ECLIPSE OVER LAKE TANGANYIKA Albert Russo
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A novel of Rwanda on the eve of its independence. In this, his second novel of Africa, Russo offers us a wide range of fascinating characters, their hopes, desires, dreams and aspirations, as they struggle against themselves and a rapidly changing society.
Spotlight: Eclipse Over Lake Tanganyika, Albert Russo
From Small Press Review:
Reading one of Albert Russo's renderings of his works from one of his native languages into the other is always a fascinating experience. If I have used the word "renderings," it is because Mr. Russo does not translate his novels, but rewrites them in order to adapt them to the other language, i.e. to another culture for other readers. After a most interesting English version of "Zapinette Video" last year, Russo's special gift for bilingual writing is brought to us in his novel Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika, initially published in French in 1994.
Mr. Russo's bilingualism enables him to intuit that, in some instances, what can be written in one language will never do in another. Each language is inscribed within a lexical and cultural framework which can probably be recreated by radical changes in the writing, even to the extent of eliminating some characters and inventing others. Of course, the process can probably be described and made into linguistic theories, but no one can master it better than a bilingual writer, like Albert Russo, who naturally knows how to transform a French novel into an English novel by remaining absolutely faithful to his original intention. In the same way, his writing is the most efficient when it sticks closely to the reality evoked and is wary of any rhetorical or intellectual effect.
Eclipse's power lies primarily in the scenes when the African reality Russo deals with is set as the background in front of which the narrative unfolds and with which it interacts, without bombast. Take the opening paragraph:
From down the plain a siren whined: six o'clock. Oswald put on his slippers, shuffled across the corridor, pushed open the heavy verandah door, and leaned on the balcony.
The passage is as graphic as you can get: the language is plainly informative, but a whole atmosphere has been created; early evening in a hot country, the heavy languor of a lone character as he is awakened or stirred out of his lethargy by a familiar siren; his longing for the world outside, which has not been evoked yet but is already present in the last phrase. We know that Oswald is going to stay on and to look at the plain below him, and that he will learn something from his gazing down at the scenery.
The scene is set for the main theme of the novel. We do not know yet that Oswald is a young American and that the town below in the valley is Bujumbura, but the information is provided in the first page of Eclipse Over Lake Tanganyika, which deals with the young man's sentimental journey (and ours) through a land "virgin as the first dawn of Creation." Albert Russo does not care about local colour. The strange vegetation, the African words and the many place names in the novel serve the one purpose of setting the scenery for a single man's confrontation with "Creation." Russo's novel is as interesting and ambiguous as Columbus's Journal: every page demonstrates the writer's fascination for the pristine luxuriant Eden- like land and his utter sadness at what havoc men have wreaked on such plentiful beauty: "a decor of papier mache, which a single spark could ignite.
Oswald is the Christ of this New African Testament. One scene shows him metaphorically crucified at the hands of his never-satisfied lover, who is also, by the way, everyone else's, Damiana Antoniades, the Great Whore of Bujumbura. As the local medic, Oswald performs a few "miracles." but he fails to convert anyone, and finally vanishes with his "plans and ideals." forsaken in the symbolical flood of a tropical storm, from which he is retrieved by the King of Burundi himself, who was Just driving by and handed Oswald a towel for him to dry himself with:
All of a sudden Oswald felt out-of-place. He had come all the way from America, fall of plans and ideals, which seemed to have vanished, swept away by the cloudburst and the Mwami's unexpected appearance.
Once Oswald, the symbolical upholder of ideals, is out of the way, Burundi becomes the realm of crooked politicians, disgruntled white trash, and killers, who inscribe on the immaculate landscape an Apocalypse of red and black. The metaphorical "eclipse" of the title is the change from an immaculate majestic blackness "carved in ebony" to the blackness of an evil fed and encouraged by the white colonization of Africa, whose aftermath extends from the Katanga rebellion in the sixties (the time of the novel) to the Rwandan genocide of the nineties. Albert Russo raises then the ultimate question of the effect of colonialism, a political system in which humaneness (love, tolerance and delight in natural beauty) is eventually dissolved into the disheartening racial equality of greed, contempt and murder.
Jean-Luc Breton, Small Press Review, May-June 2000
Also by the author
Beyond the Great Water Collected Works, Volume I
Unmasking Hearts Collected Works, Volume II
The Age of the Pearl Collected Works, Volume III
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