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Bezig met laden... Slangenkuil (1999)door Moses Isegawa
Uganda (6) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Set in the 1970's during the brutal regime of Idi Amin, Snakepit (2004) by Moses Isegawa is my Around the World for a Good Book selection for Uganda. The novel tells the story of Bat, a young man returning to Uganda after getting an education at Cambridge University. He figures that a government job in this lawless, emerging nation will be a great way to get rich quick. While you can't say that the ethically-challenged Bat is naive, he is certainly unprepared for the way things in work in Uganda and over the course of the novel ends up facing a great deal of suffering at the hands of his new enemies. The landscape of Ugandan politics and military rule include General Bazooka, Bat's superior who has fallen out of favor with Amin. In between orgies of sex and drugs, Bazooka tries to regain his position through intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and murder of, well, just about anyone. While Bazooka has it out for Bat from the beginning, his main rival is the Englishman Robert Ashes who has won Amin's affections. Hard to believe it but Ashes is even more brutal in his methods, making Uganda his post-colonial playground. All through the story there are gun battles on the street as various military and para-military forces abuse the citizenry and battle with one another. This is a really unsettling book to read. Page after page details characters stating in vulgar terms what they wish to do to their rivals and then doing it: torture, rape, murder, you name it. Reading each page is like having someone rub your skin with a piece of sandpaper until it is raw and oozing, and turning the page is like asking them to pour lemon juice on it. The writing style is a bit disjointed and uneven, but I guess overall it gives a sense of the rough and wild times Uganda in the 1970's. Story of greed, power, murder and paranoia in Idi Amin's Uganda. The book follows a cavalcade of characters as they reach for power, love or money in the new "snakepit" that is Uganda, and many are met with disastrous results. The main character is Bat, a Ugandan educated in at Cambridge, who returns to take a job under the constantly paranoid General Bazooka. Bazooka hires a former lover, Victoria, to spy on the well educated Bat. What ensues is a story of deception, lust, suspicion and retaliation in the terror filled world of 1970s Uganda. Some scenes not for the faint at heart. I enjoyed the book a lot. The only thing that kept me from giving the book 4 out of five was the fact the book followed so many characters, that some lacked details and depth that would have made the book even more intriguing (i.e. Victoria). Otherwise, it was a very insightful story about the life during some of the most torturous times in history. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Erelijsten
Praised on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the author’s native Uganda, Moses Isegawa’s first novel Abyssinian Chronicles was a “big, transcendently ambitious book” (Boston Globe) that “blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world” (Elle). In Snakepit, Isegawa returns to the surreal, brutalizing landscapes of his homeland during the time of dictator Idi Amin, when interlocking webs of emotional cruelty kept tyrants gratified and servants cooperative, a land where no one–not husbands or wives, parents or lovers–is ever safe from the implacable desires of men in power. Men like General Bazooka, who rues the day he hired Cambridge-educated Bat Katanga as his “Bureaucrat Two”–a man too good at his job–and places in his midst (and his bed) a seductive operative named Victoria, whose mission and motives are anything but simple. Ambitious and acquisitive, more than a little arrogant, Katanga finds himself steadily boxed in by events spiraling madly out of control, where deception, extortion, and murder are just so many cards to be played. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813Literature English (North America) American fictionLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The book carries on at a nice pace with a mostly well-thought out cast of characters, and the changes in perspective read well. At times, the writing is a bit disjointed vis a vis the facts, as if there were one or two sentences missing with key events, or the author expected the reader would assume something that's not clear. Finally, the author wraps up the book in the last 30 pages at a much faster pace, almost as if the publisher said, 'hurry up, let's get this done.' It was a shame to suddenly go to the narrator's voice and hear about the fates of many of the characters in an almost epilogue-style when the book was still going on. ( )