There is nothing new about Soyinka's style. It has always tended towards the direction excerpted by Hochschild in all but Soyinka's plays. Why is the reviewer surprised? Style in literature is like the fingerprint in forensics. You do not turn 78 and change your finger prints overnight. Oh, Adam Hochschild... am a little disappointed in him. As a journalist/writer he ought to understand about style and its aberrations or extremes. And the central argument he makes that Soyinka does not explain off Africa's apparent stasis and crisis, could have been resolved in his own propositional style of criticism - he offers so many propositions for what he thinks Soyinka's motives are. Hochschild could have answered the questions he wanted Soyinka to answer, that of the reasons for Africa's obvious stasis and crisis. After all Hochchild wrote King Leopold's Ghost. He knows. He was being disingenuous. Very condescending review.
Amatoritsero
On Friday, 2 November 2012 17:09:10 UTC-4, Ikhide wrote:
--"With the venerable Soyinka now 78, I wish I could report that his new volume of sweeping reflections is of the same stature as his best work, but sadly it is not. The book is vague, ponderous and awkward. Soyinka never says "house" when he can say "habitation," "native" when he can say "autochthon," "dominant" when he can say "hegemonic." Phrases in quotation marks float free of any source. When he makes broad generalizations and criticisms he sometimes expects the reader to mentally provide specific examples. (Do you remember exactly what President Obama said in Cairo in 2009? I had to look it up.) The book abounds in passages full of 10-dollar words that have to be read two or three times to figure out what they mean. About contentions in Christian theology, for example, he says:
"These all-consuming debates and formal encyclicals are constructed on what we may term a proliferating autogeny within a hermetic realm — what is at the core of arguments need not be true; it is sufficient that the layers upon layers of dialectical constructs fit snugly on top of one another."When a fine writer and a good man writes of "proliferating autogeny," it is probably not just because he is having a bad day."- Adam HochschildI do agree with this review 100 percent. I read the book and I thought it was awful. It was not his best outing. Surprised someone would publish it...
- IkhideStalk my blog at http://www.xokigbo.com/Follow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
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