Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
New Directions (1974), Edition: First Edition, 168 pages
Description
Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll. "
User reviews
LibraryThing member absurdeist
Alphabetical Africa is one of the wittiest, most cleverly constructed books I've ever read. Here's why: The first chapter, "A,"only contains words that begin with the letter "a"; the second chapter, "B," only contains words beginning with either the letters "a" or "b"; and so on and so forth goes
"After air attack author assumes Alva's asexuality affected African army's ack-ack accuracy, an arguable assumption, anyhow, army advances, annilihating antelopes, alligators and ants. Admirable attrition admits Ashanti admiral as author all alone autographs Ashanti atlas, authenticating anthill actions. Actually, asks Alva, are all Ashanti alike."
Alphabetical Africa's self-restricted artifice helps make it one of the funniest "experimental" novels or "avant-garde" novels or whatever you want to call these unconventionally structured novels that Walter Abish and other Oulipo-type writers tend to produce; novels whose narratives employ radically unorthodox devices in communicating their contents to the reader. Maybe I'm strange, but I think it's hysterical that the first person narrator of Alphabetical Africa can't appear until chapter "I" and then disappears after the apex of chapter "Z" has been reached and the novel, having incrementally lost access to the complete English language, segues from chapter "I" to chapter "H". Bye bye first person narrator, and welcome back "author".
I'm aware that many folks might automatically turn their noses up at the label "avant garde" or "experimental" as it does regrettably tend to signify that the book labeled such is just so precious ... so cutting edge, conceived by the artsy-fartsy pretentious highbrowed elect as "pushing fiction beyond heretofore preconceived limits to lofty new literary heights of visionary grandeur and artful excellence blah blah blah," or some blurbish bullshit like that; when in fact all the book has "accomplished" is come up with some cute, minutely original contrivances or gimmicks to coverup the fact of its fated (and deserved) remainder-pile-mediocrity, the focus of its promoters being on its supposed "innovaton" because solid, compelling storytelling, it lacks.
Not so, Alphabetical Africa. Though "avant-garde" and "experimental" it is, it's nevertheless a novel experiment worth reading. Worth reading twice or three times even just to figure out what Abish had to excise because of his self-imposed letter limitations. Even with the letter restrictions early on in the novel and at its conclusion, Abish's poetic prose constantly rings true, no matter how many letters are available to him. The writing never sounds forced to fit its artifice. No faux prose. Genuine narration. Pure poetry. True, it's mildly uncomfortable, at least to this reader, reading non-stop alliteration for two and three pages at a shot, but you get used to it like watching sub-titles of a foreign film after awhile; you forget they're even there on the screen, caught up as you are in the drama of the film. In the same way, what you have to interpret in Alphabetical Africa -- with its self-restricted artifice -- does not detract either, remarkably, from following an increasingly engrossing and funny plot.
What's it about?
About Africa. Alphabets. Angolans. Animals. Alligators. Ants. Antelopes. Archaeologists. Alva. Alva's abduction. Alex and Allen's arguments about Alva's abduction. Who done it?!
And about a ... a Tanzanian transvestite too!
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the rest of the novel, chapters C, D, E, F, G and on to chapter "Z". Then, the novel starts erasing itself, so to speak, as it contracts from having access to the full gamut of the English alphabet in chapter "Z" back to hyper-restrictive chapter "A", filled with alliterative paragraphs like this: "After air attack author assumes Alva's asexuality affected African army's ack-ack accuracy, an arguable assumption, anyhow, army advances, annilihating antelopes, alligators and ants. Admirable attrition admits Ashanti admiral as author all alone autographs Ashanti atlas, authenticating anthill actions. Actually, asks Alva, are all Ashanti alike."
Alphabetical Africa's self-restricted artifice helps make it one of the funniest "experimental" novels or "avant-garde" novels or whatever you want to call these unconventionally structured novels that Walter Abish and other Oulipo-type writers tend to produce; novels whose narratives employ radically unorthodox devices in communicating their contents to the reader. Maybe I'm strange, but I think it's hysterical that the first person narrator of Alphabetical Africa can't appear until chapter "I" and then disappears after the apex of chapter "Z" has been reached and the novel, having incrementally lost access to the complete English language, segues from chapter "I" to chapter "H". Bye bye first person narrator, and welcome back "author".
I'm aware that many folks might automatically turn their noses up at the label "avant garde" or "experimental" as it does regrettably tend to signify that the book labeled such is just so precious ... so cutting edge, conceived by the artsy-fartsy pretentious highbrowed elect as "pushing fiction beyond heretofore preconceived limits to lofty new literary heights of visionary grandeur and artful excellence blah blah blah," or some blurbish bullshit like that; when in fact all the book has "accomplished" is come up with some cute, minutely original contrivances or gimmicks to coverup the fact of its fated (and deserved) remainder-pile-mediocrity, the focus of its promoters being on its supposed "innovaton" because solid, compelling storytelling, it lacks.
Not so, Alphabetical Africa. Though "avant-garde" and "experimental" it is, it's nevertheless a novel experiment worth reading. Worth reading twice or three times even just to figure out what Abish had to excise because of his self-imposed letter limitations. Even with the letter restrictions early on in the novel and at its conclusion, Abish's poetic prose constantly rings true, no matter how many letters are available to him. The writing never sounds forced to fit its artifice. No faux prose. Genuine narration. Pure poetry. True, it's mildly uncomfortable, at least to this reader, reading non-stop alliteration for two and three pages at a shot, but you get used to it like watching sub-titles of a foreign film after awhile; you forget they're even there on the screen, caught up as you are in the drama of the film. In the same way, what you have to interpret in Alphabetical Africa -- with its self-restricted artifice -- does not detract either, remarkably, from following an increasingly engrossing and funny plot.
What's it about?
About Africa. Alphabets. Angolans. Animals. Alligators. Ants. Antelopes. Archaeologists. Alva. Alva's abduction. Alex and Allen's arguments about Alva's abduction. Who done it?!
And about a ... a Tanzanian transvestite too!
Show Less
LibraryThing member HearTheWindSing
Abish adroitly actualizes Africa. Arts and ambiance. Ants, alligators and antelopes. And attractive Alva.
Brilliant, albeit a bit boring, alphabetical adventure amuses.
Cross continental chase after Alva carries author all around Africa. Characteristic African culture becomes apparent.
Demanding
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constraints delimit Africa's alphabetical boundaries.Experimental aspects don't always dominate composition.
First few chapters are a bit constrained, as expected. Further chapters bring freedom and don't appear especially awkward.
Growing alphabetical bank also allows African country's expansion.
Hard earned alphabets birth fresh characters
'I' finally enables chronicler's appearance as a character himself.
Justifiably, I's entry brings changes in descriptive direction.
Keenly advancing, Abish accomplishes his experimentation goals admirably.
Linguistic gymnastics can't be enough for every literature lover, however. Likable content is always desirable.
Modes of communication - cuneiform codes, click lanuguages, communication across foreign dialects - form a frequent motif.
Narrative covers many aspects - murder, loot, chase, battles, ant extermination, colonization, foreign investors, changing African landscape and culture, amorous escapades - and much more.
Over all, it is fairly imaginative but it lacks focus and often digresses into abstraction.
Plot has to lose characters as their first name initial alphabet is dropped.
Quite often, a character's involvement is limited by his/her allowed presence.
Regardless, I enjoyed one particularly interesting element of Alphabetical Africa.
Second half methodically loses alphabets, and hence names of people and places are lost. Shrinking African landscape is mirrored in shrinking language and shrinking populace.
Technique of narration nicely parallels the content in this manner. Territory of Africa expands and contracts just as the language does.
Unfortuantely, Abish's innovative style doesn't make for an interesting read most of the time.
Vocabularic efforts are very impressive, I'll admit.
(Walter. Walter Abish . Well, I can finally be on first name terms with the author.)
Xeric environs of Africa are, however, at times reflected in the narrative since it is somewhat lacking in engagement.
You should read this only if you have a strong interest in experimental styles.
Zooming in and out effects do make for an interesting technique worth checking out.
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
This book isn't simply "in the line of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews," as Ashbery says in the back cover copy. That's because, unlike those authors, Abish does not try to match his stories with the constraints he gives himself. His linguistic
I think this matters because in the Oulipo tradition, the stories that are told have some correspondence, in tone, philosophy, pointlessness, absurdity, and so on, to the rules the authors imposed on themselves. That correspondence is the glue that binds the books together: otherwise Perec and others could have simply taken existing novels or newspaper accounts (as Goldsmith and others do now) and subjected them to predetermined rules. The lack of correspondence in "Alphabetical Africa" is its principal characteristic, I think: after you have marveled at what he's done with his alphabetical rules, and after you've laughed at his stories, you're left wondering whether the two have collided randomly, or for surrealistic purpose, or whether, in fact, Abish never thought through the possible meanings of the lack of correspondence between his insouciant stories and his rigid rules. More on this at the end.
In Perec's "Life: A User's Guide," for example, the elaborately constrained writing is in close harmony with the stories of the people in the apartment building. Just as the principal character tries to make a life that will sum to nothing, so the writer's constraints produce a distorted narrative that cannot conform to ordinary novels. In Roussel, the elaborate rules (which are, in contrast to Perec's, largely unknown, despite Roussel's own book on the subject) are in intricate and partly hidden harmony with the acephalic or obsessive or autistic behavior of his principal characters and his implied narrator.
"Alphabetical Africa" is often very funny. Its humor is a kind I recognize, without difficulty, from other authors of the 1970s. He is interested in Africa's politics ("But can Alva's claims also cure Americans bombing Chad beaches. Anyhow, all concur America's angst cannot corrupt Chadians," p. 6), in the absurdity of the places he visits, and in the ridiculous continuation of colonial and tourist expectations; but he is insouciant about most of it. He is untroubled about mentioning that his characters take acid: they are who they are. The result is a politically invested but carefree tone that reminds me, in a different sphere, of Arlo Guthrie. He spins cliché plots about dictators, spies, and murders, and he weaves in tourist impressions and fears, all in a kind of deadpan colloquial collage.
Meanwhile, each chapter in the first half of the book adds another letter, and each chapter in the second half subtracts one, and the machinery of that expansion and contraction works alongside the stories but almost never to any determinate purpose. A reader watches the first letters of many words, and also attends to the stories. The result is not a surrealist juxtaposition, because it so often seems that Abish is simply trying to write well, in spite of his own constraints. The first chapter "M" is not at all exceptional in this regard:
"M
"My memory isn't accurate anymore. Mentioning my memory makes me feel insecure. A few months ago Alex and Allen kidnapped a jeweler in Antibes and killed him almost inadvertently..."
Because this is chapter "M," a reader will be watching for Abish to display as many m's as he can. So the second sentence here, with four m's, stands out. But the sentence immediately following serves the purpose of furthering one of his stories. So it is not clear how we are expected to attend to the alliterations. Are we to read as Oulipeans for part of one sentence, and then forget that regimen, and think instead about the plot? When "Alphabetical Africa" is funny, it is so in spite of its linguistic constraints. (The first chapter "C" is an excellent example: it's really funny, and doesn't suffer, but also doesn't gain, by being constrained to words beginning with "a," "b," or "c.") Same when it's violent, or absurdist, or intentionally hackneyed.
The principal expressive option here would be surrealism: the stories would be juxtaposed in unexpected and irrational ways with the language used to express them. But that does not happen often, or consistently, and sometimes it seems not to happen intentionally. In most cases, Abish's narrator seems to have one set of concerns, and his compositor another.
In the end, it seemed to me that this is a lighthearted spoof about American attitudes to Africa in the 1970s, placed, for reasons I think the author himself never entirely analyzed, into the "terrifying and irrefutable" Procrustean frame of a linguistic game. It is an example of a book that reveals a crucial criterion for constrained writing: there needs to be a nameable connection between the linguistic constraint and whatever stories are being told. That connection can be a contrast (irrational, surrealist, or satiric) or a harmonious correspondence (between constrained lives and rule-bound writing, between partly unknowable psychologies and partly private constraints, etc.) -- but it has to be something the reader can conclude was planned and controlled, or at least observed, by the writer.
*
Reading this on Facebook July 2014, Andrei Molotiu noted that some Oulipo writers seem to be great "despite" their Oulipean interests. I might not be interested in such a writer. There should be a strong connection between story and constraints: it can be a strong contrast, or dissociation, or affinity, but it really has to work as a whole: otherwise it seems to me the interest of any constraint is diminished. Note the constraint in this book, by itself, isn't interesting. Anyone can invent a constraint: not everyone can write a book based on a constraint, but that's not a very interesting goal anyway. Relatively few people can figure out how to link or contrast the constraint to the material (story, subject matter, voice, mood).
And just to be clear about the argument I'm proposing: I am not especially interested in organic, harmonious, "coherent" (Ruskin's word) relationships between form and content, or in the humanist or romantic traditions that require such relationships. I do find I want the relationship between form and content to be acknowledged in some manner: form and content can exhibit a radical disconnection, disharmony, incoherence, randomness, surrealism, or irrationalism; regardless of the kind of relationship, I am most engaged when the author (or the narrator, or the text) demonstrates that the problem has been considered. Abish doesn't seem to notice, or care.
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constraints are "terrifying and irrefutable," as Ashbery says (chapters from A to Z and back to A, each one containing only a subset of letters of the alphabet), but the stories he tells are carefree and funny.I think this matters because in the Oulipo tradition, the stories that are told have some correspondence, in tone, philosophy, pointlessness, absurdity, and so on, to the rules the authors imposed on themselves. That correspondence is the glue that binds the books together: otherwise Perec and others could have simply taken existing novels or newspaper accounts (as Goldsmith and others do now) and subjected them to predetermined rules. The lack of correspondence in "Alphabetical Africa" is its principal characteristic, I think: after you have marveled at what he's done with his alphabetical rules, and after you've laughed at his stories, you're left wondering whether the two have collided randomly, or for surrealistic purpose, or whether, in fact, Abish never thought through the possible meanings of the lack of correspondence between his insouciant stories and his rigid rules. More on this at the end.
In Perec's "Life: A User's Guide," for example, the elaborately constrained writing is in close harmony with the stories of the people in the apartment building. Just as the principal character tries to make a life that will sum to nothing, so the writer's constraints produce a distorted narrative that cannot conform to ordinary novels. In Roussel, the elaborate rules (which are, in contrast to Perec's, largely unknown, despite Roussel's own book on the subject) are in intricate and partly hidden harmony with the acephalic or obsessive or autistic behavior of his principal characters and his implied narrator.
"Alphabetical Africa" is often very funny. Its humor is a kind I recognize, without difficulty, from other authors of the 1970s. He is interested in Africa's politics ("But can Alva's claims also cure Americans bombing Chad beaches. Anyhow, all concur America's angst cannot corrupt Chadians," p. 6), in the absurdity of the places he visits, and in the ridiculous continuation of colonial and tourist expectations; but he is insouciant about most of it. He is untroubled about mentioning that his characters take acid: they are who they are. The result is a politically invested but carefree tone that reminds me, in a different sphere, of Arlo Guthrie. He spins cliché plots about dictators, spies, and murders, and he weaves in tourist impressions and fears, all in a kind of deadpan colloquial collage.
Meanwhile, each chapter in the first half of the book adds another letter, and each chapter in the second half subtracts one, and the machinery of that expansion and contraction works alongside the stories but almost never to any determinate purpose. A reader watches the first letters of many words, and also attends to the stories. The result is not a surrealist juxtaposition, because it so often seems that Abish is simply trying to write well, in spite of his own constraints. The first chapter "M" is not at all exceptional in this regard:
"M
"My memory isn't accurate anymore. Mentioning my memory makes me feel insecure. A few months ago Alex and Allen kidnapped a jeweler in Antibes and killed him almost inadvertently..."
Because this is chapter "M," a reader will be watching for Abish to display as many m's as he can. So the second sentence here, with four m's, stands out. But the sentence immediately following serves the purpose of furthering one of his stories. So it is not clear how we are expected to attend to the alliterations. Are we to read as Oulipeans for part of one sentence, and then forget that regimen, and think instead about the plot? When "Alphabetical Africa" is funny, it is so in spite of its linguistic constraints. (The first chapter "C" is an excellent example: it's really funny, and doesn't suffer, but also doesn't gain, by being constrained to words beginning with "a," "b," or "c.") Same when it's violent, or absurdist, or intentionally hackneyed.
The principal expressive option here would be surrealism: the stories would be juxtaposed in unexpected and irrational ways with the language used to express them. But that does not happen often, or consistently, and sometimes it seems not to happen intentionally. In most cases, Abish's narrator seems to have one set of concerns, and his compositor another.
In the end, it seemed to me that this is a lighthearted spoof about American attitudes to Africa in the 1970s, placed, for reasons I think the author himself never entirely analyzed, into the "terrifying and irrefutable" Procrustean frame of a linguistic game. It is an example of a book that reveals a crucial criterion for constrained writing: there needs to be a nameable connection between the linguistic constraint and whatever stories are being told. That connection can be a contrast (irrational, surrealist, or satiric) or a harmonious correspondence (between constrained lives and rule-bound writing, between partly unknowable psychologies and partly private constraints, etc.) -- but it has to be something the reader can conclude was planned and controlled, or at least observed, by the writer.
*
Reading this on Facebook July 2014, Andrei Molotiu noted that some Oulipo writers seem to be great "despite" their Oulipean interests. I might not be interested in such a writer. There should be a strong connection between story and constraints: it can be a strong contrast, or dissociation, or affinity, but it really has to work as a whole: otherwise it seems to me the interest of any constraint is diminished. Note the constraint in this book, by itself, isn't interesting. Anyone can invent a constraint: not everyone can write a book based on a constraint, but that's not a very interesting goal anyway. Relatively few people can figure out how to link or contrast the constraint to the material (story, subject matter, voice, mood).
And just to be clear about the argument I'm proposing: I am not especially interested in organic, harmonious, "coherent" (Ruskin's word) relationships between form and content, or in the humanist or romantic traditions that require such relationships. I do find I want the relationship between form and content to be acknowledged in some manner: form and content can exhibit a radical disconnection, disharmony, incoherence, randomness, surrealism, or irrationalism; regardless of the kind of relationship, I am most engaged when the author (or the narrator, or the text) demonstrates that the problem has been considered. Abish doesn't seem to notice, or care.
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LibraryThing member le.vert.galant
I enjoyed this a great deal. It was funny, engaging, and interesting. The oulipian constraint gave the book an interesting narrative drive: as the letters disappeared, one knew the characters would disappear as well. Reaching P2, I knew that Queen Quat would be gone. At H2, the first-persona
It also worked well that Africa shrank with the vocabulary.
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narrator would morph into the more abstract "author." In the end, there would be only Alex, Allen, and Alva. It also worked well that Africa shrank with the vocabulary.
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Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1974
Physical description
168 p.; 5.2 inches
ISBN
0811205339 / 9780811205337