A Line in the River
Khartoum, City of Memory
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
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'A wonderfully subtle exploration of place, identity and memory' - PD Smith, Guardian
'A highly readable and authoritative celebration of a little-understood country and its capital city' - Geographical
'A travelogue and memoir to rank alongside anything by Chatwin or Thubron' - Jim Crace
'A most absorbing and rewarding book' - Michael Palin
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A moving portrait, part history, part memoir, of Sudan – once the largest, most diverse country in Africa – and its self-destruction
In 1956, Sudan gained independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended into civil war and conflict. When the 1989 coup brought a hard-line Islamist regime to power, Jamal Mahjoub's family were among those who fled. Almost twenty years later, he returned.
Rediscovering the city in which his formative years were spent, Mahjoub encounters people and places he left behind. The capital contains the key to understanding Sudan's divided, contradictory nature and while exploring Khartoum's present – its changing identity and shifting moods; its wealthy elite and neglected poor – Mahjoub also delves into the country's troubled history. His search for answers evolves into a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of identity, both personal and national.
A Line in the River combines lyrical and evocative memoir with a nuanced exploration of a country's complex history, politics and religion. The result is both captivating and revelatory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Sudanese exile returns in search of his country's unifying identity in this sprawling memoir. Novelist Mahjoub's family fled the Sudanese capital of Khartoum in 1989 when Omar al-Bashir's Islamist regime took power; Mahjoub was 23 when he left and returned regularly from 2008 through 2012, as the country deteriorated. He finds the city in an oil-fueled economic boom, swollen with migrants, foreigners, and new construction, but steeped in anomie and seething under authoritarian rule. Mahjoub's vivid, novelistic reportage takes in paralyzed beggars panhandling beside luxury cars, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, an editor cringing as an affable censor redlines his newspaper, a friend recalling an episode of torture, and the ubiquitous glare of TV sets airing American shows and Bollywood spectacles within the dilapidated Muslim city "like aquariums blinking with brightly colored, exotic species." He contrasts these scenes with boyhood memories of a more convivial, cosmopolitan time (boat outings and watching movies at now-shuttered cinemas), weaving in a colorful but disjointed survey of Sudan's history from 19th-century battles between Muslims and British imperialists to the convoluted contemporary tribal and sectarian wars in southern Sudan and Darfur. Mahjoub's case for a Sudanese national identity that transcends ethno-cultural animosities is unconvincing; and while there's a Naipaulian incisiveness to his portrait of Khartoum, the town feels too malaise-stricken and soulless to hold much interest.
