Word: ellello
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...CENTER OF THOSE visions is Col. Hakim Felix Ellello*u, president-for-life of Kush, minister of defense, ch*airman of the revolutionary council, architect of his nation's already-crumbling monuments to fanatical Islamic Marxism, and lecher extraordinaire. Ellello*u continually varies his narrative between the third and the first person--"There comes a time in a man's life," he explains in the midst of crisis, "when he thinks of himself in the third person"--but never varies in his ribald, poetic, heart-driven rhetoric. Revolutionary and demagogue, seducer and saint, political puritan and sexual adventurer, he sees...
...Ellello*u, the drought that brings his nation to the limits of starvation is more than a mischance of the elements or even, as one of his enemies calls it, "bad ecology." It represents a blot on the nation's soul, a demon that has to be exorcised, the work of an angry Allah demanding sacrifice. So he sacrifices. First goes the ancient king who had been his prisoner since the revolution, then an American foreign service officer who tries to bring food supplies across the border from a less doctrinaire socialist, and less impoverished, neighbor. In each case Ellello...
...wanders out into the desert, accompanied by the dearest of his four wives, to begin a search for the oracle that, he is told, will tell him how to end the drought. It seems cornballed at first, simple adventurism, but Updike is never simple. Through Ellello*u. Updike sings an elegy to the open spaces he seems to have just now found: the vast blue sky of Africa, and the rolling plains of the 1950s America in which both Ellellou and Updike attended college. This makes the most beautiful part of the book, striking in its images and complex...
...CAREFULLY AS HE has molded Ellello*u out of fiery words and fanatic ideas, Updike has created a supporting cast of splendid variety. Ellello*u's foppish political opponents, his wispy and wisely degenerate king, his seductive and bitchy and monstrous wives, all create an atmosphere of debauched craziness tempered by childlike seriousness. This aura is, in turn, scientifically punctured by the sickeningly helpful middle-Americans and mysterious vodka-guzzling Russians who emerge from the shadows to help separate the dictator from his people. Blending caricature and truth, Updike thus manages a type of satire that helps heal over with...
There is a real sense of fatalism here, born of mature confidence; Updike, unafraid in his writing, seems like the narrator who claims that, "Ellello*u's body and career carriedme here, there, and I never knew why, but submitted." Updike obviously knows where he is going, and the reader would be wise to submit; this journey is worth the price...