of writers. Do writers need to have first hand experience of what they write about? Surely that’s the point of fiction — the creation of an imaginary story with imaginary characters, accompanied by thorough research? And yet I found myself cringing throughout the majority of this book because the two main narrators seemed to me to be so blatantly contrived and artificial, and so thoroughly ‘colonized’, in postcolonial terms. Yes, I know. It’s easy to be reductive when applying PC theory to a book dealing with refugees, women and Nigeria written by a white British guy, but the ‘liminalities’ and ‘nuances’ so beloved of Bhabha don’t exist here, simply because the characterization fails to adequately support the message and the plot with which it groans heavily.
The chapters oscillate between the narratorial voice of ‘Little Bee’, a saccharine-sweet sixteen year-old Nigerian refugee, and Sarah, a middle-class magazine editor from London. Both characters are unsympathetic - ‘Little Bee’ because she is so revoltingly good, and the voice the author has assigned to her — an implausible hybrid of Nigeria and Britain — just doesn’t work. The San Francisco chronicle writes that “Sometimes she’s not convincing, and sometimes she tries too hard to convince. It’s too often apparent that Little Bee is not real. This doesn’t do justice to her story, and puts the burden back on the author to show that he’s representing her, rather than exploiting her.” Ed Lake of the Daily Telegraph felt that “Bee’s arch reasonableness and implausibly picturesque speech mean she often comes off as a too-cute cipher.” I’d agree with both these assessments - and accompanied by the construction of the other main character — Sarah — who comes across as odd, bizarre and unsympathetic, the book just doesn’t work for me. I read the whole thing, but reluctantly so, irritated by both Little Bee and Sarah, but more irritated by what seemed to be a pomposity on the part of the author in writing about an extremely delicate subject - refugees and asylum seekers - in an overdramatic form which takes itself too seriously and ruins an important message with trite and often cringeworthy characterization.
I think the only thing which might have redeemed this book for me was authenticity - had it been written by a Nigerian woman with first hand experience of rape, abuse, refugees, suicide and loss, I might have been more reluctant to criticize it, and this is probably indicative of endemic political correctness tainting my 21st century soul. However, as it was written by a white, middle class Guardian columnist it felt more like a PC attempt to be ‘right on’ and carry the message to the other bourgeois liberals who like to contemplate Broken Britain from their Erika Pekkari sofa, while sipping an organic Pinot, an unopened copy of Gore Vidal on the aged oak table before them.
P.S. No, I’m not a conservative because I didn’t like this book.
Little Bee: A Novel: :
WE DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS BOOK.
It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it.
Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:
It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.
The story starts there, but the book doesn’t.
And it’s what happens afterward that is most important.
Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds. Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009: The publishers of Chris Cleave’s new novel “don’t want to spoil” the story by revealing too much about it, and there’s good reason not to tell too much about the plot’s pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple–journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday–who should have stayed behind their resort’s walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn’t explain to the girls from her village because they’d have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day–with the right papers–and “no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.” Where you have to give up the safety you’d assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state. –Mari Malcolm - read more.
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In den 1970er Jahren entstand in den USA eine völlig neue Subkultur: Der Hip-Hop. Seine Wurzeln liegen in der schwarzen Funk-und Soulmusik, die um den Sprechgesang (Rap), sowie dem Samplen und Scratchen von Platten ergänzt wurden. Schnell wuchs sich der neuartige Musikstil, der ursprünglich aus den Ghettos der Schwarzen stammte, zu einer Jugend-und Massenbewegung aus. Heute hört man auf der ganzen Welt Hip-Hop, seine prominentesten Vertreter wie Eminem, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre oder die Beastie Boys sind internationale Stars.
