Novel
Navigation of a Rainmaker
Jamal Mahjoub · 1989
Synopsis
Tanner, twenty-five, the son of a Sudanese man, leaves England to settle in Khartoum, on his father's land. He lives in a sinister house, handles his affair with Nina badly and ruminates, idle, on the decay of the society around him, against a background of war between North and South. During a field mission for the company that employs him, a young woman dies through his fault. He then takes the road south, where oil is being sought in the midst of guerrilla warfare, with an enigmatic American who may be either a surveyor or a secret agent.
Context
The author's first novel, it appeared in 1989 in Oxford in Heinemann's African Writers series. Its first part, entitled “North”, sets a Westernised North against a nomadic South where the hero hopes to find a lost origin; the study on Encyclopedia.com links it to the modernist novel. World Literature Today sees in this book and the two that followed a trilogy of Sudan's political events. Francis Baseden and Anne Wade Minkowski produced the French version for Actes Sud.
Who it is for
A novel in English, translated into French in 1998. It presupposes some familiarity with the Sudan of the eighties, its famine and its civil war.
Prizes and reception
Zoë Heller, in The Observer, praised its portrait of the continent's ills and of the dilemmas of a well-meaning but powerless foreigner.
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