‘Dust’, the debut novel by Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, is being hailed by reviewers in the United States as an “astonishing” and “dazzling” work.
A featured review in the March 2 New York Times edition says readers of Ms Owuor’s story “will find the entirety of human experience — tears, bloodshed, lust, love — in staggering proportions.”
The Washington Post noted last month that while “few American readers have heard of this 45-year-old author before, that must change.” Ms Owuor, the Post’s reviewer comments, “demonstrates extraordinary talent and range in these pages.”
Sunday New York Times reviewer Taiye Selasi, herself the author of an acclaimed novel about Ghana, further advises that ‘Dust’ is “not just for Afrophiles. It is for bibliophiles.”
‘Dust’ is a fictionalised account of Kenya’s history, as experienced through Ms Owuor’s imagined Oganda family. The book is likely to prove controversial in Kenya because of the author’s unsparing account of the nation’s failures and tragedies.
“The novel concerns itself with that country’s blood-soaked history — from the Mau Mau uprisings of the early 1950s to the political assassination of [nationalist Tom Mboya in] 1969 to the post-election violence of 2007,” Ms Selasi writes in her Times review.
Inventive prose
But the author’s inventive prose enraptures readers despite the novel’s emotionally wrenching storyline, reviewers agree, with Ms Selasi hailing “the magic Owuor has made of the classic nation-at-war novel.”
“The richness of the plot alone will challenge a lazy reader,” Ms Selasi adds. “But the visceral lusciousness of the prose will thrill a lover of language.”
“Ultimately,” she continues. “the disjointed prose mirrors brilliantly the fragmented nature of both memory-keeping and nation-building.”
The Washington Post’s reviewer, Ron Charles, offers a similar appraisal of the challenges and rewards of Ms Owuor’s writing.
The Kenyan winner of the Caine Prize in 2003 “has constructed a book that gradually teaches you how to read it,” the Post suggests. “Let the sensuous language of Dust wash over you with the assurance that its fragmentary scenes and allusive references will be visited again and gradually brought into clearer focus.”
Not every review of ‘Dust’, published in the US by Knopf, a leading New York publishing house, has been entirely positive.
A commentator on National Public Radio observes that every character in the novel “is given such ample room to wax philosophic on lofty concepts like nothingness and the idea of Kenya that it’s a struggle to actually get to know them.”
But this reviewer, too, was swept away by Ms Owuor’s writing.
“Her prose can be inventive, even breathtaking, turning phrases or fusing unexpected words in ways that confound and inspire.”
Leave a Reply