A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

The first time I read this book was in French back in 2003. Reading it in English still has a chilling effect on me. I still feel haunted. It is one of the most beautiful and disturbing books I have read. And Courtemanche did a wonderful job bringing the genocide in Rwanda and the atmosphere leading up to it to close to the grasp of the average reader. His characters are real and the setting is real, which makes the story all the more disturbing. However, despite all the horrors, the writer allowed us to see the light and magnificent beauty of Rwanda and its people, and in portraying these, the writer made us see hope which is the prerequisite for healing, recovery and progress for a new Rwanda. This book is a must read if you want to understand what happened in Rwanda and get a clue to the other massacres that happened and/or are still happening in the continent. In the horrible violence that took place in Rwanda, that happened two decades back in Cameroon, Congo and Algeria and that is happening today in Sudan , one can not avoid asking this question: where was and where is the international community ? The stories from Triple Agent Double and A Night at a Pool in Kigali, seem to reveal that all the former German colonies in Africa that France and Belgium took over became prone to wars, dictatorships, massacres and genocides.

"A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali," by Gil Courtemanche, is a searing story of love and redemption set against the backdrop of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It is also both a love song to the people and country of Rwanda, and an indictment against the international community's indifference in the face of the impending massacre. The author, a prominent Canadian journalist, did not start out to write a novel. His first draft was written in a drunken rage as a testimonial to the friends he lost in the Rwandan Holocaust. Eventually, that first draft morphed into a novel. Virtually all of what is told within its pages is horrifyingly true. The stories of how Courtemanche's friends died is unbearably gut-wrenching. The author knew that few people would have the courage and desire to read what he had to tell. What he needed was some fictional glue that would bind these stories together and make the whole compelling enough so people would want to read it. That's when he remembered Gentille, a young strikingly beautiful and innocent Rwandan woman who worked as a waitress at the Hôtel des Mille-Collines in Kigali, Rwanda during the period he was there filming an AIDS documentary. He imagined a love story between her and an alter-ego film journalist character much like himself. That is how these two characters and their tender love story came to form the singular fiction at the core of this astonishingly powerful and incendiary novel. The book's dedication reads: "To my Rwandan friends swept away in the maelstrom / Émérita, André, Cyrien, Raphaël, Landouald, Hélène, and Méthode / To a few unsung heroes still living / Lousie, Marie, Stratton, Victor / Finally, to Gentille, who served me eggs and beer and could be dead or alive, if only I knew / I have tried to speak for you / I hope I have not failed you." I've seen two major motion pictures and countless T.V. documentaries about the Rwandan genocide, but "A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali" delivers a punch that goes far beyond all of these. It goes directly to the soul. If I were to weigh the emotional impact and lasting force of the various films, T.V. documentaries, and now this one novel about the Rwanda genocide, I would have to say that Courtemanche's book is by far the one that will resonate in my memory forever. Once you read this book, you will never forget Gentille. You will never forget Émérita, André, Cyrien, Raphaël, Landouald, Hélène, and Méthode and how each of them died...and you will never forget the Rwandan Holocaust. I'd say that Courtemanche has not failed his friends--he's immortalized them. Readers come away from this book with a better understanding of Rwanda, its people, the nature of genocide, and ultimately, of course, of ourselves and our place in the human condition. This book has my highest recommendation.

I picked up this book on one of my 90 second book-picking sprees at new fiction rack at the library with my 18-month-old in tow (hence the 90 seconds). I scan for familiar titles, familiar authors, pleasant sounding titles. What could sound more pleasant than "Sunday" and "pool" in an exotic locale? If I'd stopped to read the jacket, I probably would have put it back down. That said, I swept through the first half of the book in a couple of hours. More like, it had me in a clawlike grip by the neck. My previous conception of the event in Rwanda were like a very vague knowledge of statistics. So many hundreds of thousands dead and raped and disfigured in the most inhuman ways imaginable. Courtemanche's greatest triumph, in my estimation, was to put the stories back in the realm of the human. A story that is so numbing and brutal that one cannot continue to read it defeats the purpose, which is to bear witness to the suffering and tragedy. I came close to not finishing, to saying to myself, well I know how it will all end, anyhow. It is a testament to Courtemanche's deft humanism, to his ability to find dignity in the face of such inhuman ugliness, that I was able to turn to the last page, and very glad I did. His sensitive balancing of fragile hope with the brutally realistic details reassured me and held my hand, so to speak. This is a diatribe against the ignorance and passivity that allowed the massacre in Rwanda to happen, and that it found my admittedly passive and ignorant eyes and ears and captivated me speaks to its success.

A wonderful book which contains some of the best dialogue and exchanges ever about the difference between blacks and whites and the hatred that eats into people. Very descriptive and evocative, this book gives voice to the legacy of colonialism, human relationships, politics and love. What I liked most about it was the honesty, all the characters were inspiring in their own way but we were also aware of their weaknesses, and were able to accept that is what makes them whole as a person. It doesn't try to make excuses for anything but offers an acute observation of life that only a few people who take the time will be able to notice. In spite of the brutality that ensued, there was genuine friendship, caring, courage and bravery which allows humanity to be redeemed. My favourite characters are Emerita who was full of life and daring, Valvourt, who was very self aware esp of his weaknesses, Gentille noble and beautiful and the personal growth which love creates in her, and her father and cousin who lamented the destruction that would descend when friends and relatives killed one another. A must-read and important reminder that 'Never Again' does not mean anything unless the international community ensures the promise is kept.

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 Canadi