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Title: A Girl from Zanzibar by Roger King ISBN: 1-885586-60-4 Publisher: Helen Marx Books Pub. Date: 15 November, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An enjoyable, informative read -- reflective AND fun
Comment: The writing style is accessible and smart; complex without being confusing; insightful and reflective without weighing heavily. A great read!!!
What makes reading this novel so enjoyable is the adept weaving of history -- Zanzibar has a complex history, and it is told through the stories of the narrator, a young woman -- as well as via an insightful grasp of the contemporary condition -- of mobility, of otherness, of migration; it is both the tale of an individual, and the story of millions.
The author Roger King uses a wonderful method, of the narrator thinking about both past and present -- to bring us the careful, reflective details of an individual's life while at the same time painting a picture of the complex past (and present) difficulties of Zanzibar (particularly relevant given recent international press attention to this island archipelago off Tanzania).
The narrator, a young Goan (Indian and Portuguese descent; many settled in Zanzibar) woman who has recently come to the U.S. to teach, relates both delightfully concrete details of her life in Vermont and her past in Zanzibar, all the while revealing a very reflective story of personal changes and growth, wrangling with her past and present, as an "exotic" immigrant to the U.S. The weaving of past and present, of concrete and cerebral, make this a wonderfully rich story, both intensely personal and more broadly historical.
Rating: 5
Summary: You won't be able to put it down!
Comment: One of the most grabbing, well written books I've read in a long time. It was especially intriguing as I read it while on holiday in Zanzibar! A definite read for anyone going there, and for anyone interested in a really good read.
Rating: 5
Summary: A glorious read
Comment: The wanderings of Marcella D'Souza, the protagonist of Roger King's brilliant new novel, have begun in her native Zanzibar; taken her to the bustling, multi-ethnic streets of Bayswater, London; and finally deposited her in a quiet college town in snowy Vermont, where she has been assigned to teach a vaguely-defined course in "multi-cultural studies." Looking back on her odyssey, she has this observation: "I think I have the making of a new theory here. Maybe these days, everything is so international, there's always an advantage in being from somewhere else. What is important is not local knowledge, but foreign knowledge. If the whole world is in motion, then the world's displaced are those who stay at home." "Those who stay at home" have had little role to play in Marcella's world. As a naive, ambitious newcomer to London--the New York Times calls her a "modern-day Candide"--she falls in with a group of equally peripatetic friends, people whose racial identity, national origin, and even religious affiliations can only be expressed via a long series of adjectives: "I've got it," an earnest British friend remarks of Marcella herself, "You're a Goan Indian Portuguese Arab African of Catholic Moslem parentage." This group of friends, living a hustling and often exuberant existence in the immigrants' netherworld of Thatcher's England, contains elements that the reader rightfully suspects will pull Marcella into dangerous waters. And indeed, from the novel's first page we know that she will end up serving time in prison for an unnamed crime. But the novel unfolds with such luminous grace, effortlessly moving us from scenes of the past, into the present, and back again yet more years, that we surrender to its shifting timeline without impatience. Instead, our knowledge of Marcella and her world becomes more richly layered. Our deepening understanding makes the novel's final revelations far more satisfying then if they had been disclosed earlier. A gloriously enjoyable novel, and one that adds to the reader's perception of a world that exists, if below the radar, in the most ordinary corners of the U.S. and Europe today.
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Title: The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands by Aidan Hartley ISBN: 0871138719 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: What Remains by Nicholas Delbanco ISBN: 0446677795 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Last Good Chance by Tom Barbash ISBN: 0312422679 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0140107479 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 31 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Betrothed (Penguin Classics) by Alessandro Manzoni, Bruce Penman ISBN: 014044274X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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