{UAH} Novel by Kenyan wins praise in US

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, who was celebrating the release of her new book, Dust, gives a speech during one in a series of celebratory events to mark KWANI's 10 year Anniversary at the KU business centre conference room on the 28th of November 2013. The novel has received glowing reviews by critics in the United States. PHOTO/EMMA NZIOKA

A novel by a Kenyan author has received glowing reviews by critics in the United States.

“Dust,” the debut novel by Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, is being described as an “astonishing” and “dazzling” work.

A featured review in the March 2 New York Times says readers of Ms Owuor’s story “will find the entirety of human experience — tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love — in staggering proportions.”

The Washington Post noted last month that while “few American readers have heard of this 45-year-old author before, that must change.”

RICH PLOT

Sunday New York Times reviewer Taiye Selasi, herself the author of an acclaimed novel about Ghana, further advises that “Dust” is “not just for Afrophiles. It is for bibliophiles.”

“Dust” is a fictionalised account of Kenya’s history, as experienced through Ms Owuor’s imagined Oganda family. The book is likely to prove controversial in Kenya because of the author’s unsparing account of the nation’s failures and tragedies.

“The novel concerns itself with that country’s blood-soaked history — from the Mau Mau uprisings of the early 1950s to the political assassination of 1969 to the post-election violence of 2007,” Ms Selasi writes in her Times review.

“The richness of the plot alone will challenge a lazy reader,” Ms Selasi adds. “But the visceral lusciousness of the prose will thrill a lover of language.”

The Washington Post’s reviewer, Ron Charles, offers a similar appraisal of the challenges and rewards of Ms Owuor’s writing.

The Kenyan winner of the Caine Prize in 2003 “has constructed a book that gradually teaches you how to read it,” the Post suggests.

Not every review of “Dust,” published in the US by Knopf, a leading New York house, has been entirely positive.

A commentator on National Public Radio observes that every character in the novel “is given such ample room to wax philosophic on lofty concepts like nothingness and the idea of Kenya that it’s a struggle to actually get to know them.”

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