The Venal Creature" by Paul Batey will forever go down in the history of world literature as the first novel by an American author to win the Booker Prize and open a new chapter in American literature, given that the next year again brought victory to the author from the USA. Imagine what a strange thing has been observed in English-language literature for almost 50 years: although the Booker is awarded for novels written in English, the prize has already been sent to South Africa, India and Nigeria, and Americans whose books were annually shortlisted were constantly left out of business.
But, let's go back to Batey: firstly, he is actually Beatty, and secondly, the novel that made him famous is called "Sale", but our translators and book publishers do not care about all this from a high bell tower. Batey-Beatty is a writer and poet from Los Angeles, who became famous for his sense of humor, but it's not important at all, it's important that he is an African-American, joking about racism and blacks and managed to write a whole book about racial segregation in modern California, moreover, segregation, within which whites are oppressed.
The venal Creature is one of the nicknames of the main character and part-time narrator of the novel of the same name. He lives in the town of Dickens, which is located in the suburbs of LA, and is engaged in growing vegetables and fruits and breeding livestock. Everything would be fine, but strange things begin to happen in the life of the Corrupt Creature and all of Dickens: the city suddenly disappeared from the map, losing its borders, and segregation, which began as a half-joke-half-experiment in a single local bus, gained momentum and seized all municipal buildings.
Of course, the awarding of the Booker Prize to a "Corrupt creature" is a pure conjuncture, even I, a person who can't stand the concept of "conjuncture" (and not even because it's problematic to pronounce this word in the flow of speech), recognize this. No, well, can you imagine: an American Negro with a higher education has been joking about slavery for 320 pages, ridiculing racial stereotypes.
Describes segregation on the contrary, recalls all the significant events in the fight against this very segregation in the framework of jokes and satirical sketches, to give a prize to such a book is the height of tolerance and recognition of the fact that not only whites can laugh at blacks, but blacks are quite able to laugh at whites, and at themselves, and even at Latinos with Jews, or even all together.
In general, all the time I was reading it seemed to me that I was not looking at a novel, but the shorthand of a very long stand-up of some black comedian who was aiming to get his own comedy show on American TV: a coherent plot, understandable characters and everything else that one usually wants to see in a novel fell victim to a key idea and satire that runs over the edge, there was only a set of comical situations, bright replicas and funny conclusions of the narrator, whose image is completely artificial.
No, there really is something to laugh at here, and I think that for those who are in the subject, that is, black residents of Los Angeles, this book is generally something hilarious and funny to the point of stomach cramps, everyone else will get as far as their awareness. In "The Venal Creature" there is an immeasurable number of mentions of various black figures of culture, arts and politics, sometimes not the most famous or long forgotten (one of the heroes of the novel is an actor of the TV series "The Little Ones", most of the episodes of which were filmed in the 1920s-1930s.
Surprisingly, I even saw some series in my childhood), it is clear that almost anyone knows someone and something, the level of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or the march in Selma, regardless of his place of residence on this planet, but I would like to get rid of the constant, almost every-page appeal to comments, especially since neither they nor the mentions themselves carry a lot of meaning and are often required only so that the reader can appreciate another joke.
From the remembered (it would be funny if it wasn't sad):
- an attempt by Dickens, who disappeared from the maps, to find a sister city among. It could have been Chernobyl, but it refused. It's interesting, but cities really disappear from maps: they change their name or simply cease to exist, for example, because their entire population is being wiped out, and this is already happening in our time.
- an attempt to bring back slavery in the 21st century.
The idea that there are people who are not just disposed, but want to be slaves, seems to me not so stupid, and the questions about whether the suffering of millions of African slaves was worth it for modern African Americans to have what they have, are worthy of attention.
- adaptation of American classics for modern schoolchildren. No, books do not make it easier, they are transformed in accordance with the values of modern society: how can kids be offered to read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin" if the black heroes there are humiliated and subordinates.
In my mind, this quickly rhymed with the recent discussion of the TV series "Friends", in which a new generation of viewers saw sexism, homophobia and a lot of intolerance, while 20 years ago it seemed extremely democratic and liberal. It's even funny, but the word "nigger", which is often used in their speech by African Americans themselves, became forbidden 10 years ago, and is now referred to only as "the n-word".
Surprisingly, not only Batey joked about this, but also the American writer of Jewish origin Jonathan Safran Foer in his latest novel "Here I Am".
In general, it's all really very funny in places, and the idea is good, but it would be nice to come up with a plot for it when starting work on a book, and not just a set of several situations held together by the narrator's unnecessarily verbose reasoning, because due to the translation and introduction of a bunch of local realities into the text.
A lot is lost (for example, I know that the original text of the novel is replete with slang of black native speakers of American English, but this was not felt in the translation at all, although in general it was not bad and it is clear that a lot of work was done), and there is too little left to spend your time and effort on it, and even more so to advise an unprepared reader.
427.937 SRY