Dust Author: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EBRTD6K | Format: PDF
Dust Description
From a breathtaking new voice, a novel about a splintered family in Kenya—a story of power and deceit, unrequited love, survival and sacrifice.
Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His grief-stricken sister, Ajany, just returned from Brazil, and their father bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands, seeking some comfort and peace. But the murder has stirred memories long left untouched and unleashed a series of unexpected events: Odidi and Ajany’s mercurial mother flees in a fit of rage; a young Englishman arrives at the Ogandas’ house, seeking his missing father; a hardened policeman who has borne witness to unspeakable acts reopens a cold case; and an all-seeing Trader with a murky identity plots an overdue revenge. In scenes stretching from the violent upheaval of contemporary Kenya back through a shocking political assassination in 1969 and the Mau Mau uprisings against British colonial rule in the 1950s, we come to learn the secrets held by this parched landscape, buried deep within the shared past of the family and of a conflicted nation.
Here is a spellbinding novel about a brother and sister who have lost their way; about how myths come to pass, history is written, and war stains us forever.
- File Size: 1495 KB
- Print Length: 386 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0307961206
- Publisher: Knopf (January 28, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EBRTD6K
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,031 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > African - #53
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Sagas - #92
in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature
- #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > African - #53
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Sagas - #92
in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature
Before publication date in late January 2014, I hope that Amazon will have activated the "Look Inside" feature. The enthusiastic endorsements that have been used in advance publicity for this debut novel -- praising its epic scale, emotional turmoil, and historic sweep -- may well be true, but the reader has to feel comfortable enough with the actual writing to get the measure of the book. If the feature is enabled, read the first three pages. I had hoped that their staccato fragmented style might be a feature of the Prologue only, but no, Owuor returns to this manner frequently throughout. Here is a small sample from the third page, a young man running for his life:
-- He runs through the stench of decay, the perfume of earth hoping for rain, habits and dreams of Nairobi's people: smoke, rot, trade, worry, residues of laughter, and overbrewed Ketepatea. Odidi runs.
-- Incantation: Justina! Justina!
-- Shelter of faith.
-- The mob screams, "Hawa!"
-- Justina! Faith into sorrow into longing: I need to go home.
-- "Waue!" The answer.
-- Memory's tricks. Odidi soars into the desiccated terrains of Wuoth Ogik, the home he had abandoned: his people reaching out for him, cowbells, bleating goats, sheep, and far mountains....
The quality is obvious; there are some fine images in Owuor's writing and a knife-point immediacy; it means a lot more to me now that I have got halfway through the book than it did when I first read it. But the fragmentary style is exhausting.
Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor takes you on an elegiac journey, introducing you to complex personal histories and tragedies. Set in northern Kenyan's dust, darkness and daylight, this novel is a memoir of lives transformed by tribal and political conflicts, and colonial processes and imperialistic excesses. The novel presents a tour de force narrative about lost fathers, brothers, sons and women and descends into the labyrinth-like individual stories to present a tale of a family, country, humanity.
A sister Ajany returns to Kenya to find her brother Odidi. She has seen his corpse, but she seeks a closure, an understanding of Odidi's life before his tragic end. The siblings grew up in a dusty Kenyan countryside, in a massive house, where all the books are inscribed with a name of a foreigner or a stranger, Hugo Bolton. Their mother Akai is a mysterious women, who has her own complex narrative of love lost and found, that emerges in bits and parts as we read the novel. Their father Nyipir is a person who in one life acquires many incarnations. He is driven by his own needs, greed and wants into a few incarnations, but he is forced into many more to just survive Kenya's turbulent times. Servant of a white man, gravedigger, sepoy, cattle thief, husband, father, a friend to many smugglers and wanderers, a young man who wanted to travel to Burma to retrieve his father and brother's bodies to bury them in their own country. There is a fascinating singer of water songs, Ali Hida Dada, a policemen whose own complex life journey crisscrosses through the personal histories of Nyipir, Akai, Ajany, Odidi and a fifth person, Galgalu who is attached to the Nyipir-Akai household, like a foster son. Isiah Bolton, a son in search of a father who disappeared in Kenya.
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