Zakes Mda
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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> African -> General AAS
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
Remarkable, stunning,-brilliant. A "must read" novel. 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.
The publishing of his second novel, The Madonna of Excelsior : A Novel, establishes Zakes Mda as a bright new star of international literature. This novel, like his first, deals with African society?s attempts to deal with the struggle between tradition and modernity in contemporary Africa.The basis of the novel is an actual event. In 1971 19 citizens of a village in Orange Free State were arrested for violating the Immorality Act in South Africa. Their crime? Interracial sex.
The book is a fictional accounting of the subsequent lives of those caught up in this incident.
The focus of the story, the ?Madonna? of the title is Popi, a young lady who represents the issue of one of these sexual encounters. She is called ?colored? by polite society and far ruder things by most others. Her life transverses the crossover from white apartheid rule to black native African rule and she fit in neither world, being ?to black for the apartheid regime and to white for the African regime?.
Most of the figures in this novel emerge as people deserving, if not of sympathy, at least of understanding. It is one of the strengths of the book that Mda?s politics?if he has any?are entirely absent from the narrative. This is a book about people and their experiences, not a vehicle for political rhetoric. Not that the tragedies of the political situation in South Africa don?t emerge?they most surely do. They do so within the context of the story, however.
In the end the villains in contemporary South Africa are not the apartheid enforcers who instigate the action with their contemptible raid, nor those caught up in it, or even those who discriminate against these people. The villains are those, former opposition leaders resisting the injustice and corruption of apartheid, who now are the legislators, town councilors and such, who allocate jobs, housing, favors and the like to themselves, their wives, girlfriends, family and cronies. All of those who, assuring that everything would change under a regime, instead ensured that nothing in fact would be any different for those without power.
In the end this is a book about people, stuck in an uncomfortable middle, despised by the old guard in their time, despised by the new guard in the present, trying as best they can to come to terms with their pasts, present and futures. It is a singularly insightful and moving tale.
The Madonna of Excelsior is one of the best books I?ve read in years. It?s definitely a ?must read? book.
Editorial Review:
"A generous, patient, wry and intelligent voice...[that] suggests not just a writer who can seduce us through beautiful language and unfailing humor. We also encounter a writer who has the power to shock and frighten us, to astound and anger and unsettle us...In short, his is a voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration." --Neil Gordon, New York Times Book Review
Selection, Summer Reading, New York Times Book Review
In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior in South Africa's white-ruled Free State were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act, which forbade sex between blacks and whites. Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of one irrepressible fallen madonna, Niki, and her family, at the heart of the scandal.
