The Theory of Flight
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- USD 8.99
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- USD 8.99
Descripción editorial
As Imogen Zula Nyoni, aka Genie, lies in a coma in hospital after a long illness, her family and friends struggle to come to terms with her impending death.
Genie has gifts that transcend time and space, and this is her story. It is also the story of her forebears – Baines Tikiti, who, because of his wanderlust, changed his name and ended up walking into the Indian Ocean; his son, Livingstone Stanley Tikiti, who, during the war, took as his nom de guerre Golide Gumede and who became obsessed with flight; and Golide’s wife, Elizabeth Nyoni, a country-and-western singer self-styled after Dolly Parton, blonde wig and all.
With the lightest of touches, and with an overlay of magical-realist beauty, this novel sketches, through the lives of a few families and the fate of a single patch of ground, decades of national history – from colonial occupation to the freedom struggle, to the devastation wrought by the sojas, the hi virus, and The Man Himself. By turns mysterious and magical, but always honest, The Theory of Flight dwells not on what was lost and what went wrong in a nation’s history, but on the personal triumphs and why they matter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An unnamed African country's violence and AIDS epidemic frame a woman's personal loss in Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Ndlovu's epic, supremely well-crafted debut. The novel begins at the moment of Genie Nyoni's death from AIDS, when she is seen to "fly away on a giant pair of silver wings." From there the novel details Genie's family history, her childhood, and the intertwining lives of those close to her. Genie is the daughter of revolutionary idealist Golide Gumede, who expresses his belief in the power of flight as a metaphor for hope, and country-western singer Elizabeth Nyoni. When Genie is nine, soldiers raze her village, destroy her home, and massacre several of her neighbors. Still, she maintains a radiance and refusal to submit to despair, and as the years pass, her bright outlook affects those around her, such as the man who becomes her lover and then a famous artist. The truth about the early scene of violence in her village, which neighbors had pinned on her for Gumede's revolutionary activities, is only revealed at the end, along with the source of her HIV infection. Ndlovu's deeply moving and complex novel is astonishing for the amount of hope it evokes despite the darkness that's so pervasive in Genie's world, where she creates her own reality in order survive. This transcendent and powerful testament to the indomitable human spirit is not to be missed.