![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The posture of casual superiority that all Europeans in the book assume concerning all Africans is undoubtedly an accurate reflection of the late colonial period. The middle section, set in Ishmaelia itself, wasn’t as amusing, no doubt because of Waugh’s recourse to national stereotypes. The first is hilarious, and the final section evoked a good number of guffaws from me. Any resemblance to the nation that occupies this space in our world, Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia), is hardly coincidental since Waugh served as a correspondent there in 1935. The setting is the mythical northeast African country of Ishmaelia. Evelyn Waugh published this satirical account of the unlikely success of a foreign correspondent just before the outbreak of World War Two, when the proxy war that the competing totalitarian dictatorships of Germany and Russia had waged in countries such as Spain became a direct confrontation. ![]()
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