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Title: Ways of Dying : A Novel by Zakes Mda ISBN: 0-312-42091-9 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful terrible book
Comment: WAYS OF DYING is one of the most fascinating novels that I have read in years. The book is set in South Africa during a period that seems to span the end of the apartheid regime and focuses exclusively on the lives (and deaths) of poor South African Blacks in rural villages and urban shanty towns near what I suspect is Durban. Fans of Marquez will feel very much at home here in a world of "magical realism", yet while Mda may have been influenced by novels like 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE he has a voice that is uniquely his own, and one that I sense is profoundly rooted in Africa. Mda's "hero" is a self-declared Professional Mourner, who ekes out an existence at the edge of society. Some aspects of his life are almost grotesque in form, and the deaths that surround him are often truly horrifying, yet somehow I found this a profoundly optimistic and human book. In spite of the worst that the world can throw at him the Professional Mourner is able to transcend mere existence & by the end I was shamelessly rooting for him. I should add that I used this book in a course on the Turn of the Century, and one of my toughest-case students, whom I had failed to excite with anything else, came into my office today saying "I just LOVE Mda" You will too,
Rating: 4
Summary: At last a new African writer! And he's good! Yay!
Comment: I am an avid reader of African literature, both fiction and non-fiction (especially memoirs). I am always searching for contemporary non-white writers (the white writers are good, but it is not unreasonable to want other perspectives), so I was happy to learn about Zakes Mda from a recent New York Times book review column, and I ordered his two books immediately.
'Ways of Dying' is not about post-apartheid South Africa, though the blurb suggests that. I estimate it to be set in the late 1980s, shortly before the end of the old regime was drawing near.
It's a short book, but it's well written, and paints a vivid picture of life in South Africa. And yes, the 'black perspective' is different, and very interesting, and most welcome.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best South African writer I have read
Comment: Like all recent South African fiction I have read, this one is full of horrible violence. But it is a love story, and much more optimistic than Coetzee or Brink.
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Title: The Journey of One Buddhist Nun: Even Against the Wind by Sid Brown ISBN: 0791450961 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu by Michael Jesse Battle, Desmond Mpilo Tutu ISBN: 0829811583 Publisher: Pilgrim Pr Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Heart of Redness: A Novel by Zakes Mda ISBN: 0312421745 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Conquest of Violence by Joan Valerie Bondurant ISBN: 069102281X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 June, 1988 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Anil's Ghost : A Novel by Michael Ondaatje ISBN: 0375724370 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 24 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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