Dust - Couverture rigide

Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0307961206 ISBN 13 : 9780307961204

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2014

Synopsis

Kenya, 2007. Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His sister, Ajany, and their father bring his body back home, to a crumbling colonial house in northern Kenya. But the peace they seek is hard to find: the murder has stirred deeply buried memories of colonial violence, of the killing-sprees of the Mau Mau uprising, and the shocking political assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969. When a young Englishman appears, searching for his missing father, another story, of love, or at least a connection, begins. This is a spellbinding state of the nation novel about Kenya, showing how the violence of the past informs the violence and disorder of the present. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's memorable characters; Ajany's mother, deranged with grief and past violations, the Trader, embodying the timeless nomadic traders of Sudan, and Odidi himself, who transcended his past, came to success, and then a tragic end, are enchanting. Owuor reveals to us a new Kenya, a Kenya of bloodshed but also of modernity, suffused with a spirit world only half-remembered.This is a country where the characters listen so acutely for what is not said, and for the voices from the distant and recent past.

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

**Short-listed for the Folio Prize**

“Go buy Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust. In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience—tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love—in staggering proportions . . . Although written by an East African, Dust is not just for Afrophiles. It is for bibliophiles . . . Akai-ma ranks among the most inimitable female characters in modern literature.” —Taiye Selasi, New York Times Book Review

“An astonishing novel . . . Engrossing . . . Owuor demonstrates extraordinary talent and range in these pages . . . Here in this remarkable novel is a brave, healing voice.” —Washington Post
 
“Inventive, even breathtaking . . . Dust [is] the next step in what I anticipate to be a prodigious career.” —NPR.org
 
“An amazing novel . . . Dust anchors Owuor as the rightful heir to Kenya’s greatest novelist: Ngugi wa Thiong’o . . . A dazzling narrative, Faulknerian in many ways . . . The rewards are significant, especially Owuor’s unforgettable characters . . . By the story’s end you are rewarded with a genuine sense of fulfillment.” —Counterpunch

“Owuor’s fragmentary style is dense but lyrical.” —New Yorker

“Brilliant . . . A chilling portrait of Kenya that’s brimming with pain and promise . . . Owuor is taking her place in Kenya’s long line of outstanding writers.” —Essence magazine
 
“Owuor dives back into Kenya’s history as far as the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, tracing its postcolonial troubles up to the near-present. As in a baroque Cormac McCarthy production, that history’s defining motif is blood . . . The reader is repaid with scenes of strange, horror-stricken beauty.” —Wall Street Journal

“This stunning debut novel grabs the reader’s heart, refusing to let go . . . Owuor represents another shining talent among Africa’s young writers publishing in English. This searing novel, though informed by her Kenyan roots, should not be pigeonholed. These unforgettable characters and universal themes will speak to all readers who seek truth and beauty in their literature.” —Library Journal (starred)

“There is hardly any aspect of Kenya that Owuor seems unable to tackle with her unique flair in this masterfully executed novel, from the mid–20th century’s Mau Mau rebellion and its aftermath to the stirring personal destinies of her sundry cast of characters . . . Her writing is exceptionally chiseled.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed)
 
“This powerful first novel will evoke references to William Boyd and even to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad . . . [An] important addition to the literature of contemporary Africa.” —Booklist
 
“This is a big, big unforgettable book, full of love and full of pain. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s prose can burn your skin off. Her narrative power tears through the landscapes of Kenya: life, cheap death, torture, love, friendship. Dust is a most visceral, moving novel about a family caught up in the smelt of a Kenya roiling inside the lusts and violences of its adolescence, determined to move past it. Epic in scope, Dust covers over sixty years of betrayals, love, mysterious caves, colonial brutalities, epic love, political betrayals. A crisis that brings the nation to the brink of self-destruction. You will meet a mother with an AK-47 you will never forget, a father shamed by a secret, betrayed by a nation. The varied landscapes of Kenya have never been more tenderly made alive. We gush and cry through the floods of rivers and rage that burst past civilities and boundaries; we melt at love that has to live with blood needlessly shed; we gasp at lives most unexpectedly saved. We can carry all of this unbearable world, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor proposes, because it is beautiful. This is the novel my twenty-first century has been waiting for, for our world in these seismic times.” —Binyavanga Wainaina, author of One Day I Will Write About This Place 
 
“The prose has an appealingly rough-hewn poetry, built on clipped sentences and brush-stroke evocations of the dry landscape . . . Owuor has style to spare.” —Kirkus Reviews

Reviews from the UK:
 
“Dust is a fine, compassionate novel that relishes the complexity of human relations. It is written in a language that is often beautifully observant, and is alert in its insight and sympathy . . . Absorbing . . . The narrative skilfully shifts focus between these stories without losing direction or tension . . . At the core of Owuor’s novel, disguised by its intensely poeticised evocation of experience and its desire to avoid an easy emotionalism, is a moral concern to forgive past wrongs. This is not to grant her creations an easy salvation, but it is the only way forward for them—and for Kenya.” —The Guardian
 
“Richly evocative . . . Owuor’s language is pungent, poetic, almost synaesthetic . . . What emerges is a subtle, sensitive portrait of a place.” —The Telegraph

Extrait :

Massive purple clouds rush in from the eastern coast. Ambushed by a warm wind in Nairobi, they scatter, a routed guerrilla force. At Wilson Airport, a qhat-carrying eight-seater plane weaves its way off the apron. The last small plane out of Nairobi without top-level permission for the next week. Above the airport din, egrets circle and ibises cry ngangan- ganga. Father, daughter, and son are going home.
Dusk is Odidi’s time. In the contours of old pasts, Ajany retrieves an image: She is sitting on a black-gray rock, spying on the sun’s descent with Odidi. Leaning into his shoulder, trying to read the world as he does, she stammers, “Where’s it going?” He says, “Descending into hell,” and cackles. She had only just learned the Apostles’ Creed.
...
 
The plane lifts off.
The coffin and its keepers are nestled amid bales of green herbs.
Straight-backed, stern, silences reordered, Nyipir is a chiseled stone icon again, an archetypal Nilotic male. But there are deep furrows on his forehead. She can paint these, too. Trail markers into absence. Ajany had once believed Baba was omnipotent, like God, ever since he had invoked a black leopard to hunt down the mean and red-eyed inhabit- ants of her nightmares.
She trembles.
Nyipir asks, “Cold?”
Baba’s baritone, Odidi’s echo. Dimpled handsomeness. The Oganda men were gifted with soft-edged, rumbling voices.
Ajany turns. The light of the sky bounces on her thin face, all
bones and angles. Fresh bloodstains on her sleeves. The frills of her orange skirt are soiled. She is tinier than Nyipir remembers. But she had always been such a small, stuttering thing, all big hair and large eyes. More shadow than person, head slanted as if waiting for answers to ancient riddles. He clears his throat. From the gloom of his soul, Nyipir growls, “Mama . . . er . . . she wanted to . . . uh . . . come to meet you.”
Ajany hears the lie. Sucks it in, as if it were venom, sketches invis- ible circles on the window. Stares at the green of coffee and pineapple plantations below.
“Yes,” Nyipir says to himself, already lost, already afraid. He shifts. The dying had started long ago. Long before the murder of prophets named Pio, Tom, Argwings, Ronald, Kungu, Josiah, Ouko, Mbae. The others, the “disappeared unknown.” National doors slammed over vaults of secrets. Soon the wise chose cowardice, a way of life: not hearing, not seeing, never asking, because sound, like dreams, could cause death. Sound gave up names, especially those of friends. It co-opted silence as an eavesdropper; casual conversations heard were delivered to the state to murder. In time neighborhood kai-apple fences were urged into thicker and higher growth to shut out the dread-filled nation. But some of the lost, the unseen and unheard, cut tracks into Nyipir’s sleep. They stared at him in silence until the day his disordered dreams stepped into daylight with him to become his life:
They had pointed a gun to his head.
Click, click, click.
 
He had fallen to the ground, slithered on his belly like a snake, hissed, and vomited, because he had forgotten how to talk.
 
Today.
Sweat on palms, heartbeat quickening, Nyipir swallows. A groan.
Ajany hears a father’s leaching anguish. She scratches an ache where it itches her skin, gropes inside-places as a tongue probing cavities does. Expecting to be stung.
 
Today.
The past’s beckon is persistent.
From the air, Nyipir peers down at an expanding abyss. His country, his home, is ripping itself apart. Stillborn ballot revolution. These 2007 elections were supposed to be simple, the next small jump into a light-filled Kenyan future. Everything had instead disintegrated into a single, unending howl by the nation’s unrequited dead. This country, this haunted ideal, all its poor, broken promises. Nyipir watches, arm- pits damp. A view of ground-lit smoke. Dry lips. His people had never set their nation on fire before.
On the ground, that night, in a furtive ceremony, beneath a half- moon, a chubby man will mutter an oath that will render him the presi- dent of a burning, dying country. The deed will add fuel to an already out-of-control national grieving.
Nyipir turns from the window.
He is flying home with his children.
Yet he is alone. Memories are solitary ghosts.
He lets them in, traveling with them.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0307961206
• ISBN 13: 9780307961204
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 369