Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
A translation from the Gĩkũyũ by the author
768 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 20 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I've
had this book checked out from the library for almost a third of 2013. I
first took it out sometime in September, renewed it, returned it only
to check it out again, renewed it, returned it, checked it out again a
few days later. I wanted to read it, but other books kept distracting
me, and especially since October, my reading pace has slowed
considerably, making it harder to squeeze such a huge tome (the biggest
book I read all year!) in between the others.
I don't know why it
took so long for me to finish it once I started. It's a bitterly
hilarious satire, sweeping together painful and depressing views of
neocolonial economics and globalism, racism and corruption, exploitation
and "traditional" wife-beating, the IMF and a "Global Bank" all too
happy to award loans to a dictator so long as his nation is politically
stable enough to crush the poor and working class under the terms of
repayment, told in an allegorical magical-realist mode. Like with all
satires, its characters have a tendency to feel like cartoons, and the
faux-documentary narration creates an additional level of emotional
distance, which wasn't to my taste, but this is the sort of story more
people on the "receiving" end of global capital -- which means basically
all of us in the West -- need to read.
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