Gil Courtemanche (1943–2011)

A very difficult novel to read but I am glad I did. Gil Courtemanche takes us to the days leading up to the genocide in Rwanda and introduces us to people who lived in Kigali at this time. These are real people and through them I am better able to understand what it meant at that time to be a Tutsi or a Hutu which, really, wasn't very different except for some physical attributes. The two tribes had intermarried for a long time and for the ordinary people they were all just Rwandans.I got to know a whole group of people who were good people at a very bad time. People with a passion for life "Each moment stolen from fear is a paradise." Some ordinary people became heroes and those with power and influence turned away. The novel is not just a testamount to the human spirit but it is also a love story to a people pure of heart in Rwanda, in Africa. Half novel and half personal account.… (meer)

I heard the author of this book being interviewed on Radio National not so long ago. He had a a crusty. gravelly voice, roughened by too many cigarettes and chastened by life and the things he’d seen as a reporter. He was in Rwanda when the genocidal war between the Hutu and the Tutsis broke out, and this book is his homage to the people he knew.

What does it do to a man when he is the sole survivor of a catastrophe, and he survives because he is White? The sharpness of his pain cries out above his elegiac tone, and not just when he writes of his beloved Gentille, but also of his friends: little people — stall-keepers, prostitutes, waiters.

Wisely, he doesn’t try to explain what happened. It’s both too big and too small for that. He does, however, cast blame, especially on the Belgian missionaries who sowed the seed of ethnic hatred between the tall, fair-skinned Hutu, originating from Ethiopia, and the darker, more squat Tutsi. When the enmity spilled over into what the 20th century calls ‘ethnic cleansing’ the brutality shocked the world, its horror exacerbated by the fact that the UN was already there as a peace-keeping force, and did nothing. Courtemanche is blunt about this: he says that well-trained and equipped UN soldiers could have controlled the situation. It could have been prevented.

He is sardonic about the barbarity. The Hutu butchered the Tutsi with machetes. They lopped off the feet of the boys so that they couldn’t become soldiers. They raped the women, hacked off their breasts, and left them to die slowly. Sometimes very slowly, of AIDS. They hated the women especially, because they bred the Tutsi children. Courtemanche doesn’t spare Western sensibilities—he points out that Africans don’t have the luxury of a nice, clean war with smart bombs and quick clean deaths achieved with pin-point accuracy guns.

The sense of menace pervades a novel that closely follows what actually happened. Everyone knows what’s coming, and the drunken, pot-smoking militias swagger about boasting about how they will kill the ‘cockroaches’. Yet Bernard Valcourt stays on, making his film about AIDS, because he is passionately in love with the beautiful Gentille. This love he has for her is so beautifully drawn, so eloquently wrought, that it lifts the story onto a new plane.

In the midst of the horror, this love is a purpose for living.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/31/a-sunday-at-the-pool-in-kigali-by-gil-courte...… (meer)

Nel 1777 a Mannheim, in Germania, tra gli ospiti di casa Weber capita un giorno anche Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ed è così che a modesta famiglia di un copista di musica – il paziente Fridolin eber, la tenace Frau Weber e quattro graziose fanciulle – approda al palcoscenico della grande musica. All’inizio è amore a prima vista tra Mozart e Aloysia, la più bella delle quattro ragazze.
Il padre di Mozart, tuttavia, incita il figlio a pensare alla carriera e non alle sottane. Stufa di aspettare, la bella Aloysia sposerà incinta un pittore di discreto talento. Mentre la primogenita Josefa, segretamente innamorata anche lei del giovane musicista, si sente superata ingiustamente e se ne va di casa, e la più piccola, Sophie, per sfuggire ai soffocanti “progetti” della madre corre a rifugiarsi in convento, sarà la terza, Constanze, a salire con Mozart all’altare. Romanzo storico in cui la felicità della scrittura si unisce al piacere delle vicende narrate, Il matrimonio delle sorelle Weber ci porta direttamente nel cuore dell'animo femminile, nei sogni, nei desideri e nelle disillusioni di quattro giovani donne e della loro madre, e, insieme, ci offre il ritratto perfetto di un'epoca di grande creatività e civiltà… (meer)