The Whistler (Angola)

ISBN: 9780955233975 Price: £7.99 Click on image to BUY

By Ondjaki
Translated by Richard Bartlett

A STRANGER wafts into a village with no name and sets to whistling as he wanders idly through the church, hypnotising the doves in the rafters and bringing the priest to tears with his haunting tune.

Thus begins a week of whispers and gossip that culminates in a Sunday Mass celebrated with orgasmic fervour - literally - as the whistler’s enchanting tune bewitches the frustrated faithful.

Spellbinding, irreverent and hilarious, Ondjaki’s comic masterpiece from Angola is a triumph of joy over adversity in a country ravaged by sorrow that will make the reader weep with its mirth and passion.

The Whistler can be seen as an unexpected, yet welcome, antidote to the painful after-effects of the civil war that traumatised the author’s homeland for 30 years by offering a vision of hope and humanity to a people asleep with their pain.

The Whistler is the first work by one of Africa’s most promising writer in the Portuguese language to be made available in English and was translated from the Portuguese original, O Assobiador.

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‘There is no doubt that Ondjaki is a craftsman, and an adept one at that, who has the uncanny ability at once to shock and lull the reader. Even across languages (the book is translated from the Portuguese) the book’s poetic cadences beat insistently and, rise to a crescendo’
- Mail & Guardian, South Africa

‘There are some books that are surprising because they are so completely unexpected - not in their appearance, but in their method. O Assobiador (The Whistler) is such a book. As a product of Angola, a country riven by civil war and its after-effects for the past 30 years, a novel of such laughter and unmitigated hope comes as a welcome shock’ - African Review of Books

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Mail & Guardian, South Africa
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