Purchase
Sometimes There Is A Void
Zakes Mda
Memoirs of an Outside
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
January 2012
On Sale: January 3, 2012
576 pages
ISBN: 0374280940
EAN: 9780374280949
Kindle: B005LVL2G4
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Memoir
Zakes Mda is the most acclaimed South African writer of the
independence era. His eight novels tell stories that venture
far beyond the conventional narratives of a people’s
struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells the
story of a life that intersects with the political life of
his country but that at its heart is the classic adventure
story of an artist, lover, father, teacher, and bon vivant. Zanemvula Mda was born in 1948 into a family of lawyers and
grew up in Soweto’s ambitious educated black class. At age
fifteen he crossed the Telle River from South Africa into
Basutoland (Lesotho), exiled like his father, a “founding
spirit” of the Pan Africanist Congress. Exile was hard, but
it was just another chapter in Mda’s coming-of-age. He
served as an altar boy (and was preyed on by priests),
flirted with shebeen girls, feared the racist Boers, read
comic books alongside the literature of the PAC, fell for
the music of Dvorák and Coltrane, wrote his first
stories—and felt the void at the heart of things that makes
him an outsider wherever he goes. The Soweto uprisings
called him to politics; playwriting brought him back to
South Africa, where he became writer in residence at the
famed Market Theatre; three marriages led him hither and
yon; acclaim brought him to America, where he began writing
the novels that are so thick with the life of his country.
In all this, Mda struggled to remain his own man, and with
Sometimes There Is a Void he shows that independence opened
the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all
their variety.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy