9780894103056 - lament for an african pol di beti, mongo (2 risultati)
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Da: Better World Books: West, Reno, NV, U.S.A.Better World Books: West
Contatta il venditoreVenditore con 5 stelleCondizione: Usato - Buono
EUR 9,82
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Condizione: Good. 1st English language ed. Former library copy. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good.
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- Prima edizione
Da: zenosbooks, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.zenosbooks
Contatta il venditoreVenditore con 4 stelleCondizione: Usato
EUR 16,16
EUR 5,23 spedizioneSpedito in U.S.A.Quantità: 1 disponibili
paperback. No Jacket. First Edition. Washington D.C. 1985. Three Continents Press. 1st American Edition. Highlighting and Underlining Throughout, Otherwise Good in Wrappers. 0894103059. Translated by Richard Bjornson. 370 pages. paperback. Cover art by Tom Gladden. keywords: Africa Cameroon Literature Translated World Literature…. DESCRIPTION - Mongo Beti's Lament for an African POI continues the story of Mor-Zamba, the revolutionary partisan first introduced in Remember Ruben (Three Continents, 1980). Accompanied by the irrepressibly roguish Jo the Juggler and the idealistic schoolboy Evariste, Mor-Zamba returns to his native village of Ekoumdoum twenty years after the corrupt and illegitimate chief had encouraged the colonial authorities to imprison him in a forced labor camp near the capital. After having participated in the struggle for independence, this gentle giant received from his inseparable childhood companion Abena, now commonly known as the revolutionary hero Hurricane-Viet, the order to liberate Ekoumdoum from the reactionary chief who remains in power despite the fact that the country itself has nominally achieved its independence. In fact, the situation in Ekoumdoum is a portrayal in miniature of the corruption and venality that has continued to reiY1 on a much larger scale in many African countries. The action in the novel takes place during the first year of independence and reveals the author's conviction that the mere granting of freedom under neo-colonialist conditions is insufficient. What is needed, he believes, is a genuine revolution in the consciousness of the common people and a dismantling of all the corrupt institutions that still hold them in bondage. The story of Mor-Zamba's return and the drama of his attempt to achieve this goal in Ekoumdoum is told with consumate artistry by Beti, who combines elements of irony, classical rhetoric, and oral story-telling techniques to hold the reader spellbound with strategems of guerilla warfare and bizarre tums of fortune. Beti is the most prolific and widely read author to have emerged from the literarily active West African country of Cameroon. During the 1950s his satirical, socially critical novels The Poor Christ of Bomba, Mission to Kala, King Lazarus, and Cruel City had already published him as one of the two or three leading novelists of his generation in francophone Africa. However, when his country became independent in 1960, he ceased to write and devoted himself to his job as a teacher in France. Because he had opposed the Ahidjo regime, which had been put in place by the French, he did not feel free to return to his native country, and yet he also did not believe it would be appropriate for him to publicly condemn an independent African government in the same way he had earlier castigated the colonial authorities. Nevertheless, when the Ahidjo government conducted a series of show trials and executions in the early 1970s, Beti could no longer remain silent. In rapid succession he published Main baisse sur le Cameroun (a well-documented, journalistic indictment of the government) and two novels, Remember Ruben (published by Three Continents) and Perpetue both of which excoriated the corrupt conditions in a fictional country that bears a strong resemblance to Cameroon. Lament for an African Pol is the third novel in this post-independence sequence, and in it Beti the ironic undertones, serio-comic characterizations, and well-formed plots that made his earlier works into popular classics of modem African literature. Richard Bjomson is a and scholar of European and African fiction and has spent several yean in Cameroon. He is currently Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University. Bjornson has published his translation of fourteen stories by Rene Philombe in Tales from Cameroon (Three Continents, 1984); he has served as President of the American Literary Translators Association; and he has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center at the University o.
