Mating Birds: Lewis Nkosi (Author)
Reviews:
"Mating Birds is more than just another protest novel. Its attack on apartheid is not moral so mush as clinical. It is in exposing the mythology of segregation that Lewis Nkosi's power and originality lie." The Guardian.
"Nkosi writes unforgettably." Nadine Gordimer.
"Fine, passionate, youthful writing." J.M. Coetzee.
"Nkosi's first novel confronts boldly and imaginatively the strange interplay of bondage, desire and torture inherent in interracial sexual relationships within the South African prison house of apartheid." The New York Times Book Review.
From the back cover:
Twelve years after its first publication, Mating Birds still surprises and compels. There is nothing predictable about this award-winning novel: although penned at the height of apartheid, it is too subtle and provocative to be categorised as "struggle" writing. It is literary fiction at its best, sophisticated and yet accessible-a classic.
This edition, with a new preface by the author...will be eagerly received locally and internationally.
Book Description
The story of a young South African black man obsessed with an English girl whom he encounters on the segregated Durban beachfront is told from the narrator's prison cell in this classic African novel. Although no words are exchanged, a connection develops between the two mismatched lovers, leading to an intense and ambiguous sexual encounter. He is charged with rape and receives the death sentence. Reconstructing his own history, his obsession with the girl, and his court proceedings, the narrator offers a powerful examination of the warped racial morality and brutality of apartheid.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"In a few days I am to die," writes the narrator at the start of this novel about a young, black South African man condemned to death for allegedly raping a white woman. He wonders if he would be in the prison cell if he had never spotted the woman sunbathing on the beach. Instead, he muses, he might have gone on to become "the first truly great African writer my country has ever produced." The author, a black who has been banished from his native South Africa, may not yet be a "great" writer, but his words flow smoothly over subject matter that is often painful. As the narrator tells the story of his childhood in a Zulu household, of his first encounter with the white sunbather and of the incident that resulted in the verdict against him, the reader becomes uncomfortably aware of the ugly political and racial ramifications of the situation. Although Nkosi is a talented writer, this work is to be read more for the strength of its message than for the power of its prose. This is a short, but by no means a small, novel.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
From his cell in Durban, South Africa, the black narrator of this short, powerful novel can see mating birds "clinging to each other joyfully in the bright air as though for dear life." But he is condemned to die: condemned for mating with a white woman. On her accusation, he has been found guilty of rape; by his account they were "mating birds," drawn together across racial barriers by irrepressible sexual desire. While the nature of their encounter remains ambiguous, the squalid evils of apartheid are rendered with the utmost clarity. Nkosi, an exiled South African, has a fine ear for dialogue and an unusual economy of expression. Recommended for black studies and fiction collections. Peter Sabor, English Dept., Queen's Univ., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Publisher
Lewis Nkosi is the author of Home and Exile, The Transplanted Heart, and Underground People. He has written for The New York Review of Books.
About the Author
Born: December 5, 1936, Durban, South Africa
Died: September 5, 2010
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence
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