Receive The Adventures Of Vela Translated By Albert Wendt Available As Volume
read this for my year of reading Oceania in, It isn't easy to find books set in Samoa, and most of them are by Albert Wendt or Margaret Mead, According to the internet and the little information I can find on this book, Wendt sees this as his masterpiece, what he worked toward his entire life.
It can be a challenge to read, It is about Vela, an immortal storyteller who is either embodying people as he tells their stories or is multigender, multicharacter, It may be both. He almost feels like a god but while he converses with them, he does not seem to have the powers they do,
The stories are told in verse, almost in a chanting way, and oral performance is implied, The language is heavily Samoan and I was often at a loss as to what was going on! Still a lot of Samoan culture and values, as filtered through Wendt, can be discerned by reading these stories the openness of sexual relationships is a frequent theme but we know this to be true from Margaret Mead!, the presence and purpose of pig, the landscape, the food, the outsider it's all here.
And a little sidetrip to China, which is confusing to me!
"Yes he murmured our only gift is to fashion stories out of our
misery and in the storying bring some meaning to it.
" “We can't rewalk the exact footprints
we make in the stories of our lives
but we'll hear again our footprints
like the lullabies our parents sang us
the moment our stories end
Perhaps out of our footprints
our children will nurse wiser lullabies” Albert Wendt
Worth it for the first section of the book.
This is a quite, not graphic, but definitely nonprudish, I wish there were more books from this region of the world because the myths and stories were very interesting and I'd love to read more interpretations.
Journey through the many stories and worlds of the immortal Vela, the Samoan song maker, poet, and storytellerVela, who was so red and ugly at birth they called him the Cooked Vela the lonely admirer of pigs and the connoisseur of feet Vela the lover of song maker Mulialofa.
Follow Vela down through centuries as he encounters the singleminded society of the TagataNei and the Smellocracy of Olfact and recounts the stories of Lady Nafanua, the fearless warrior queen, before whom travelling chroniclers still bow down today.
A Pacific epic, this novel stretches hundreds of years before the arrival of Papalagi to the present day and fuses the great indigenous oral traditions of storytelling and Western poetry.
Abandoned after the end of the sample which is the firstof the book, It's rare for me not to finish a book, even one I don't like, but this style just wasn't for me, I'll try another of his books to see if it suits me better, Wendt has succeeded where so many have failed, and written a modern epic poem, Like most epics, it is a national tale, Wendt describes the emergence of a new Samoan identity in the wake of colonisation, Every aspect of the poem contributes to express this sense of identity, The narrative digresses acrossyears of Samoan history, and spreads wide across the Pacific even my own Australia gets a bit part, The language pulses. There is more than a shade of sitelinkSalman Rushdie in Wendt's style, He litters the book with Samoan and Maori words, He is as disgressive and casual as sitelinkGeorge Gordon Byron, and just as Romantic, He settles into a flexible fiveline stanza with
plenty of coordinate clauses, enjambment and cesurae, His paratactic style will appeal to fans of Old English epic, The plot is tragic, but as in many tragic stories all the destruction leads to a great renewal, At first I felt the book lacked structure, Wendt is more in the Mahabharata school of encyclopaedic epic, rather than in the terse and focussed Homeric school, But by the end of the book, the threads come together, and it ends on an exhilarating note of, to use Wendt's word, 'resurrection',
Wendt must surely be one of the most important authors in all world literature today, I liked this book a lot better than the others of his that I've read, It's a 'novel in verse' based on pacific oral tradition, but with elements taken from modern culture also, it's probably at its best when it gets really scatological and sexual in a very genuine way that reminds me of some premodern texts, there's also some very memorable scenes like the part where two guys have a song contest and the loser has his bones extracted and turned into a one legged 'boneman' that dances.
Albert Wendt was born in Apia, Samoa, Wendts epic Leaves of the Banyan Treewon theNew Zealand Book Awards, He was appointed to the first chair in Pacific literature at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Inhe took up a professorship of Pacific studies at the University of Auckland, InWendt was visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii, Inhe was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to literature, In theQueens Birthday Honours he was appointed a member of the Order of New Zealand, Albert Wendt was born in Apia, Samoa, Wendt's epic Leaves of the Banyan Treewon theNew Zealand Book Awards, He was appointed to the first chair in Pacific literature at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Inhe took up a professorship of Pacific studies at the University of Auckland, InWendt was visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii, Inhe was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to literature, In theQueen's Birthday Honours he was appointed a member of the Order of New Zealand, sitelink.