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In the House of the Interpreter

A Memoir

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
With black-and-white illustrations throughout

World-renowned Kenyan novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic Ng˜ug˜ý wa Thiong’o gives us the second volume of his memoirs in the wake of his critically acclaimed Dreams in a Time of War.
 
In the House of the Interpreter richly and poignantly evokes the author’s life and times at boarding school—the first secondary educational institution in British-ruled Kenya—in the 1950s, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mau Mau Uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty. While Ng˜ug˜ý has been enjoying scouting trips, chess tournaments, and reading about the fictional RAF pilot adventurer Biggles at the prestigious Alliance High School near Nairobi, things have been changing rapidly at home. Poised as he is between two worlds, Ng˜ug˜ý returns home for his first visit since starting school to find his house razed and the entire village moved up the road, closer to a guard checkpoint. Later, his brother Good Wallace, a member of the insurgency, is captured by the British and taken to a concentration camp. As for Ng˜ug˜ý himself, he falls victim to the forces of colonialism in the person of a police officer encountered on a bus journey, and he is thrown into jail for six days. In his second year at Alliance High School, the boarding school that was his haven in a heartless world is shattered by investigations, charges of disloyalty, and the politics of civil unrest.
 
In the House of the Interpreter hauntingly describes the formative experiences of a young man who would become a world-class writer and, as a political dissident, a moral compass to us all. It is a winning celebration of the implacable determination of youth and the power of hope.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 10, 2012
      Acclaimed Kenyan novelist, poet, playwright, and critic wa Thiong’o recalls the seminal moments of his high school years from 1955 to 1959 during the bloody Mau Mau rebellion against a rigid British colonial regime. The memoir starts on a pleasant, restive tone with young Kenyan schoolboys attending Alliance High School in their school uniforms, but the revolt spills over into the surrounding villages and towns until the British troops begin a scorched earth policy, burning huts and crops to starve out the guerrillas. With his revolutionary brother in the mountains and his brother’s wife in prison, young wa Thiong’o is watched and monitored by authorities, and finally detained in the dark chambers of physical and psychological hell. Alternately youthfully innocent and politically savvy, this is a first-rate telling of that African revolutionary elite who determined the future of their continent.

    • Kirkus

      September 15, 2012
      Kenyan writer and professor wa Thiong'o (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine) offers a second harrowing volume of memoir, a sequel to his Dreams in a Time of War (2010). The author begins in 1955, when he had just completed his first term of boarding school and returned home to find...no home. His village was destroyed, and his family was relocated. Right from the outset, then, the themes of dislocation, fear and random violence and terror emerge. His older brother sided with the anti-colonials and was eventually captured, then released; the author was imprisoned, not long after his graduation--a random detention that culminated in the 1959 trial that concludes this book. Wa Thiong'o highlights his family and friends, but also the dominant presence of the school principal, Edward Carey Francis, who appears as a strong, principled but enormously complex character whom the author both feared and revered. School became a revelation, as the author plunged into the library, reading indiscriminately at first (he loved Sherlock Holmes, was troubled by the literature of empire). Excelling in the classroom, he submitted a story for publication in the school journal (it was accepted), and he participated in the school's annual Shakespeare production. The author also writes about his dawning spiritual and religious life (he became an extraordinarily devout Christian, then began to question) and about his ineptness at sports. He preferred table tennis and chess to soccer and field hockey. Throughout, he fittingly refers to school as his "sanctuary," for the place shielded him from the Mau Mau Uprising and other regional and continental crises. An inspiring story of a young man determined to excel and escape.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      June 15, 2012

      A 2009 Man Booker International Literary Prize nominee and an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience in his native Kenya in the late 1970s after his arrest for writing a controversial play, wa Thiong'o here follows up a first volume of memoirs called Dreams in a Time of War--which, by the way, was a Samuel Johnson Prize nominee. This new work covers wa Thiong'o's high school years in 1955-59, which places it smack in the middle of the Mau Mau uprising that eventually led to the end of British colonial rule. Nobel-worthy reading, I'll bet; wa Thiong'o is often mentioned for the prize.

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      October 1, 2012
      Following Dreams in a Time of War (2010), acclaimed Kenyan writer Thiong'o, in this second volume of his memoirs, remembers his four years in boarding school in the late 1950s in Kenya's first high school for Africans, modeled on Tuskegee in the U.S. His brother is a guerrilla in the mountains with the anticolonial Mau-Mau (terrorist or freedom fighter?), and the teens' dual viewpoint will hold readers, both the wry commentary on the literature curriculum (he loves Shakespeare but doesn't get Wordsworth's daffodils) and especially his growing political awareness of the savagery of empire building ( King Solomon's Mines was full of adventure but clearly at the expense of Africa ). His inspiring role models include Garvey, Du Bois, and Nkrumah, and he joins the call for whites to scram from Africa. The A-student wins a scholarship to prestigious Makerere College, but, even though he is no activist, he narrowly escapes prison. The personal detail dramatizes the farce of the colonial land grab and of Christianity as liberation of the natives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2012

      In this second volume of memoirs following his Dreams in a Time of War, Kenyan author Ngugi (Wizard of the Crow) references The Pilgrim's Progress, solidly foregrounding his spiritual awakening and the development of his religious understanding. Here, he covers his years in the mid-1950s at Alliance High School, Kenya's first school for Africans, and a short period after his graduation, before his matriculation at college. He traces his emergence as a solid thinker, unsure sometimes of his abilities but developing amid deeply contradictory environments and messages. At school, readers see him as a member of a very British institution; when home, he helps his mother in the fields and treats his school friends to some of her field-roasted potatoes. Meanwhile, British imperialism and Kenyan nationalism clash. This memoir traces not only the development of a strong personality, but of a distinct period in Kenyan history. VERDICT In a time of great change, a boy becomes a man. This title will appeal greatly to those who like their memoirs grounded in history. The development of character through inquiry into the world around oneself is a repeated, and poignant, theme.--Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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