About book The Viceroy Of Ouidah (Vintage Classics) (1999)
Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy Of Ouidah masquerades as a small book. In 50,000 words or so, the author presents a fictionalised life that has been embroidered from truth. History, hyper-reality, the supernatural and the surreal and the cocktail that creates the heady mix through which strands of story filter. Overall the experience is much bigger than the slim book suggests.We meet Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian born in the country’s north-east in the latter part of the eighteenth century. We learn a little of his background and then we follow him to Dahomey in West Africa, the modern Benin. He finds a place in society, consorts with kings, encounters amazons and conjoins with local culture. He also becomes a slave trader, making his considerable fortune by moving ship-loads of a cargo whose human identity is denied, as if it were merely the collateral damage of mercantilism. Francisco Manuel survives, prospers and procreates with abandon. He fathers a lineage of varied hue, a small army of males to keep the name alive and further complicate identity, and a near race of females who inherit the anonymity of their gender.But The Viceroy of Ouidah is much more than a linear tale of a life. Bruce Chatwin’s vivid prose presents a multiplicity of minutiae, associations, conflicts and concordances. Each pithy paragraph could be a novel in itself if it were not so utterly poetic. A random example will suffice to give a flavour.“Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded on her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, ‘What are these women?’ and Da Silva would glare down the table and say. ‘Our future murderers.’”Within each vivid scene, we experience history, place, culture, and all the emotions, disappointments and achievements of imperfect lives. A jungle vibrates with untamed life around us. Treachery sours and threatens, while disease and passion alike claim their victims. It is a book to be savoured almost line by line. It provides an experience that is moving, technicoloured, but, like all lives, inevitably ephemeral. Like the outlawed trade that endowed riches, it eventually comes to nought, except of course for those who are inadvertently caught up in its net and whose lives were thus utterly changed if, indeed, they survived.I read The Viceroy Of Ouidah without a bookmark, always starting a few pages before where I had previously left off. Each time, I read through several pages convinced that it was my first time to see them and then I would reach a particularly striking phrase and realise I had been there before. The extent of the detail and complexity of the images present a rain-forest of detail that is completely absorbing. The Viceroy Of Ouidah is thus surely a book worth reading several times.
Dazzling novel about a Brazilian slave trader who settles in the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa where he spawns an enormous family of mulatto Da Silvas. Lots of brutality, of course, and Francisco da Silva is by no means a nice man, but you do end up feeling some sympathy for him in the final part of the book where everything falls apart for him. But there is more to this short novel than just the story of Francisco da Silva. The first part is a brief, but sadly precise account of life in 1970s revolutionary Benin, depressingly familiar stuff from that decade in Africa. The members of the Da Silva clan - by this time spread out all over West Africa - meet to celebrate a Requiem Mass for "the Founder". His youngest daughter, now well over 100 years old, is on her deadbed, and her life - also tragic, of course, after a very brief love affair - is shown in flashbacks. There is a lovely sense of decay about this book. A really good read!
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Like hearing the death-bed confession of a madman, swaddled in sweaty bandages and delirious with fever. Big jumps, taller tales, more than a hint of the truth and a whiff of disease as well.I came to this by way of the Herzog film "Cobra Verde" and am glad I did so. Don't know enough about the process of Chatwin, but some of the quick captures from the past are as visceral as they are fleeting. Left me with the sensation of a man larger than life, but so much smaller than fate. Music seemed to ring throughout the book.Nothing short of fascinating...granted seeing the film first has both filled my eyes and blinded me. But credit Herzog too for his own imagined past.
—Thurston Hunger
The movie is Cobra Verde… which I watched many years ago and have only a faint recollection. Thanks Adam for reminding me of it and making me curious to read the novel.
—Adam
Un libro distinto. Su escritura es bien particular y la historia otro tanto.Me gusta la manera como da entrada a su historia y como se sincera con el lector para notificar la falta de información dentro de sus investigaciones para dar vida a su historia, que comienza a principios del siglo XIX cuando la venta de esclavos estaba en apogeo.Decidido a hacer fortuna en la venta de esclavos Francisco Da Silva viaja al continente negro, pero el proceso de su fortuna es extraño por lo dispar en formas de pensar y por las costumbres que son aun mas interesantes. A la vez que amasa con inteligencia y perspicacia su fortuna, crece tambien una serie de compromisos, envidias y laberintos que lo hacen desconfiar incluso de su mas fiel ayudante.Acaba en la real miseria nuestro personaje y toca con una prosa muy particular su autor los sentimientos y pensamientos por los que va pasando en ya sin poder Virrey de Ouidah.Un viaje interesantísimo su lectura. AJB
—Alberto Jacobo Baruqui
