Books 2010: Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith

I'm a longtime fan of Alexander McCall Smith's #1 Ladies Detective Agency series.  These books which are set in pastoral Botswana, tell the tales of Precious Ramatswe, a lady detective or a certain age and a certain size.  Each one describes a gentle African beauty of culture, people, and geography with humble respect and dignity.  There is something that is both simple and profound at once in the same sentence, the chapter, the entire novel, and the entire series.  It is a quick and easy read, but never insulting of one's intelligence.

Until now, I had not found McCall Smith's other novels all that appealing.  During the period that I was reading about the ladies detective agency, I was traveling back and forth to Africa.  This time, I was traveling back and forth to London, when I became immersed and enamored with Corduroy Mansions.

Corduroy Mansions is a townhouse divided into several flats in the Pimlico area of London.  Each flat has its own cast of characters, with somewhat interlinking stories, each totally absurd, yet somehow almost perfectly plausible.  One twenty-something flatmate living among the group of young women living together entirely by circumstance, is the junior staffer of an abhorrent MP who ends up firing her by text message. While another of these post-uni young woman works at a health food store, and somehow offers her boy-crush a free colonic irrigation.  A middle-aged gentleman is desperate to have his mid-20's son move out to his own place, and schemes ways to push him out of the nest.  All this while a desperate divorcee schemes her way into the nest.

The novel has an agreeable pace and tone.  McCall Smith carries you easily through each sentence and chapter, but never insult you intelligence.  And while the plots unfold in a simple, seemingly one-dimensional narrative, there is an additional plane of biting, droll wit, so subtle it's often almost missed, like one character's somewhat neurotic observation of the fish seller always being prompt, "she liked that in someone who sold perishables."  There were many times when reading, I just enjoyed the little subtle joke or the totally nuanced absurdity, and I could imagine McCall Smith's twinkling eyes as he wrote it.

4 out of 5 stars for a good read, an gentle read, and a natural humor...this one's easy on the eyes, and only as taxing on the brain as you want it to be.

Grassroots Soccer

Excellent slideshow by photographer Jessica Hilltout on the grassroots soccer played throughout Africa on makeshift fields with soccer balls fashioned of rubber bands, stockings, and paper, and string.

Here's some amusing trivia from the accompanying article on Hilltrout's work.

The most oddly soulful of Ms. Hilltout’s images are of objects: the homemade balls fashioned by children from plastic bags, old socks and rags, tied up with string or strips of tree bark. Some children inflated condoms — commonplace and free on a continent beset by AIDS — wrapped them in cloth to make them heavy, then in plastic bags to seal them and finally bound them in twine. These ingenious, improvised balls bounce like real ones for a few days before the air escapes.

Hurray for Africa's ingenuity!

Cool! Must see....

My favorite aunt and uncle were recently in town.  I hosted them for breakfast, and scammed an invitation for dinner with them at G-town's La Chaumiere.  It was a lovely evening - delicious food and good conversation.  As NYC public school teachers and former Peace Corps Volunteers (like me), our conversations often turn to some my favorite topics - art, reading, travel, the NY Times, the state of public education, cooking, etc.

On this trip to DC, they spent the day at the museums, and this exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Africa Art sounds just wonderful.  I have always been vexed that the museum did not feature more contemporary African (and diaspora) artists.  Instead, it has defined African art as sort of a natural history/sociocultural/anthropological collection of ornately carved drums, walking sticks and pipes.  So I'm pleased the new curator gives these artists more attention.  I am also a fan of textiles, and the Dutch wax print fabrics, so prevalent in West Africa, are familiar and evocative to me.  Here, Yinka Shonibere uses these amazing vibrant printed fabrics to recreate Victorian scenes.    Here's another.  Anyway, just another way to look at things and bend the mind a bit.  I will have to check it out soon.