Beasts of No Nation still Burdensome

Let's just be clear, here: some of my titles will not be that clever. And, if you don't like puns and/or word-play, none of them will be clever.

That being said, let me begin:

Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala is one of those books that is probably acclaimed before it even reaches the presses. In a way, that is rightly so, because the story and subject are perfectly suited for critical praise.

I am not going to be such a person.

Now, first, do not get me wrong. The book is not terrible. In fact, I'd venture to say it's actually pretty good.

But it's not entertaining, either. And, even though it's art-as-social-commentary, if you expect people to curl up on a cold winter day and read, you might want to capture some sort of world that compels us ot read more.

Rather, the book tends to repell, and on numerous fronts. Right away you are met with language. The words are English, to a degree, but the syntax is not. The grammar is not. A lot of the words are not (that is, not really words at all). As poetry, I could take this, and perhaps this shouldn't be classified as a novel, but rather as an epic poem. But it was sold as a novel, and therefore was designed to be read as a novel, but failed to work as such. Iweala creates the voice of Agu to be a distinctive dialect, and I am an objective enough reader to accept that. But since the entire narrative is Agu's, what we, as readers, are subject to is hacking and slashing our way through language to get at story.

People will probably say: the language is not that dense. And they are correct. But, the language needn't be dense at all. I think there is something of gimmick afoot, and that's what makes me hesitate in regarding this book as something more than it is: a fairly realistic story of a child-soldier in Western Africa.

Which, of course, further repells the reader. This book is not for the faint of heart. Not graphically violent, but not rated PG, either. Agu's world sucks, and he lets us know how bad it sucks. I wish to be clear, though. That this is repellent is the nature of the story. I don't think Iweala wrote the book to help someone be cozy in front of the fireplace - the story was meant to jerk them out of our comfortable world and show them that not everyone is doing so well. If you are going to write about off-putting things, though, don't put us off with the way you tell it, too. Give us a chance to understand why it's so bad in language we understand, that's all I ask.

Another young writer that I read, Angie Cruz, did something similar in her book Soledad. Throughout the entire novel, there are no quotation marks. There was dialogue, but no quotation marks. So that meant constantly going back after you realized that someone was now talking, disrupting the narrative flow. Again, the story could have been fantastic (it wasn't, but it wasn't terrible, either), but instead all I remember is having to fight through some writer's device in order to get the information.

The fact that these people, pretty much my age, have published novels and I don't - doesn't even factor into my opinion.

Honestly, though, I think Iweala wrote a strong book. But I feel it could have reached and touched a wider audience by mixing his lyrical dialect with more straight-forward prose. And I really think that critics love this book for the exact reason I don't like it.