The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Precious Ramotswe's father believes that "Every man has a map in his heart of his own country and...the heart will never allow you to forget this map." The quote made me wonder if in a culture where people move an average of 11 times in life, do we still have this deep connection to home? And is home the place we were born or does it go deeper - is there a call in our hearts for our roots?

In many movies I have seen and books I have read regarding Africa, the characters express a love, an almost primal connection to the land. Why? I don't see this same continuing motif in literature/film about other lands. A second example of this in the book: "Mma Ramotswe did not want Africa to change. She did not want her people to become like everybody else, soulless, selfish, forgetful of what it means to be an African, or worse still, ashamed of Africa." What does it mean to be an African? Is there no shame for the problems of Africa - the wars, the rapes, the corruption?

"I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own." There is something to be said for this sort of natural spiritualism. The idea that I exist and the earth exists and that the two are somehow connected.

Religion: "I do not think [God is a white man] because there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we are just people. And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name then, and he did not live over at the Jews' place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in the places where we knew he liked to be." It's an interesting thought to assume that all gods are actually the same god - just variations. But the very existence of those variations suggest it is more likely that there is no god outside of human construction. Unless some higher being fashioned him/her/it-self into the necessary being(s) for each specific population.

Love and Sex: She has such a strange relationship with Note. He hits her, rapes her, and yet "she wanted to marry him. He was not a good man, she could tell that, but she might change him. And...there remained those dark moments of contact, those pleasures he snatched from her, which were addictive. She liked that. She felt ashamed to even think of it, but she liked what he did to her, the humiliation, the urgency." The big question is why? Maybe a small part of me can see how a person may like the pain of it. But Precious is an extremely smart person who doesn't lack for love or confidence. What is it about the darkness that draws us? Do we feel we deserve to be punished?

Mma Ramotswe's dream is to buy a house in Mochudi, ask some cousins to come live with her, and spend her time growing melons and talking to family and friends. Right after detailing this dream, the author writes, "How sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this, and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyways. What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass? None, in her view; none at all, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realised how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion." The word boredom should be stricken from the dictionary.

I copied many more quotes and wrote many many more comments in my journal than I include here. It is the same for every entry I have made about a book and every entry I will make. Only bits and pieces will be included here. And no summaries of the books. These snippets may entice you to read. Or not.

Buy  |  Borrow  |  Accept  |  Avoid