Sunday at the Pool in Kigali [Paperback]

Gil Courtemanche (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 2004

A cathartic denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, this title is both a poignant love story and a stirring hymn to humanity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bernard Valcourt is a Canadian journalist in Rwanda planning a film on the local AIDS epidemic when he falls in love with Gentille, a Tutsi who works at his hotel at the time of the Hutu-led genocides. Chronicling the days of the government-sponsored atrocities, Courtemanche's novel is powerful in its ability to remind us how much the myth of race has done to divide and destroy the human species in the past hundred years. At the same time, however, it strains to position itself as a sort of neo-existentialist tome, quoting Camus and echoing The Plague. Valcourt describes himself without irony as "sophisticated... an enlightened humanist," and yet his childish self-pity and bitter refusal to accept life's harsh realities are less the trappings of a great intellectual than the alcoholic he obviously is. From the swimming pool terrace of the H"tel des Mille-Collines in Kigali, he observes the rapidly deteriorating situation, "rather like a buzzard on a branch... waiting for a scrap of life to excite him." His supposedly spiritual love for Gentille is intended to redeem him, but it most often takes the form of a rhapsody over her "perfect" body. The Rwanda painted by Courtemanche (a Canadian journalist himself) is a country bloodied by ignorance, hatred, sexual obsession and lust for power, as terrifying and darkly obscene as anything imaginable. Tragic and deeply touching at turns (and illuminating from an historical perspective), the novel is nevertheless cheapened by Valcourt's muddled sentimentalizing and adolescent grandiloquence. As Einstein said, everything is either meaningless or miraculous. Most often it's romantics who, becoming cynics, embrace the former.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In recounting the 1994 massacre of Rwanda's Tutsis by the majority Hutus, Courtemanche fictionalizes the thoughts and actions of real participants, but the horrors he describes were all too real. At the story's center lies the improbable love that blossoms between Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt and Gentille, a shy Hutu waitress at Kigali's Mille-Collines Hotel. Valcourt and Gentille speak out against the brutal attacks that presage the genocide but make no headway with corrupt police, impotent UN forces, oblivious Western media outlets, and postcolonial Belgians and French who helped sow the seeds of racial superiority in Rwanda and then retreated when they bore deadly fruit. It's a powerful political novel about important world issues, which hardly ensures an audience here. As Valcourt notes, "In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance." That this book would introduce many U.S. readers to events that killed some 800,000 people underscores how fatal our willful ignorance of foreign affairs can be to the world's powerless. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd (June 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841955256
• ISBN-13: 978-1841955254
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,189,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Poignant Lament, July 3, 2004

By 

Bonnie Toews "Heart Tugs ... at the crossroad... (Newcastle, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Hardcover)

A beautifully written story, which is more autobiography than fiction, but I suspect no newspaper was interested in this journalist's eye-witness account of a people betrayed in a preventable Holocaust. Cushioning what happened in Rwanda in a work of fiction is the only catharsis Gil Courtemanche could achieve. In his dedication of the book, he names those in real life whom he does not disguise with pseudonyms in the actual story, and as it turns out, the lovely but tragic Gentille was a very real person. Originally written in French, none of this journalist's imagery and lyrical phraseology is lost in Patricia Claxton's English translation. Maybe she even enhanced it.

At first, Courtemanche's description of the Canadian UN Force Commander as the "weak general" angered me for, from today's perspective, it is an unfair judgment, but if I were in this journalist's shoes at the same time in history with the same background knowledge he had then, I too would have been furious at the UN general's apparent ineffectiveness to prevent the genocide of a race, the Tutsis, and their moderate Hutu sympathizers by extremist Hutus that followed. I was in Rwanda in 1994 covering the humanitarian relief program for UNIMIR. I arrived at a time when we finally had a different perspective of this "weak general." The UN refused to give him permission to take action, and he has suffered inconsolable guilt as a result. Nevertheless, this "weak" general risked his life and his career to stay with the people he came to love by disobeying the UN's command to come home once the genocide began. He was told to let the civil war take care of itself. He and his small Canadian Force willingly disobeyed orders and refused to leave, and he telephoned a Canadian CBC broadcaster every night so the News Room could hear the screams as he gave a nightly report. Eventually the Tutsi rebels achieved what the UN did not-overthrew the barbarian hordes orchestrating the genocide-to make it safe for replacement UN Forces to land in Kilgali. Millions of Hutus, fearing retribution, flooded the borders of Zaire and finally grabbed the attention of CNN. By this time, the UN and Canadian Military did not dare court martial the general and his small band of Canadian peacekeepers, who stayed and risked massacre to bring humanitarian relief and eventual retribution. This general was not "weak." His UN masters--particularly the US and France on the Security Council--made him and his UN mission powerless. There's a great difference. Maj. General Romeo Dallaire (whom Courtemanche never names in the story) had courage few military commanders on UN missions have shown today. I feel Courtemanche could have added a footnote, as he does with many historical explanations for what he writes, to clarify his original perception of the "weak general."

Once I read the story I had to leave it until I could deal with the memories in writing a review of "A Sunday at the Pool in Kilgali." The love story of a Canadian foreign correspondent, Bernard Valcourt, and the beautiful Hutu, Gentille, who had Tutsi features and elegance, is set against the societal corruption exemplified by those who gather around the local hotel pool: relief workers, Belgian peacekeepers, Rwandan middle-class, refugees and prostitutes. Here, the middle-aged Valcourt observes the disintegration of society turning on itself, while the adoring love of his much younger amour brings him alive. They plan their wedding in the midst of carnage, but eventually he can't protect her. During an escape attempt, members of the Hutu militia assault him and capture Gentille. In real life, Courtemanche never learned what happened to Gentille, but Valcourt finds her after the genocide ends-a ruined, broken woman dying of AIDS, who begs Valcourt to leave her to die in peace.

The love story takes on a life of its own as Valcourt attempts to explain what is happening to the world around him that's falling apart. There are many passages like these: "Watch out-men are turning into dogs and worse still than dogs and worse still than hyenas or the vultures on the wind making circles in the sky above an unwary herd."

In light of death, Courtemanche emerges a philosopher. The `white' man tries to teach the African to live, while he waits to die--most often because of AIDS. What the `white' man fails to realize, he writes, is that you can live only if you know you are going to die. Says one character, Cyprien: "You think we don't value life as much as you. So tell me, Valcourt, poor and deprived as we are, why do we take in our cousins' orphans, and why do our old people die with all their children around them?"

There is much we can learn from the people we marginalize in Africa.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This book is purient garbage, don't waste your money, September 6, 2004

By 

Charles "charlemagne" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Hardcover)

I was in Kigali before and during the war. I saw the massacres first hand. This book absolutely disgusts me. It is nothing more than a very badly written, factually very inaccurate, attempt to make money on the backs of the dead. Do not waste your money. There are many well written books about the genocide, such as We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch or the new one by General Dallaire, who was the head of the UN Peacekeeping Force. Shake Hands with the Devil : The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-written account by a soulless journalist, March 3, 2005

By 

World Traveler "Oakland" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Paperback)

I had mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the author portrays racial attitudes, the nature of violence and propaganda that led to the Rwandan genocide, and, for most Westerners, odd Rwandan values with respect to death and disease, exceedingly well. You have to understand the history of the country from colonial times to pre-genocide antagonism between Hutus and Tutsis, sentiments towards mortality and sex (the author uses some jaw-dropping examples to illustrate some rather stark differences), and foreign nationals' eagerness to exploit tensions or blithely ignore them, if you have any hope of understanding how close to 1 million people could be butchered in cold blood by their compatriots over the span of a few months. To this end, Courtemanche writes skillfully and chooses incidents that leave indelible images in the reader's mind. (Many are horribly gruesome, but there is no point is sugar-coating something as horrible as this)

That said, it's almost impossible not to loathe this man. (SPOILER AHEAD) First, his courtship of a woman younger than his daughters, and, because of her ethnicity, in perpetual danger, smacks of exploitation, no matter how artfully he dances around it. And most sickeningly, he ignores his wife's pleas to leave as racial tension mounts (friends are murdered around him, and Gentille is given her fair share of warnings of what will happen to her), and refuses to evacuate them from Rwanda. He knows, as a white man, he is in no danger. He complains that he is bored by his native Canada, and would miss the lush Rwandan landscape terribly if he were to leave it. But to not think of the lives of your own wife and adopted child? When he offers that he always knew he would lose her, it makes you almost want to scream.

I'm glad I read this book for the personal account of the horrible, inhumane tragedy that befell the Rwandan people, including the author's wife Gentille and child (they were real people), but, frankly, I wish I had rather read something similar written by someone not so devoid of humanity. The thought that my purchase put more than a penny in Gil Courtemanche's bank account makes my stomach turn.