Reading The Whistler (Aflame Books) by Ondjaki — not to be confused with Michael Ondaatje of The English Patient fame — reminded me of a review I read of John Updike’s novel Villages.
Updike’s novel ends with a character, Owen, kneeling between his wife’s legs and combing “her luxuriant pussy, now his, as if preparing a fleecy lamb for sacrifice”. Then there’s the moment when he compares his mistress’s vagina with his wife’s: “Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze.”
The outraged reviewer says all this reminded him of the joke that Updike is “just a penis with a thesaurus”. To be fair to the Angolan Ondjaki, The Whistler is not all penises and vaginas. He is much subtler than that.
The inspiration for his book could easily have been the avant-garde duo of Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, acolytes of Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin.
Ondjaki tells the tale of a nameless stranger who walks into a village with no name — it so happens that this stranger can whistle. Of course, his is not the whistling that most of us do when taking a shower, or — to descend to the scatological level at which the book at times chooses to operate — taking a piss.
Take the character KaLua, who has an irresistible need to defecate. “I love shitting to the sound of a good whistle,” confesses the man who normally goes about clutching rolls of toilet paper. Or another character, who urinates continuously for three minutes, almost dozing off in the process.
The stranger’s whistling is the kind that hypnotises and entrances doves, villagers and everyone who hears it. “Married couples broke down in tears, hanging on to the tip of that echo with care and peace. Others smiled; the old people stood dead still …”
After one such haunting whistle, Dona Mama has a dream sequence in which she recalls her wedding night. “She demanded the presence of her husband in the bed, throwing herself at him with the determination of a tiger, the claws of a bear, the humidity of a slug, the strength of a mare, the fearful curiosity of a virgin and the ripe sexuality of a woman.”
On another occasion, the whistler sings away in such fashion that he “extolled the belligerent intensity” of his audience. The “impulse” generated when they brushed up against each other was transferred to the donkeys — a recurring metaphor in the book. Afterwards, there was a sexual mêlée, and the narrator reiterates that “when the term sexual mêlée is used, one really means sexual mêlée”.
The carnivalesque sexual ambience created results in widows, rather vaguely “declaring to themselves the passing of their husbands in the exacerbated fulfilment of the sexual function” and two men dying, it would seem, after an orgiastic coupling; pigeons seeking out doves and vice versa; the bat mating with the sparrow; the farmer seeking out the goat and the chicken; and many “other possible eventualities”.
There is no doubt that Ondjaki is a craftsman, and an adept one at that, who has the uncanny ability at once to shock and lull the reader. Even across languages (the book is translated from the Portuguese) the book’s poetic cadences beat insistently and, rise to a crescendo. Certain parts, the second half especially, really stand out and the author’s narrative authority and intensity are, at times, astounding and magisterial.
However, one wishes sometimes that the authorial spurts were more controlled and the narrative’s jagged ends tidier. This would begin to explain the sexual ambience that somehow turns the second, more solid half of the book into an exhibitionist, carnivalesque sexual orgy.
But one thing is certain: Ondjaki is not simply a penis with a thesaurus. He is more. He has an encyclopedia too, and a sense of humour, a wildly intimate side to him and, perhaps most importantly and simply put, he is a damn good writer.