Björn recenserade Good Morning Comrades A Novel av Stephen Henighan
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4 stjärnor
Out of the mouths of babes... Good Morning Comrades is set in Angola in the early 90s, among civil war and supposed post-colonialism spearheaded by the liberating comrades from Cuba and the Soviet Union, with roving gangs of bandits and political unrest. And all witnessed through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who's never known anything else and is just as cheerfully proud of it all as you'd expect of a good citizen.
I'm always a bit worried when I stumble upon a novel written by a poet; there's always the risk of trying to write like a poet, weighing the novel down with language. But like a good poet, Ondjaki knows the value of language, how to tell a story simply, without the narrator realising just how many different layers there are to his story, how much of history echoes in his language.
Out of the mouths of babes... Good Morning Comrades is set in Angola in the early 90s, among civil war and supposed post-colonialism spearheaded by the liberating comrades from Cuba and the Soviet Union, with roving gangs of bandits and political unrest. And all witnessed through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who's never known anything else and is just as cheerfully proud of it all as you'd expect of a good citizen.
I'm always a bit worried when I stumble upon a novel written by a poet; there's always the risk of trying to write like a poet, weighing the novel down with language. But like a good poet, Ondjaki knows the value of language, how to tell a story simply, without the narrator realising just how many different layers there are to his story, how much of history echoes in his language.