Measuring Time

Measuring Time
Helon Habila
2007
383 pages
Published by Norton and purchased by moi. Well, technically, it was Hamburger, because he bought the giftcard. But I used it.

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I was all excited because, even though I’m still playing catch-up from last year, I thought I had managed to write a post for every book that I read in January.

I thought wrong. Not only did I never post about this book, I didn’t even have it listed in my January reads.

I’m sorry, book. I’m very, very sorry. Because you were wonderful, and you don’t deserve to be treated like that.

I first heard about this author over at Amy Reads, when she was talking about Oil on Water. I decided to read Measuring Time though, because one of the characters writes about history, and well, I got a thing for history.

Here’s the synopsis from Publishers Weekly:

In the late 1970s, twin brothers LaMamo and Mamo Lamang dream of leaving their Nigerian village to find fame and fortune. When they’re 16, LaMamo runs away and joins various rebel factions fighting in West Africa, while his sickly brother, Mamo, stays behind with their belligerent father (their mother died in childbirth) and becomes a brilliant student. LaMamo’s occasional letters let Mamo live vicariously but, more importantly, lets Habila reinforce his work’s central message-that the biographies of ordinary individuals provide the real stuff of history. As Mamo becomes the history teacher at a local school, LaMamo actually lives history, meeting Charles Taylor and witnessing the anarchic chaos of West Africa in the 1980s and ’90s. Mamo embarks on a career as a chronicler of “biographical history” (modeled on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives), beginning with a history of his village and his culture. Like his wayward brother, Mamo witnesses events that force him to examine his conscience. Habila fleshes out the novel with memorable secondary characters-a thuggish cousin, a damaged idealist love interest, an especially Machiavellian bureaucrat. The fresh, brilliant result contrasts cultural traditions with contemporary bureaucracy and reimagines a country through the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of its citizens.

This is the very best type of fiction…there’s history, but the type of history that ordinary people make. Which is what Mamo likes to write about. In other words, we’ve got a character writing non-fiction history and an author writing fictional history. Very tricky. Also, you actually get to learn something, without feeling like you’re plodding through some boring history text (and trust me, I’ve plodded through plenty of those). So two thumbs up to Habila, for teaching me something about Nigeria and entertaining me at the same time.