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Summary
Summary
In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.
Author Notes
ANJAN SUNDARAM is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Africa and the Middle East for The New York Times and the Associated Press. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Policy , Fortune , The Washington Post , the Los Angeles Times , the Chicago Tribune , The Telegraph , The Guardian , the International Herald Tribune , and the Huffington Post . He has been interviewed by the BBC World Service and Radio France Internationale for his analysis of the conflict in Congo. He received a Reuters journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rain forest. He currently lives in Kigali, Rwanda, with his wife.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 2005, Sundaram withdrew from Yale without completing his Ph.D. in mathematics and declined a job offer from Goldman Sachs, as he tells in this impressive narrative. Instead, in 2005, he opted for the precarious life of freelance reporter in one of the world's most desperate and downtrodden countries in the world-Congo. Settling in Kinshasa with a local family, Sundaram begins accommodating himself to the harsh realties of daily life while struggling to survive as a fledging reporter in an unfamiliar and strange environment. When Sundaram lands a position as a stringer for the AP news service he gains a bit of stability. He makes professional contacts, writes more stories, and garners a bit of prestige. He leaves Kinshasa, wanting to experience more of the country, traveling upriver on a barge to a region where multinational companies log the forests and introduce local populations to the effects of globalization. When war breaks out over disputed election results, Sundaram ventures into the fray, holing up in a margarine factory and becoming one of the few reporters in the war zone filing stories. The author skillfully captures the smallest details of life in a destitute land, blending the sordid history of Congo with his battle to forge a career in a troubled and forsaken country. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sundaram left the calm, logical world of mathematics and a job offer from Goldman Sachs for the chaos of the Congo and the uncertainties of journalism. The combination was unpromising, as few cared . . . for news of the Congo. Then he lucked into a position as a stringer with the Associated Press, reporting on harrowing struggles to exploit wealthy metal reserves, conflicts between the militia and rebels, political corruption, street riots by bands of wild boys, and insane inflation that sent Kinshasa citizens on a rampage of purchases. Surviving paycheck to paycheck, Sundaram lived with a local Congo family and navigated the worlds of the embassy, foreign journalists, and the Indian community. On a daring trip upriver, he risked his life to interview a warlord fighting for control of valuable territory and stayed in Kinshasa to report on postelection chaos as other reporters fled. Excerpts from his notebooks chronicle personal reflections as he struggles to learn how to report from an unruly land, harboring doubts and misgivings and a feverish desperation to make sense of one of the deadliest places in the world. A breathtaking look at a troubled nation exploited by greedy forces within and without.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
In very different ways, these two books - both already highly praised - bring us new tidings from a country the size of western Europe that we commonly think of, when we think of it at all, in oversimplified ways. Congo is, variously: Africa's Heart of Darkness; Stanley's most excruciating challenge; the Belgian king's privately owned colony; Lumumba's graveyard of hopes; Mobutu's "kleptocracy"; the strange kingdom of the Kabila dynasty; a site of massacres and rape; a place of "geological scandal", which has provided us, since the end of the 19th century, with "red rubber" for tyres ("blood rubber" as it's now often referred to), uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and with copper and cobalt and, more recently, coltan for our PlayStations and mobile phones. The first of these books originated in November 2003, in Brussels, where Flemish archaeologist David van Reybrouck, tried to find the perfect book to read about Congo - a country he was about to visit for the first time. In the early 1960s, before he was born, his father had worked there as a railway engineer. But the family legacy didn't amount to much: a few African masks on the wall and a dog named Mbwa (the Swahili word for dog). Finding nothing on the shelves that satisfied him, Van Reybrouck resolved that he himself should write such a book - a total history of Congo. The result is 650 impressive pages spanning 90,000 years - though most of them detailing events since 1850. He interviewed 500 people during 10 trips to the country, and has drawn on 5,000 written sources. The general critical consensus on the book is that it "reads like a novel" while being "as rigorous as an academic history". The second book is no less appealing. In 2005, a 22-year-old Yale mathematics graduate from India, Anjan Sundaram, threw up a Goldman Sachs job offer in order to buy a one-way ticket to Kinshasa - because, in America, "the world had become too beautiful". Awaiting him in Congo was the profound sense of crisis he seemed to be searching for. His sole link to his new world was a Congolese bank teller in New Haven, who connected him with her husband's brother in Kinshasa. Thus Sundaram began to live with a family in Victoire, a neighbourhood in the capital's cite - the former cite indigene - as opposed to la ville, previously la ville coloniale. The result is a street perspective of Congo, an exercise in ultra-perceptive reportage. Sundaram took up journalism and became a freelance writer - a stringer - for the Associated Press. He stayed until the 2006 elections, the first free and fair vote in 41 years, and spent a Rimbaud-like season in hell. I recommend both books, but with caveats. Congo's story is a rollercoaster of crime, human tragedy and a kind of grotesque exhilaration - a disconcerting joie de vivre. If anything, such a history proves that, no matter how bad things are, they have been, and could always get worse. "As from today, we're no longer your monkeys," were the words Patrice Lumumba spat in the coloniser's face on independence day in 1960. But only 10 weeks later the first prime minister lost power, and six months later he lost his life. From 1965 until 1997, 32 years of cold war satrapy took their toll. Under Mobutu, corruption was democratised and chaos made trite. Van Reybrouck brings this excessive history vividly to life. Fluent in English and French in addition to his native Dutch, and a student of the western Congo's lingua franca - Lingala - he has not only read through the library he intends to replace, he has dug up new archival material and draws on living memories. Most remarkably, he found a 126-year old Congolese, who was born before the Berlin conference of 1884-85 where the "scramble for Africa" took place. The author goes as far as Guangzhou, China, from where the Congolese ship home computers, mobile phones and cheap clothing. The result is a book as rich and resourceful as Congo itself. Van Reybrouck faithfully portrays a country which, like the Congo river cut off by rapids from both its source and the sea, impresses by its size and its power yet is truncated, bereft of a beginning and an end. Inevitably, perhaps, navigating the book can be frustrating. The author doesn't fully trust his "bottom-up history", and lends the voiceless a voice laden with commentary ("Zizi Kabongo spoke about his country's history with great lucidity and finesse"). The publisher of Congo argues that the author, by focusing on the Congolese perspective, "returns a nation's history to its people". Certainly, the attention paid to Congolese sources enriches the book - as a Nigerian adage has it, "you don't stand in one place to watch a masquerade". However, Van Reybrouck and other authors on Congo, such as Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost) and Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz), receive accolades for a reason: they make Congo's history "readable" for us, the outsiders. Whatever a Congolese person's perspective on their own country might look like, one would hardly confuse it with the account of someone who has visited 10 times. Sundaram's first-person narrative goes a long way to illustrate just how significant one's vantage point is. Here few history lessons are taught. Forsaking the "posture of knowingness" in his engagement with his Congolese "family" - and with neighbours, street children, a warlord, supposed witches or girls hunting for a foreign provider - Sundaram provides insights into a society usually kept at an exotic remove of unbridgable "otherness". He begins to understand what it means to feel threatened by one's own society, if not by oneself. "It seemed also out of fear of his own rise that the Congolese turned bottle caps into imaginative, anonymous art. That he played endlessly with words, inventing vocabularies; that he pillaged . . . The projects, stunted, were without deliverance - a sort of wallowing in one's futility, one's chaos. One expected only to survive." Sundaram's writing has prompted comparisons with VS Naipaul and Ryszard Kapuscinski, probably, and regrettably, because the former is of Indian heritage and the latter was a news hunter and gatherer with a gift for reportage. In my eyes, however, the voice of The Stringer resembles more that of the quixotic hero of Evelyn Waugh's satire on journalism, Scoop, who turns to ordinary people to understand the extraordinary situation that is theirs but could be his. Sundaram explores the other he might have been with great talent. The book is already a little dated, however: years have gone by since the momentous 2006 elections. And in fact "the Congolese" - some kind of representative man - himself does not exist. To order these books with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Stephen W Smith In very different ways, these two books - both already highly praised - bring us new tidings from a country the size of western Europe that we commonly think of, when we think of it at all, in oversimplified ways. Congo is, variously: Africa's Heart of Darkness; Stanley's most excruciating challenge; the Belgian king's privately owned colony; [Patrice Lumumba]'s graveyard of hopes; Mobutu's "kleptocracy"; the strange kingdom of the Kabila dynasty; a site of massacres and rape; a place of "geological scandal", which has provided us, since the end of the 19th century, with "red rubber" for tyres ("blood rubber" as it's now often referred to), uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and with copper and cobalt and, more recently, coltan for our PlayStations and mobile phones. Inevitably, perhaps, navigating the book can be frustrating. The author doesn't fully trust his "bottom-up history", and lends the voiceless a voice laden with commentary ("Zizi Kabongo spoke about his country's history with great lucidity and finesse"). The publisher of Congo argues that the author, by focusing on the Congolese perspective, "returns a nation's history to its people". Certainly, the attention paid to Congolese sources enriches the book - as a Nigerian adage has it, "you don't stand in one place to watch a masquerade". However, [David van Reybrouck] and other authors on Congo, such as Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost) and Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz), receive accolades for a reason: they make Congo's history "readable" for us, the outsiders. Whatever a Congolese person's perspective on their own country might look like, one would hardly confuse it with the account of someone who has visited 10 times. - Stephen W Smith.
Kirkus Review
The former Associated Press stringer in Kinshasa details his year of living dangerously amid the chaos of post-Mobutu Congo. Sundaram was working toward a doctorate in mathematics at Yale when, suddenly tired of abstraction, he began craving a taste of hard-edged reality. He got his wish. A New Haven bank employee with Congolese roots arranged for him to live with her relatives, a married couple and their infant daughter, in a modest house (by Congo standards) in the rough-and-tumble Victoire section of that country's capital. Sundaram, who had turned down a job with Goldman Sachs for the opportunity, arrived with a few thousand dollars and the quixotic idea of becoming a freelance correspondent. After some misadventures, including the theft at gunpoint of his entire bankroll, the author managed to get a gig with AP, which was looking for someone to help cover the upcoming election in 2006 between Joseph Kabila, son of the assassinated rebel who deposed longtime strongman Mobutu in 1997, and his vice president, Jean-Pierre Bemba. Sundaram weaves back and forth between his strange personal odyssey and the country's tortured history and politics, with his own experiences and sensations meriting most of the attention. Much of the time, while encountering ordinary Congolese and expatriate merchants, journalists and U.N. employees, he waited for something to happen. Finally, he went in search of news, taking arduous trips into the rain forest, where he found pygmies losing ground to greed and globalization, and to the east, where warlords and militias threatened local villages and U.N. forces. Books by journalists usually keep the focus outward, but Sundaram has more of a novelist's interior sensibility and a talent for describing anxiety and ennui. Readers may be tempted to compare him to Conrad and Naipaul, but he has a strong, unique style all his own.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 2005, Sundaram left the shelter of an American university campus and the logical, orderly world of mathematics for the chaos of Congo and less-than-steady work as a stringer-a freelance journalist paid per story. He was inspired by a Polish journalist who told him that the civil war in that country was underreported and by a Congolese refugee in the United States whose brother still lived in Kinshasa. Since winning independence in 1960, Congo has been ruled by dictators, at war with neighboring Rwanda, and mired in corruption. More than five million people have died and human rights abuses persist. In his first book, Sundaram describes the challenges of "everyday" life in Kinshasa. He filed human-interest stories with the Associated Press from Internet cafes and traveled into conflict-prone areas to interview soldiers, warlords, and workers. He reported on a national election: 80 percent turnout in many districts, despite 20,000 candidates and six-page ballots. Sundaram's experiences are exhilarating, while the scenes he describes are terrifying and often hopeless. Neil Shah's narration is forceful and clear. VERDICT Recommended for public and high school library collections with an interest in Africa.-Nann Blaine Hilyard, formerly with Zion-Benton P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.