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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
December 2006
On Sale: December 13, 2006
240 pages
ISBN: 0374287856
EAN: 9780374287856
Hardcover
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Fiction
The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda's fifth novel, is his
most enchanting and accessible book yet-a romantic comedy of
sorts in which the changing face of post-apartheid South
Africa is revealed through prodigious, lyrical
storytelling.
As the novel opens, the seaside village
of Hermanus, on the country's west coast, is overrun with
whale watchers-foreign tourists wearing floral shirts and
toting expensive binoculars, determined to see whales in
their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home,
the Whale Caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he
calls Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha
fails to appear for weeks on end, the Whale Caller frets
like a jealous lover-oblivious to the fact that the town
drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red
stiletto heels, is infatuated with him.
After much
ado-which Mda relates with great relish-the two misfits fall
in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and
their on-again, off-again relationship suggests something of
the fitful nature of change in post-apartheid South Africa,
where just living from one day to the next can be challenge
enough.
Mda has spoken of the end of apartheid as a
lifting of the South African novelist's burden to write on
political subjects. With The Whale Caller, he has
written a tender, charming novel-the work of a virtuoso
among international writers.
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