Running The Rift
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Naomi Benaron’s debut novel follows Rwandan Jean Patrick Nkuba, a Tutsi, from his earliest dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal contender in track, to the moment when he finds himself facing a mob of killers, with no choice but to vault over a wall and run for his life. In the years preceding the genocide, Jean Patrick’s world becomes ever more violent and restrictive, spinning toward the inevitable moment when the killing begins and he must leave behind the woman and country he loves. Benaron interweaves Rwanda’s politics, the beauty of its landscape, and the yearning and dedication of Jean Patrick himself into a tremendously moving story of the country and the character’s unraveling and tentative new beginning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the years leading up to the Rwanda genocide, Benaron's Bellweather Prize winning debut novel follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, "the jewel in Rwanda's crown," a Tutsi boy with a gift for running. Jean Patrick dreams of representing Rwanda in the Olympics, but must contend with abject poverty, an ethnic quota system, and savage bullying. He runs Olympic-qualifying times, moving closer to his dreams as tensions rise between the governing Hutus and the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Force), a Tutsi-led rebel army. Jean Patrick gains the favor of the president, but falls in love with a journalism student participating in antigovernment activism, and finds himself entangled in a vast and calamitous game of political chess. "Something unimaginable is coming," warns his brother, a rebel soldier, and when the long-smoldering tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis erupt into a hellish conflagration, Jean Patrick must run away from the country he has spent his life running for. Benaron accomplishes the improbable feat of wringing genuine loveliness from unspeakable horror. She renders friendships and families with tenderness and sincerity, and lingers on the goodwill that binds a fractious community, even as those tethers grow taut and, finally, snap. She regards even the genocidaires with clear-eyed charity, allowing moral complexity to color the perversity of their deeds. It is a testament to Benaron's skill that a novel about genocide about neighbors and friends savagely turning on one another conveys so profoundly the joys of family, friendship, and community. This powerful novel recounts inhumanity on a scale scarcely imaginable, yet rebukes its nihilism, countering unforgivable violence with small mercies and unyielding hope.
