I didn’t finish any books this week, so no review. Not a real one, anyway. I think I’ll just go ahead and write a review for a book that doesn’t exist. I recently finished My Uncle the Clown, a zombie novel by Efram Kimbabwe. I don’t know what ethnicity Kimbabwe is, and I’m not even sure it matters. I do know that too often books are published because they have a certain ethnic voice, or a target ethnic audience, and they might be otherwise lacking in readability. Sort of an affirmative action for fiction, except instead of it being an attempt at giving people a chance to overcome centuries-old racial barriers, this is just an attempt at cashing in on itinerant chauvinism. As a middle aged middle class middle educated married white male with no children, I am only speaking from a position of jealousy and resentment.
And finally, a segue: jealousy and resentment are the main themes in My Uncle. What starts out to be simple survival-horror flipped on its head turns into a screed for how you don’t have to be molested to have a crappy childhood. I guess some people don’t know how good they’ve got it. Perhaps there’s a subtle message here, that they war between the haves and the have-nots was finally ended, with the haves getting what they’ve always had and the have-nots getting nothing but a voice. And so the language we all speak in is a language of deprivation. You can have all the comforts of a privileged life, you just can’t say you have it– you can only talk about what you don’t have.
Or something like that. I found myself glossing over the more philosophical sections of the book, trying to get to the juicy parts. I loved it when the main character stole his uncle’s clown uniform and dropped into the slave pens to look for his lost notebook. I accidentally read another review online that suggested this was an allusion to Daniel in the lion’s den. I don’t know anything about that. Daniel had something to do with the prophecy of the coming of Jesus, I think. And come to think of it, Kimbabwe does use the word “cross” a lot in that chapter, since the main character keeps moving around the slave pens, looking for his journal… and the whole time I was waiting for them to wake up, to go all Human on him, forcing him to go into zombie mode and eat one or two of them.
I won’t give away if he does or not. I’ll just say that it occurs to me now that more than one person has pointed out the whole Jesus/Zombie connection, and now I’m thinking I need to go back and re-read this book. But I probably won’t. I mean, even if it turns out to have been a work of utter genius, I don’t speak genius very well. Genius is seeing things that aren’t there anyway, right? And while I can read into things with the best of them, I went to Barnes and Noble today and took pictures with my cell phone of some books I’d like to sample, not to mention that I promised a friend I’d read Barney’s Version as way to apologize for making unfounded assumptions about the movie that was based on the book itself.
None of which has anything to do with whether you should read My Uncle the Clown or not. On the one hand, of course you should. Kimbabwe’s prose is a bit clumsy in places, like he was too eager to get his ideas down without bothering to take the time to properly contextualize what he was saying in a consistent manner– but not so often that it becomes a problem. It’s not a distraction, and you can sort of get used to it (not unlike what one character says about eating brains: you get used to it. You don’t learn to love it, but you get used to it).
On the other hand, no, of course you shouldn’t read it, the book doesn’t exist. I made it up as an excuse to write, a fake review, to get my 750 words done for the day. Kimbabwe might even be your favorite writer of all time, but you still shouldn’t read this book. Kimbabwe himself doesn’t even exist. I just took the name Efram Zimbalist, changed it to Zimbabwe, then changed that to Kimbabwe. Who was Efram Zimbalist? And actor, I think. I’m probably spelling his name wrong. I think his daughter or granddaughter was the other main character on that show Remington Steele.
Which reminds me: if you do read My Uncle the Clown, the scene with the zombie 007 is hilarious. 3/5 stars.