Black Sunlight
"House of Hunger" not only won The Guardian fiction prize but stunned the imagination of readers with its view of the slums of colonial Salisbury. "Black Sunlight" gives a similar cockroach-eye view of London.
Paperback, 128 pages
Published
January 1st 1988
by Heinemann Educational Books
(first published 1980)
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Marechera was the kind of off-beat Zimbabwean writer that did himself no favours, one who ended his life sleeping on Harare’s park benches refusing to talk to his family. He was either mad or blessed with, as some believed, a taint of genius, and his small output of work continues to attract attention with the reissue of his second novel in Penguin’s newly launched African Writers Series. A photojournalist whose name may or may not be Christian becomes connected to a violent rebel organisation t...more
Nov 05, 2011
jean lice
rated it
2 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
studies,
zimbabwean
this truly is the most depressing book I've read in a long time; reading it made me feel way older than I am. it's the way Dambudzo Marechera captures the voidness of life, the unknowing cause of it, so perfectly. his characters function as a means to an end; Dambudzo tries to convey a bleak and dark view of life itself by excessively using the stream-of-consciousness narrative at times, and referencing and/or quoting a vast number of known. this is my problem with the book. I bought it expectin...more
genius in full flower[return][return]dambudzo marechera could transform everyday language into a tortured scream for sanity or mold it into a seductive poetry of passionate need and joyful determination. the extremes of political chaos and spiritual urgency that characterized 1970s zimbabwe illuminate the pages of black sunlight with unblinking honesty and desperately clinging hope. [return][return]this small masterpiece, along with his guardian-prize winning house of hunger, is one of the most...more
"Black Sunlight" is a short but multi-layered novel. It is thought to be less complete than "The House of Hunger" and often viewed as something of a failed experiment. This is not the case, however, and "Black Sunlight" deserves serious consideration as an original, modern masterpiece. The novel--taking something from Milton's phrase, "darkness visible"--is a study of modern melancholy and the darker side of the human psyche.
This book is bloody fantastic, with an edginess to the narrative that makes it raw, titillating and impossible to put down. Sometimes, though, it veers into reference-strewn stream-of-consciousness which I found forgivable but tiring. This is the best book of African fiction I've read by far, and I plan on tracking down everything this man wrote.
May 04, 2013
James Humphrey
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Nicole Gervasio
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"A black man who has suffered all the stupid brutalities of the white oppression in Rhodesia, his rage explodes, not in political rhetoric, but in a fusion of lyricism, wit, obscenity. Incredible that such a powerful indictment should also be so funny."
Doris Lessing in praise of The House of Hunger
Harare, 1986
At home in Harare, 1986.
© Ernst Schade.
Known as the "enfant terrible of African literat...more
More about Dambudzo Marechera...
Doris Lessing in praise of The House of Hunger
Harare, 1986
At home in Harare, 1986.
© Ernst Schade.
Known as the "enfant terrible of African literat...more
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