Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to similar audio books?
Not applicable
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Not applicable
Advantages:
Puts the horrors of Rwanda into perspective
Disadvantages:
Sexually explicit and very very violent
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
===Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing===
Before I tell you about the book, I'd like to ask you to think about the causes of the genocide in Rwanda. If you know all about what happened and why, jump forward and ignore this bit. If you don't - then bear with me.
Try to forget everything you know about history and imagine a very different world in which Britain was invaded by a colonising force. The colonial masters found a great diversity in how we looked - tall, short, skinny, rotund, blonde, dark, ugly and gorgeous. They hired an academic scientist - a so-called expert - to study us and discern whether we really were all the same 'tribe'. He looked at our physiognomy and decided that all the tall skinny fine-boned blondes were one race - perhaps descended from the Vikings and he called those the 'blondes'. Then he built a second group of the shorter, rounder, coarser featured darker-skinned people and decided they'd come from the Romans and called them the 'brunettes'. So-far, so thankfully completely fictitious.
Next step, the colonialists attributed personality and behavioural traits to the two groups. Let's say they decided that the blondes are the clever, honest and dependable ones whilst the brunettes are stupid, dishonest and only good for physical labour. I've left the red-heads out of this scenario - I think they get it hard enough without my input. So the colonialists gave all the top jobs to the tall skinny blondes - they became the managers, the bankers and lawyers, the business owners and TV anchormen and women. The dumpy dark group built roads, looked after the children of the blondes and worked in factories and mines. Despite the fact that brother and sister, mother and son within the same family might be a mix of the characteristics, the colonialists gave us all identity cards that assigned us to one group of the other.
Decades later the colonialists got bored and left. The brunettes were tired of being treated badly and decided to get their own back on the blondes who were still running things. A group of brunettes whipped up a frenzy of bloodlust amongst the down-trodden worker class and, with the shooting down of the presidential plane, the brunettes turn on the blondes, slaughtering them in the streets with machetes, raping the women and leaving them to die. If you look like a blonde but your ID card says you're a brunette then they assume you slept with someone in the ministry of ID cards and they kill you anyway. If you look like a brunette but your card says you're a blonde, then they'd better kill you too - just in case.
And that - if you'll pardon the liberties I've taken with history - is pretty much my take on how the Rwandan genocide came about. The Belgian colonialists created two groups - the Hutus and the Tutsis (equivalent to my brunettes and blonds) and the whole thing went utterly crazy in 1994 leading to the deaths of between 800 000 and one million people.
Outside Africa the rest of the world watched the news reports, tutted to themselves and did far too little - after all, there's no oil in Rwanda, is there? Probably like me - if you remember it at all - you didn't have any idea where Rwanda was or anything about its history. Perhaps even now, you still couldn't place it on a map. Maybe you suppressed a wry smile at the name 'Tutsis' and thought of your grandmother using that word to refer to your toes when you were a child. But there was nothing amusing about what happened in Rwanda.
Why I became interested in Rwanda
I saw the award winning film 'Hotel Rwanda' as an in-flight movie and it made me want to know more and to understand how such a thing could happen. I was ashamed that I'd not paid more attention and felt that in order to make some kind of retribution for that ignorance, the least I could do was to look for books on the topic. 'A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali' went onto my Amazon wish-list along with another called "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families". Both stayed on the list forgotten for a while until my periodic review of the wish list (otherwise known the 'what's cheap this time?' check) meant I spotted a bargain copy through one of Amazon's private sellers and I snapped it up.
Did the book live up to expectations?
I expected to be shocked, disgusted and horrified because it's hard to imagine a book about such horrifying events could be anything other than brutal. It's fair to say I got all that in bucket-loads but not always in the ways I'd expected. If you are easily shocked you might want to stop reading now or just skip the rest of this paragraph. PLEASE - don't come back later and tell me you weren't warned. If this book were a film it would have to carry an adult rating because it's absolutely packed with sex, violence and hatred but unlike in another book I recently reviewed that also contained a lot of violent sex, in this case, such issues ARE necessary to the plot and it's hard to write about the book without touching on these topics. The sex is harsh, brutal and shocking - both when rape is used as a weapon and when the author examines the role of AIDS in the destruction of Rwanda. The most shocking examples that stick in my mind range from situations the protagonists have chosen to find themselves in, to ones that are forced upon them. There's the bizarre but touching kindness of the family paying a prostitute to visit their son as he's about to die of AIDS in his friend's hotel room. Just before he takes the morphine his friends have bought for him he says "Even rich people in the United States don't have beautiful deaths like this. Then there's the arrogant and heavily pregnant diplomat's wife having her way with the beautiful black pool-boy whilst unaware that he's knowingly infecting her with HIV; there's the man forced to have sex with his wife whilst a dozen men who have already raped her look on and attack him with machetes; and finally the man filming the final moves of a woman who lies dying in front of him puts down his camera and rapes her dead but still warm body. This is a book that dredges such depths of human depravity but yet still retains an immense sense of compassion. The book could be sensationalist but the sheer horror of the reality of what happened in Rwanda makes it an uncomfortable but compelling read. I am fully convinced that this is not exaggerated for effect - it's just a fair reflection of a one of Africa's darkest times.
The book is fiction but clearly it is rooted in a good dose of fact - let's call it 'faction'. The characters are all real people who existed although many are now dead. In some cases the names of the characters and the things that happen to them may not match up but the overall impression is solid. There's nothing in the book that didn't happen but it won't necessarily have happened to the named people.
So what's the plot?
Yes I know it's a bit weird to have written so much without telling you what the book is about but it's not the plot that you remember after reading this because in many ways it's the oldest story in the book - boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, life throws up obstacles, boy loses girl and .......... well I think that's enough. You'll have to read it to find out if love will conquer all or whether evil will win through. The characters are there to carry the story and it's the events that happen around them that make this such an unforgettable book.
The main character is a Canadian documentary maker called Valcourt who finds himself in Rwanda working on a documentary about the impact of AIDS and HIV on the country. He's making videos of dying men and women, working with groups trying to promote the safe-sex message and trying to raise awareness inside and outside the country. It's clear to readers that without the massacre, Rwanda was already in serious trouble from the rapid spread of AIDS and from the general rejection of safe-sex.
The tale is set around the pool of the Hotel des Mille Collines which will be familiar to viewers of Hotel Rwanda as the hotel that gave refuge to Tutsis during the killings - the same pool that was drunk dry by the refugees. The pool however is just a symbol - you won't get a recreation of the Hotel Rwanda - this is a much different look at the Genocide.
Valcourt takes a detached position initially as an observer of the depravity around him - watching the lewd behaviour of the prostitutes and pool boys, the tourists and the expatriates, the gang leaders and local business men. But his detachment can't be maintained after he falls in love with Gentille, a beautiful waitress at the hotel. Many of the events of the genocide take place around Valcourt and Gentille as they plan their wedding and visit her family just as the events of many of history's worst horrors must have taken place whilst people hung out their washing, took the dog to the vet or practiced the piano. Gentille's family has a dark secret that threatens her life because whilst she is registered as a Hutu, she looks like a Tutsi, all of this due to her grandfather's amateur eugenics experiments. In the interests of giving his children and grandchildren the best opportunities in life he gave up all that he had to get them good marriages to the fairest skinned Tutsis that he could find. When the Hutus start killing their Tutsi 'cockroaches', what hope is there for a girl whose features put her on the wrong side of the line?
Do I recommend it?
Absolutely - this is a book that brings home the horror of genocide elegantly and memorably and delivers more of a punch than a pure factual account could ever hope to. However it is unremitting in its horrors and it's not a book for anyone with a weak stomach. You will read things you may wish you hadn't - and that's something to consider carefully before you get yourself a copy.
Details
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Gil Gourtemanche, translated from the French by Patricia Claxton Published by Canon Gate ISBN 1 845195 525 6 Cover price £7.99
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