Paradis, a novel by Nobel laureate in literature in 2021, is a wonderful journey to different lands and areas in Africa, seen through the eyes of a 12 years old Swahili, Yusuf. Through him we encounter a wide rage of events and characters, with different backgrounds and nationalities, ranged from traders, thieves, criminals, tribe leaders, slave merchants, women portrayed in different colours and identities, colonial powers: Germans and French….etc.Through 284 pages, we come to know another Africa: more authentic and subtle than the traditional known literature about the continent. Without a decent and honest writes as Abdulrazak, we are lift with a rude frame of powerful people who could dictate to us their short sighted and narrowed view of life. 

I am just reading “War”, of Bob Woodward, 2024. What a vast gap between depicting  characters as Yusuf, Khalil, Aziz, Abdallah, Maimuna, Hamid, the Lady, Amina….& the characters we meet on the top of the echelon in World´s Politics: Biden, Trump, Zelinski, Putin, Blinken….. World of upside down view  between two approaches to depict the world we are living in . Depending which angle you are looking from, another world could be seen, although we are all living on a small planet on the verge of destruction & annihilation. Only literature gives us a glimpse of hope to look forward.

Reading “Human Acts”, published  after  “The Vegetarian”,  pushes you to look terrified into the abyss, the Inferno; “the Paradise lost” of Milton matches  to some extent the unimaginable deterioration of humanity-seen in the different six chapters of the novel, through all imagined and unimagined methods of torturing and executing young girls and boys, as Dong-ho, who is only fifteen years old. The uprising of the students late seventies against the military regime in South Korea, in  Gwanghui, costs the city huge price. The police chief representing the president, shamelessly said: “the Cambodian government killed another two million of there’s. There’s nothing stopping us from doing the same” P 203. I have been there to see Cambodia killing fields. Reading Han’s novel makes the killing fields for me very concrete, physical, touchable and deeply felt.  The author, Han Kang, who was nine when the massacre took place, insisted to document what happened in her home by interviewing those who survived the massacre. The brother of Dong-ho asked her warmly after interview: ” Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again” p, 208.

The second persons’  narrative methodology gave the author the proper tool to be detached when needed, or well engaged in another occasion; when moving from one victim to other, even to give a space to soul addressing its body when leaving the deadly body after bullets pierced hit the head- as portrayed by the boy’s friend  p, 49: “I was determined not to be afraid of anything”. 

It is harrowing indeed: an abyss without a bottom. Humanity learned nothing of past history.  War crimes continued even nowadays in 2025- see Gaza.