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Trái Tim Của Bóng Đen: Cội Rễ Loài Người

Prospero

The Dream of the Celt. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 404 pages; $27. Faber and Faber; £18.99

IN 1884 Roger Casement, an ascetic young Ulsterman, joined an expedition up the Congo river led by Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born American explorer, believing that commerce, Christianity and colonialism would emancipate the dark continent. By the time he left Africa 20 years later, Casement had emerged as the leading figure in an international campaign to denounce the abuses committed by the Congo’s Belgian colonisers. As British consul, he published a report that detailed how the African population were beaten and mutilated to force them to supply rubber for export to Europe.

When reports reached London that the rubber boom had prompted a similar reign of terror against the indigenous population in Putumayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, the British foreign secretary sent Casement to investigate, with the words: “You’re a specialist in atrocities. You can’t say no.” He found that the cruelty of overseers who forced indentured labourers to continue working until they had paid off their debts had annihilated three-quarters of the Indian population. His report prompted the collapse of the Peruvian Amazon Company, the London-registered company responsible. Casement was knighted, and the Times hailed him as “a great humanitarian”.

A passionate man of complex character, Casement is a tailor-made protagonist for Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who won the Nobel prize in literature in 2010. “The Dream of the Celt” blends fact and fiction; it is at once a meticulously researched fictional biography and a clever psychological novel.

Casement’s fame quickly turned to notoriety. Only a few years after his lauded success in Peru he was hanged in Pentonville prison as a traitor. Having transferred his thirst for justice to the fight for Irish independence, he sought German military support for the cause during the first world war. But many Irish nationalists opposed this stance, leading him to be ostracised by several of his friends, such as Joseph Conrad. Casement was caught in 1916 on an Irish beach during a foiled attempt to land 20,000 German rifles. His British captors sought to further besmirch his name by circulating diaries in which he detailed homosexual encounters with young men on several continents.

This is ripe material. The African segment of the book will be familiar to readers of “King Leopold’s Ghost”, Adam Hochschild’s remarkable history of the rape of the Belgian Congo. Some of the dialogue is stilted by the need to convey information but Mr Vargas Llosa is blessed with extraordinary powers of description and imagination, the reader is quickly engrossed by Casement’s story. The strongest passages are when the author skilfully interweaves scenes in Pentonville prison with details of Casement’s earlier life to trace the evolution of Casement’s consciousness. Like many good novels, “The Dream of the Celt” is a moral tale. It is about the choice between denial or denunciation in the face of evil, and the fine line between activism and fanaticism. That makes an old story strikingly contemporary. 




Vargas Llosa mê tay Casement này lâu rồi, có thể cùng lúc mê cuốn Trái Tim Của Bóng Đen, như trong bài viết của ông về cuốn này, mà TV đang giới thiệu

Nhưng phải về già, ông mới viết ra nổi câu chuyện của 1 vị anh hùng bi thương, và cũng còn là một câu chuyện đạo đức.
Casement có rất nhiều tật xấu [ông là người đồng tính]; người dân Ái Nhĩ Lan chẳng hề coi ông là anh hùng cái con mẹ gì hết, và có thể cũng coi ông là 1 tên phản bội như đám Hồng Mao!

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Kẻ Xa Lạ phải chết

Trái Tim Của Bóng Đen: Cội Rễ Loài Người

GCC biết tới Trái Tim của Bóng Đen, biết tới Conrad, là nhờ đọc 1 bài viết trên tờ The New Yorker, những ngày mới ra hải ngoại, học lấy cái bằng, license, đi bán bảo hiểm nhân thọ, có tí tiền bèn mua báo dài hạn, nào NYRB, nào Người Nữu Ước.
Tờ NYRB ở với GCC lâu lắm, chỉ tới khi nghĩ, sắp đi rồi, thì giờ đâu mà đọc nữa, bèn nghỉ mua dài hạn, không ngờ khốn nạn hơn nhiều, khi mua lẻ.

Trong bài viết về Trái Tim của Bóng Đen, Vargas Llosa cũng kể trường hợp về 1 tay, quá tò mò, mất công làm "cả 1 cú" điều tra.... :

On a plane journey, the historian Adam Hochschild found a quotation from Mark Twain in which the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asserted that the regime imposed in the Free State of the Congo between 1885 and 1906 by Leopold II, the King of the Belgians who died in 1909, had exterminated between five and eight million of the native inhabitants. Disconcerted, and with his curiosity aroused, he began an investigation that, many years later, would culminate in King Leopold's Ghost, an outstanding document on the cruelty and greed that drove the European colonial adventure in Africa. The information contained in the book and the conclusions that it reaches greatly enrich our reading of Joseph Conrad's masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, which was set in that country just at the time when the Belgian Company of Leopold II - who must rate alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the bloodiest political criminals of the twentieth century - was perpetrating the worst of its insanities.

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Heart of Darkness

The Roots of Humankind

1. The Congo of Leopold II

On a plane journey, the historian Adam Hochschild found a quotation from Mark Twain in which the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asserted that the regime imposed in the Free State of the Congo between 1885 and 1906 by Leopold II, the King of the Belgians who died in 1909, had exterminated between five and eight million of the native inhabitants. Disconcerted, and with his curiosity aroused, he began an investigation that, many years later, would culminate in King Leopold's Ghost, an outstanding document on the cruelty and greed that drove the European colonial adventure in Africa. The information contained in the book and the conclusions that it reaches greatly enrich our reading of Joseph Conrad's masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, which was set in that country just at the time when the Belgian Company of Leopold II - who must rate alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the bloodiest political criminals of the twentieth century - was perpetrating the worst of its insanities.

Leopold II was an obscenity of a human being; but he was also cultured, intelligent and creative. He planned his Congolese operation as a great economic and political enterprise designed to make him both a monarch and a very powerful businessman, with a fortune and an industrial and commercial network so vast that he would be in a position to influence political life and development in the rest of the world. His Central African colony, the Congo, which was the size of half of western Europe, was his personal property until 1906, when pressure from various governments, and from public opinion