Henning Mankell - The Eye of the Leopard (MP3 EN)

Description
Henning Mankell - The Eye of the Leopard (1990/2008)
English Translation by Steven T. Murray,

Read by Saul Reichlin
11:12 unb 64/24 stereo

A haunting novel juxtaposing a man's coming-of-age in Sweden with his life in Zambia, from the internationally bestselling author.

Interweaving past and present, Sweden and Zambia, The Eye of the Leopard draws on bestselling author Henning Mankell's deep understanding of the two worlds he has inhabited for more than twenty years.

Hans Olofson arrives in Zambia not long after independence, hoping to fulfill the missionary dream of his friend Janice. He is also fleeing the traumas of his motherless childhood: his father's alcoholism, his best friend's terrible accident, Janice's death, his fear of an ordinary and stifled fate. Africa is a terrible shock, yet he stays and makes it his home. But he never fully comes to understand his place as a mzungu, a wealthy white man among native blacks, and the fragile truce between them. Rumors of an underground army of revolutionaries wearing leopard skins warn him that the truce is in danger of rupturing.

Alternating between Hans's years in Africa and those in Sweden, The Eye of the Leopard is a bravura achievement and a study in contrasts—black and white, poor and wealthy, Africa and Europe—both sinister and elegiac.

-------------------------------------------------------
*Starred Review* American readers only familiar with Mankell’s Kurt Wallander crime novels are in for a delightful surprise. In The Eye of the Leopard, he creates a beautiful, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful coming-of-age novel set both in Sweden and Zambia. The story of Hans Olafsson opens with him suffering through a bout of malaria, convinced he is about to be attacked. This tense opener is followed by a series of flashbacks to Hans’ lonely childhood in the forests of northern Sweden as well as his eventual arrival in Africa. Mankell’s signature ability to evoke a sense of place is evident in this early work, published in Sweden in 1990, as he takes us from the cold and claustrophobia of a tiny cabin in Sweden to the heat, dust, and violence of postcolonial Africa, each setting brought to life with an immediacy that leaves the reader alternately frozen and overheated—and altogether unable to break away from this engrossing and tense tale. Much of the drama here comes from Hans’ Zambia years, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, when his stature as a mzungu, or rich man, forced him to come to terms with being a white man in a hostile black country. A powerful exploration of the stresses and challenges of freedom. --Jessica Moyer