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Deni Ellis Bechard

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The award-winning author blends fiction and memoir in this “captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical” novel of neocolonial corruption in the Congo (Foreword Reviews, starred review).
 
Assigned to write an exposé on the elusive conservationist Richmond Hew, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But then he meets Sola, a woman looking for a white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon. And he begins to uncover a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.
 
A harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints—from an anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects to a community of charismatic Congolese preachers and a revered conservationist who vanishes. Then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by memories of his father.
 
These disparate elements coalesce into a map of Richmond Hew’s enigmatic movements in Deni Ellis Bechard’s “self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction” with fascinating echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
This book is currently unavailable
238 printed pages
Original publication
2018
Publication year
2018
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Quotes

  • Jacob Budinhas quoted6 years ago
    As you get older, there is less padding between the world and your bones, so lying to yourself about the truths of existence becomes more difficult.
  • Jacob Budinhas quoted6 years ago
    This is the source of the duality in the girl’s narrative. She needs the demon’s power and embodies it as a witch, and yet she flees it, knowing that being a demon is what alienates and destroys her.
  • Jacob Budinhas quoted6 years ago
    “I see,” I said, and did understand—believed, in fact, that all worldviews were hybridized, that our brains were archaeological layers if not geologic strata, not only of belief but of instinct, so that at the surface we played at being rational, modern creatures while our viscera churned with primeval fears.

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