The Perpetual Outsider: New York Times Reviews Zakes Mda’s Sometimes There Is a Void
Verdict: carrot.
In a review of Zakes Mda’s memoir, Sometimes There Is a Void, Rob Nixon contrasts Mda’s work to JM Coetzee’s, and compares him to VS Naipaul. Like Naipaul, Nixon says Mda’s imagination “has been shaped by three societies”, and while Coetzee’s narratives grapple with “metaphysical maladies”, Nixon says Mda’s greatest gift is his “Dickensian” exploration of the margins of South African experience.
Nixon says that Sometimes There Is a Void strikes a “fine balance between outward engagement and inner exploration”:
Zakes MDA and J. M. Coetzee, the two most acclaimed South African novelists of the past 20 years, could be writing about different countries — and, in a way, they are. Coetzee excels at sparsely populated fictions of gnawing interiority. His socially uneasy and anguished solitaries, often academics like himself, wrestle with psychological dilemmas and metaphysical maladies. In contrast, Mda’s greatest gift is his Dickensian social range, his ability to generate characters from diverse backgrounds, colluding and colliding across the barriers erected to divide them. Where Coetzee is drawn to existential hinterlands, Mda takes us deep into his country’s literal interior, those rural regions that, in most South African writing, are pushed to the margins.
Book Details
- Sometimes there is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider by Zakes Mda
EAN: 9780143527442
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Apr
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