Cion
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
At the instigation of the sciolist, Toloki, the professional mourner introduced in Zakes Mda's early novel Ways of Dying, takes the opportunity to travel the world in search of new ways of mourning. He finds himself abandoned in Athens Ohio, but a chance meeting with a Halloween reveller leads him to the poor hamlet of Kilvert, home to descendants of fugitive slaves. A community of traditional quiltmakers, the people of Kilvert, and notably the Quigley family, offer Toloki hospitality while never completely coming to terms with what they regard as his shamanistic attributes. From them he learns the stories told by the quilts and the secrets held by the sycamores - ghost trees that are the carriers of memories - and he becomes aware that this is a community which strives to keep alive their past in order to validate the present. They cannot let go, for the past is all they have. And it is through the quilts and the sycamores and the messages they carry that the old story is told of the slaves in the plantations of the south and their eternal quest to escape and find their freedom, interwoven with the story of life in present-day Kilvert. It is also a time of growth for Toloki, bringing about a softening of his former austerity and enabling him to determine the path his future will take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exuberant follow-up to Ways of Dying, the celebrated South African novelist and playwright Mda once again centers his story upon the professional mourner Toloki this time, as he makes his way through a sad and surreal America. Set on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, the novel fixes its outsider gaze on everything from Billionaires for Bush to late-night television, viewing American cultural and political life through a near-anthropological lens. But there is much heart here, too, as Toloki is taken in by an impoverished Southern family; he befriends the son, Obed; falls in love with his melancholy, sitar-playing sister, Orpah; and learns to quilt from their mother, Ruth. Simultaneously, he learns how the quilts link Ruth's ancestry to the slave trade and, in particular, the escape of Nicodemus and Abednego, the beloved sons of a slave called "The Abyssinian Queen." Cross-cutting between the slave story and Toloki's experiences, the book offers a rich and original picture of the United States on both a personal and grander historical level and is suffused with the same lyricism, vividness and dark, tragic wit that have earned the author previous recognition here and in his homeland.
