Of beasts and beings /

Zimbabwean writer Holding (Unfeeling) delivers another powerful tale of guilt and responsibility set in a dystopian Africa. This time out he cleaves the stories of two different people: one an unnamed character who is captured, shackled to a cart, and forced to drag it across a corpse-littered wasteland; the other a white teacher adrift in the country of his birth, who no longer believes he has a claim to his home. The first desolate journey is marked by fear, violence, thirst, and emotional depravity, as a man and two boys force their captive to transport a pregnant woman to an unknown destination; they are unable to act humanely to anyone along the way. The second is equally raw and relentless, playing out in the pages of the white schoolteacher's journal as he sells his house and prepares to leave his homeland forever. These disparate characters and threads eventually converge, greatly increasing the moral stakes. Holding cleverly implicates the reader in the discrimination and dehumanization that has taken place in his abstract tale, casting us as collaborators in the tragedies playing out across Africa. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Unfeeling, 2007) is a story-within-a-story, a postmodern outlet for white guilt. In the immediate aftermath of a civil war, there is famine. A man foraging for scraps outside a city is lassoed by three men with machetes. We learn nothing about this man, the lead character, not his age or color or background, for reasons that will only be made clear much later. His black captors lead him, roped and gagged, past dead bodies, through a burnt-out shanty town, until they loot a house and disappear with the goodies. He acquires new captors, two tough teenagers, who lead him to an older man and a pregnant woman. They harness their captive to a street vendor's cart containing the woman and begin their unexplained journey through the bush. Food is scarce, water a luxury. Holding throws around some big words: carnage, killing fields, genocide. His percussive prose seeks to reflect the raw hurt of their ordeal. Sometimes it succeeds; more often it's awkward and showy. Thrust into the middle of their journey is a section of diary entries written by a 31-year-old man. Like his creator, Ian is a teacher, respected by his high-school students. Unsettled by the political climate, he's selling his house and moving to South Africa. Ian is more type than individual. That type is the "civilized" white man who draws comfort from the classics but is a heartless employer of black servants, willfully blind to their plight. The journey culminates with a final twist that attempts to add dimension to the tale. A story most notable for the grim monotony of the character's trek. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.