Dance of the Jakaranda
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
Publisher Description
“This funny, perceptive and ambitious work of historical fiction by a Kenyan poet and novelist explores his country’s colonial past and its legacy.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
Set in the shadow of Kenya’s independence from Great Britain, Dance of the Jakaranda reimagines the special circumstances that brought black, brown and white men together to lay the railroad that heralded the birth of the nation.
The novel traces the lives and loves of three men—preacher Richard Turnbull, the colonial administrator Ian McDonald, and Indian technician Babu Salim—whose lives intersect when they are implicated in the controversial birth of a child. Years later, when Babu’s grandson Rajan—who ekes out a living by singing Babu’s epic tales of the railway’s construction—accidentally kisses a mysterious stranger in a dark nightclub, the encounter provides the spark to illuminate the three men’s shared, murky past.
With its riveting multiracial, multicultural cast and diverse literary allusions, Dance of the Jakaranda could well be a story of globalization. Yet the novel is firmly anchored in the African oral storytelling tradition, its language a dreamy, exalted, and earthy mix that creates new thresholds of identity, providing a fresh metaphor for race in contemporary Africa.
“Destined to become one of the greats . . . This is not hyperbole: it’s a masterpiece.” —The Gazette
“A fascinating part of Kenya’s history, real and imagined, is revealed and reclaimed by one of its own.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Kimani’s novel has an impressive breadth and scope.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Highlighted by its exquisite voice, Kimani’s novel is a standout debut.” —Publishers Weekly
“Lyrical and powerful.” —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his American debut, Kimani illustrates the discordant history of East Indians in Kenya through a fabulously complicated set of intriguing characters and events. One balmy night in 1963, a musician named Rajan is transfixed by the kiss of an ambiguously ethnic woman named Mariam, whose ethnicity seems ambiguous (Rajan himself is East Indian). He takes her home to his grandfather Babu, a meeting that "transcended any explanation other than fate." Babu, it turns out, was a Punjabi laborer who first arrived in Mombasa in 1897 to build the railroad that "slithered down the savanna" under the direction of Mariam's illegitimate English grandfather, commissioner McDonald. After a misunderstanding between the two men blossoms "into a grudge that would last a lifetime," an intricate set of events comes to fruition with Rajan and Mariam's relationship. The joy of Kimani's storytelling is only rarely hampered by the unwieldiness of his plot; he alternates between the colonial past and the "season of anomie" that begins when an edict from the Big Man, who rules the newly independent Kenya and threatens "foreign nationals" (those whose heritage was English or East Indian) such as Rajan with deportation. Rajan's understanding of himself as "a brown man in a black world which had been placed under white rule" fractures as surely as the nation itself does, sent reeling in the face of a "past that had finally caught up with the present to complicate the future." Highlighted by its exquisite voice, Kimani's novel is a standout debut.