![]() ![]() Playwright David Demchuk's first novel opens as a series of fairy tales. What makes this novel is Makumbi's vision in how the curse travels through her characters – and then imagining how they will be rid of it.īy David Demchuk, ChiZine, 244 pages, $19.99 This richness, and the challenge it may pose to some readers, is its own reward, but a novel is more its ethnographic detail. Kintu is a Ugandan novel for Ugandans – steeped in Ganda mythology, its Lugandan words left untranslated, the assumptions of its characters and the history shaping its narrative unexplained. Certainly Makumbi's characters' claims as ethnic Ganda – and, in turn, the family curse's claim on them – are central here. Buganda as a synecdoche for the Uganda itself says a great deal about modern Uganda. More properly, Kintu – a family saga about a curse unleashed in 1750 and its effects on the members of a clan in 2004 – is a novel of Buganda, the subnational kingdom that long predates the Ugandan state. ![]() Kintu has been called "the great Ugandan novel" it is hard to not draw comparisons between what Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi does here and Chinua Achebe's work in Things Fall Apart – it is that good. ![]() By Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Transit Books, 446 pages, $24.50 ![]()
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