Umfaan's Heroes
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
A richly funny and painful story Umfaan's Heroes is a fantasy and a political novel in spite of itself, with a seasoning of Science Fiction with a unique insight into living under the insane madness of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Lovers of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Sharpe, Ursula Le Guin and Franz Kafka will enjoy this book.
Aware of his incarnations in past lives, Tom Bloch, 18-year-old army conscript - South African, white, Jewish - in a prison cell, is condemned to death for terrorism. The novel relates Tom's journey to his cell, how he was befriended by a witch-doctor claiming to be a harvester (of bodies!) from another planet, via his fist fight with his father, his friendship with an Afrikaner boy, experiments with drugs to this gloomy place with the hangman's noose dangling outside.
Just as well that Tom has always regarded life as an interlude between deaths for he soon becomes dangerously involved with the Mandela-like figure of Absolom. And madness, death and insane comedy is the only winner….
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First novelist Elkon has done his utmost to keep this tale about injustice in his native South Africa from becoming ``merely'' political. Working with an often facile plot about the moral awakening of two white boys who eventually aid an imprisoned black activist, the author adds elements intended to be simultaneously comic and mythopoetic. The narrator, one of the boys, not only claims awareness of who he was during past lives on Earth, but recognizes the previous incarnations of those he meets. A wise old man spins diverting if cryptic fables, sowing images that recur throughout the novel. But these overtures to universality are defeated by Elkon's miserly portrayals of many characters. Describing a couple's engagement, the narrator remarks that the well-bred bride is delighted with her ``poor Jewboy'' mate because marrying him is ``such a daring, rebellious, romantic thing to do.'' The groom, meanwhile, is on cloud nine: ``He had always wanted to marry a rich shiksa.'' Trapped by a certain pettiness of his own, Elkon fails to persuade us that his moral vision is the real thing.
