Reviews for Africa's ecological future

The average rating for Africa's ecological future based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-02 00:00:00 Paul Gellner I don't know exactly what Boyle's style provoked in me that it disturbed my sleep. Maybe her vast vision of a crude reality that she describes without averting her eyes, taking in all the foreboding, all the fear and all the unfairness that abounds in life and calmly waiting for the storm to break loose without missing a beat. Maybe the poetic candor or the innocent faithfulness that pulsates underneath her carefully crafted sentences that sound like an ode to bygone times when youth and promise were still within one's reach. Maybe the voice at the back of my head that detected truth and personal experience behind Boyle's fictional work and my suspicions confirmed later by Doris Grumbach's afterword enclosed in this beautiful edition of a book that has been overlooked for too long. A story about love, art and loss delivered in no particular order because Boyle's point is precisely that one cannot exist without the other. How to disentangle one's passions from what originates them? Hannah is a twenty-four years old American married to a Frenchman and living in the north of Paris when she crosses paths with Martin, an editor and poet from Ireland, whose adoration for words is so boundless that it makes up for his poor health and limited financial means. Defying convention and dodging all kind of practical reasons to ignore their feelings, the young couple elope together and embark on a journey in the France of the twenties that brings them to meet other expatriate artists under the close surveillance of Martin's possessive aunt, the person who threatens to unbalance their still fragile but deeply felt commitment. Far from the insipid cliché of mixing literary rhetoric with the predictable tale of a doomed love affair, Boyle's novel rises above narrative conventions and it reaches an unprecedented clarity of expression that vindicates her ideals as a woman and a writer. Her painstakingly accurate choice of words paints an all-embracing landscape that acts like a mirror for her characters' inner struggles, although it's Hannah's viewpoint that acts like the leading voice in the canon of interior monologues that fuse in the vulnerability of adverse circumstances. Boyle's perspective is absolutely feminine and for once, the male is the object of her meticulous observation. As whimsical as Martin's outbursts in frustration and impotence might be, it's Hannah's silent strength that carries the novel to a heart-stirring culmination. Even though the world depicted in this delicate piece is often a sinister, cold and unforgiving place, Boyle's genuine prose acts like an antidote against the cynicism and the vanity that jeopardizes the belief that true love is the natural way to protect the invisible ties that makes us human, the only authentic emotion that ignites the empathy that can transform the world for the better; and that art is the only possible channel to give form to such an unstoppable force.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-13 00:00:00 Sebastian Solarez In the previous Kay Boyle novel I read there was a foreword by the author written fifty years after the book was first published, explaining how autobiographical it all was. In this one, there's an afterword, also written many years after publication, not from the author this time but with her approval. In it, Doris Grumbach reveals that the disclaimer at the beginning of this 1932 novel stating that the characters are entirely fictitious and have no reference whatsoever to real people, living or dead is itself fictitious. Grumbach goes on to say: It turns out that almost everything and everyone in 'Year Before Last' is part and parcel of young Kay Boyle's life in France in the late Twenties. Then she quotes something Boyle wrote in the 1980s about autobiographical fiction: The pronoun 'I' is an awkward one to deal with, and I do so with impatience; for I have come to believe that autobiography to fulfil a worthy purpose should be primarily a defence of those who have been unjustly dealt with in one's own time, and whose lives and works ask for a vindication. I've never thought about autobiography in the light in which Kay Boyle presents it, but she does seem to have known quite a few artists whose lives and works went uncelebrated, so there is that aspect to consider. But the fact remains that it is not her own life and work she is vindicating in this autobiographical novel. The 'defence', if that's what it is, which she presents in Year Before Last is of her one time lover, the poet Ernest Walsh. He's fictionalised as Irish American Martin Sheehan who struggles to write his own poetry and publish a literary magazine exactly as Ernest Walsh did. Boyle herself is fictionalised as a young American woman called Hannah. There's a secondary 'defence' going on as well, of Italian poet Emanuel Carnavali with whom Walsh and Boyle had a deep bond. He's referred to in the novel as 'the Italian poet' and Kay Boyle dedicated the book to him. What's interesting about all of this is that even having digested Grumbach's words about the fictitious disclaimer, and Boyle's about the value of autobiography, I'm inclined to think that Kay Boyle meant what she said in 1932 in the disclaimer. I feel she succeeded in transforming the year she spent living with Ernest Walsh into a real fiction. In spite of the exact parallels with hers and Walsh's lives at every twist and turn of it, this story of Martin and Hannah, drawn to each other on first sight, holds the magical quality of a fairy tale inside it. The fairy tale element is in the way the narrative follows a little old car along the winding roads of the hills above Cannes; the way Hannah and her three dogs run wild across the countryside; the alternately good and evil god-mother figure who haunts the lovers' lives; the quaint old houses and dingy hotel rooms they hide away in; the constant swerving between feast and famine; the frequent images of blood red against deathly white; the tension between following love and following money. When it was over, after wanting it to be over several times during the last fifty pages, I perversely wanted it not to be over. That's the spell it cast on me.