Word: ellellou
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 in its construction; Updike interweaves flashback and narrative to force a sad comparison between the America that believed so deeply when Ike said it was happy, and the nation that since developed...
...Colonel Hakim Félix Ellellou, Kush's Muslim-Marxist President, such imports are ideological and theological blasphemies. Yet Ellellou himself has had his head turned by the West. At 17, he left his native village to join the French colo nial army. He served in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu and spent the middle '50s studying liberal arts in Wisconsin. Back home, married to a white college sweet heart, Ellelloū rose through the ranks under a French-puppet king and then emerged as the leader of the coup that put him in power...
Narrated by Ellellou, deposed and comfortably exiled in the South of France, the story has that sad, ironical tone of dis location found in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. "All their languages were second languages . . . clumsy masks their thoughts must put on," are among Updike's Nabokovian touches...
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