Title: Oh Zaperetta!
First published: December 31, 2004
Description: Review by David Alexander

Zulu Zapy Wins the Rainbow Nation

Authors who, like Shakespeare, make wisdom come out of the mouths of fools are nothing new.  In addition to fools, juveniles, curmudgeons and ingenues have all been created by authors to speak truths that would otherwise be hard to take or impossible to fathom.  The technique may be as old as literature itself, but the distinction of having done it exceedingly well has been won by only a few. Voltaire, in creating Candide, was among these select few writers. Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn was another.  Dickens was a master of the art. 
Albert Russo is also a master of this art, and a modern master at that.  His hand is sure and his store of bon mots, exiting with irreppresible verve from his continuing character Zapinette, seems inexhaustible, as does Zapinette's supply of malapropisms attuned to the trend-consciousness of 21st century global society.  Indeed while the word malapropism refers to the Dickensian character Mrs. Malaprop, whose pronouncements were the direct opposite of apropos, I suggest that the new coinage of zapropisms should be used to denote the deliberate misuse of trendy, hip or globalist catchwords of this century, just as Ms. Malaprop made a cleverly ambiguous mockery of those of the 19th by her locutions, for Zapy is a veritable zapropotamus of zapropisms that help make the book a delight to read.  (And I use the word "delight" advisedly, reflecting back along the turned tides of decades to the moment in a college class on the Romantic poets with British poet Elizabeth Sewell, who remarked when I stated that the purpose of literature was to entertain that, no, literature's purpose was to "delight, not entertain."  Sewell used the word delight in the same sense 19th century critic Matthew Arnold used it.  Steeped in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and the like, she'd had a very precise gamut of meaning for the word, as I do, here.)
The novel's plot takes Zappinette, in the company of her usual foil, or straight-man, her Uncle Berky (variously called Unky Berky or Uncle Bonka), to visit family in South Africa, a trip resulting from a contest run by the French government, the fine print of whose terms required the travelers to act as unofficial ambassadors of goodwill on what, according to contest rules, is a "humanitarian" journey in which they'll have to complete "fieldwork" and report back to the French government.
Here it should be noted that our 12-year-old heroine Zapy is a personifcation of global culture not only by her world wide webbish patter and blogospheric quips, but via a family heritage as diversified as a multinational corporation, with branches in major countries around the world.  The South African part of this multicultural franchise is represented by "three distant cousins ... whose Huguenot forebears had fled France during the religious wars."  The first of these kin we encounter is cousin Kif and his "barrel-like" wife  Maatje (pronounced, we are helpfully informed Maa-tcha) who live on a ranch near Gravelotte, which is a town outside Pretoria, and which Zapy and Uncle Berky plan to spend a week at before moving on to Durban, their next stop, where yet more family will make them their guests.
Their first stop, though, is Johannesburg, where the second part of the title referring to the Rainbow Nation, makes its presence manifest.  Through the eyes and the voice of Russo's effervescent ingenue's rollicking first person narrative, we're given a grim picture of the realities of South Africa today, that emerge through the thin sugar coating like the awful taste of the inside of an M 'n M when the chocolate's been left sitting in the sun too long and you first bite down through the candy shell.  Rainbows are, after all, illusions, as are the pots of gold at their end, and when the word, or words like it, is used to describe a social milieu it's generally self-mockery.  Just as the socalled Gorgeous Mosaic that Mayor David Dinkens would have liked New York City to have been when he occupied Gracie Mansion was the very opposite of gorgeous and, if a mosaic, a shattered and contentious one, so the rainbow of this Rainbow Nation arches over a land of suffering and disparities which has become more rather than less divided and troubled since the end of Apartheid.
One of Albert Russo's greatest strengths as a writer is the clear-seeing eye he casts on the inequities and injustices of life, including those glaring breaches of the social contract that we all have to put up with but really shouldn't, and here he is also reminiscent of that earlier paragon of big-hearted social conscience, Charles Dickens.  Although the narrative cycle of which Zulu Zapy is a part bears a subtitle which refers to Zapy's "hilarious adventures around the world" this, as all other Zapinette novels (hilarious though they may be) are works that don't shrink from the responsibility of all the best literature to fulfill one of an author's chief goals, which is to tell us (or if not tell us, then show us) that seemingly mundane and unremarkable yet so very often implausible and vagrant thing: the truth.
Subjects: 12-year old  Zapy, her tricks, her humor and her ... wisdom, Fiction, humorous, general
Places: New York, France, Italy, Switzerland, South Africa and Belgium
People: Zapinette and her extravagant Unky Berky
Time periods: turn of the 21st century