Word: huts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...been appearing, disappearing and reappearing ever since. In the 1870s a German prospector, Jacob ("Dutchman") Waltz, called "Snowbeard" by the Indians, killed at least five men in getting his hands on the map. For years afterward, Waltz lived with a quadroon girl in an adobe hut in Phoenix, periodically slipped into the crags of Superstition Mountain to replenish his supply of nuggets...
...eyelids to find out what they concealed? I couldn't be certain about this." These titillating opening sentences promise events sinister, portentous or at least symbolic. But "he" turns out to be nothing more alarming than a pet monkey who had wandered into the visitor's hut in a game reserve in Kenya. The reader is soon introduced to the monkey's owner - a precocious ten-year-old girl who can converse familiarly with animals and gets no back talk...
...translation by Peter Green, Kessel's prose comes out as National Geographic exclamatory. Kessel has an eye and nose for Africa, from the way Masai warriors dress their hair (with red clay) to the construction of a native hut (from cow dung). But apparently he was trying to crossbreed Lolita with Rima, the bird-girl, and to enhance the result with the mystical animal overtones of Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven. He professes to see Patricia as a study in "the passage from innocence to non-innocence." But the reader who, like the monkey, pulls...
...claws exist only in his mind and are unsheathed only when he swipes at matters his naive mind cannot understand. Tiger is a Trinidad peasant who made a half charming, half pathetic appearance in A Brighter Sun (TIME, Jan. 19, 1953). In that book, Tiger went from mud hut to modest brick house on wartime U.S. dollars. Now Tiger is back, and he has two major problems. The bigger one comes from having driven his primitive mind to absorb Plato and Shakespeare: What do I want from life? The second is one he shares with his poor, illiterate neighbors...
When his father gets a job as foreman at a distant cane plantation, he asks Tiger to come along as his assistant and timekeeper. They wind up in a hut at Five Rivers, where sugar cane is life and life is sugar cane. The laborers work under the brutal sun by day, pour rum down their parched throats by night. Payday is so important that those who have shoes put them on for a few minutes as they stand in line for their money. And second in real authority only to the white overseer is Tiger-because he can read...