Ms. Lane and I spent our summer vacation relaxing and enjoying some great books. The following is Ms. Lane's Tiger Review of M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party.
Diaries and letters recount this remarkable story, a National Book Award winner, in revolutionary America of Octavian Nothing, a young African prince who is a zoological experiment conducted by the Novanglian College of Lucidity, a group of Boston radical intellectuals. They want to determine if the African mind can absorb what the European mind can. The boy, Octavian, and his mother are treated as royalty but kept isolated from the rest of the world. Octavian received an excellent classical European education. However, his entire life is observed and recorded. They measure how much food he takes in and how much outtake there is. The situation takes a turn when, at age seven, Octavian discovers he is part of a scientific experiment and the reason for the close scrutiny he has lived under. Another turn of events occurs when the Novelangian College hosts a pox party, an attempt to improve the small pox vaccine, where the guests are inoculated with the disease. The attempt fails miserably. Octavian’s mother dies of the disease and in his grief he escapes. He meets other runaway slaves and realizes the reality of his bizarre life. The story is told is eighteenth century prose and describes the struggle for freedom, the goal of his Patriot captors, while defining the horrors of slavery along with the hypocrisy of the nation’s quest for liberty.
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