UNESCO Part VII

I read an issue of OK and started the latest New Yorker yesterday, but I also read three titles from the UNESCO list. Yaka, by Pepetela, is an unusual story of the white community in Angola for the last hundred years. The narrative device is the statue, Yaka, which observes all the sad occurrences of colonialism and post-colonialism, and sometimes speaks. In Gallegos' Cantaclara, cavalier errant, I could feel the sun on the drenched plains of Venezuela throughout the book, however conventional the plot was. Finally, I read Kemal's Memed le mince, the story of a maquisard, a story filled with ineffable sadness at the circumstances that drive such people to such difficult lives.