The Viceroy of Ouidah

The Viceroy of Ouidah
In this vivid, powerful novel, Chatwin tells of Francisco Manoel de Silva, a poor Brazilian adventurer who sails to Dahomey in West Africa to trade for slaves and amass his fortune. His plans exceed his dreams, and soon he is the Viceroy of Ouidah, master of all slave trading in Dahomey. But the ghastly business of slave trading and the open savagery of life in Dahomey slowly consume Manoel's wealth and sanity.

"This is Conrad's Heart of Darkness seen through a microscope." --The Atlantic Monthly

"Dazzles and mystifies, with its lush anger, its impacted memory, its gorgeous desolation." --The New York Times
Customer Review: Destroyed by the night
I came to Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah by way of Werner Herzog's (very loose) film adaptation of it, "Cobra Verde." Herzog's film doesn't quite work. At the end of the day, it's rather fragmented. Chatwin's novel does work. The storyline is simple, and ultimately, I think, not as important as the mood the novel creates. Francisco Manoel da Silva is an early 19th century Brazilian sharecropper who sails to the west African kingdom of Dahomey, makes a fortune in the slave trade, but is eventually brought low and dies penniless and mad. His descendants, wanting desperately to think of themselves as white and Brazilian, fetishizing their ancestor's memory, and nostalgically harkening back to the day when the da Silva name meant something in Dahomey, congregate annually to commemorate him. At the annual gathering that opens the novel, Eugenia, the only suriving child of Francisco, is dying. She's well over 100 years old. None of this is remarkable. What's so powerful about The Viceroy of Ouidah (not an especially good title, by the way) is the mood it creates. Even better than Joseph Conrad, Chatwin draws a portrait of the dark and unfathomable forces of nature--both human and nonhuman--that we "civilized" folks who confront them can't even begin to imagine. We may think for a while, as Francisco does, that we're their master. But in the long run, to cite an unsettling scene in the novel, the night will slay us. The night will destroy us. Paralleling the wild, insane, destructive forces of nature in the novel is the equally destructive slave trade that Francisco engages in. One reviewer has remarked that we gain no insight into Francisco's psychology, and I think this is an accurate statement. He remains opague to the reader. But this may be intentional on Chatwin's part: in his own way, Francisco is part of the very darkness that destroys him, and that darkness is too inky, too swamp-like, for clarity. An extraordinary allegory. Not as rich as the author's later Utz, but well worth reading.
Customer Review: difficult read
very hard to get into; it reads like a college literature assignment that you are supposed to decipher (not fun); not recommended