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Article Excerpt
Gallery Bundu: A Story about an African Past. Paul Stoller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 176 pp.
The Peace Corps, I was once told, has a matrimonial agency quality to it. It is about helping, and occasionally, espousing third-worlders. It is about roughing it up and sowing ones wild oats. David Lyons, a rather self-absorbed, inconsequential type, does just that (besides dodging conscription to Vietnam, this being 1969): no marriage, however, comes from his encounters with Nigerien women, but a child, whose elusive quest makes up the main drive of an otherwise spectacularly bland story. Paul Stollers Gallery Bundu is a confessional novel that never lives up to the demanding criteria of that sub-genre, and, more sadly, fails to build on other possible strengths--like the exoticness of the setting (for Western readers) or the potentials for making a political point under the pretext of telling a story.
The novel takes place mostly in Niger, at various points in time between 1971 and...
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