Kimbene is an unformed, ambitious Nigerian youth who at first has nothing to recommend him but his height. In his Ibo tribe the tallest member is automatically installed as ruler. Guided by his boyhood friend, Ngugi, who barely tops six feet and therefore has no hope of power, except vicariusly, Kimbene rises from orphan to local chief to regional king and then is faced with an even greater challenge, whether to remain in the isolated world of his highest achievement or return to his agricultural roots. The conclusion turns ...
Read More
Kimbene is an unformed, ambitious Nigerian youth who at first has nothing to recommend him but his height. In his Ibo tribe the tallest member is automatically installed as ruler. Guided by his boyhood friend, Ngugi, who barely tops six feet and therefore has no hope of power, except vicariusly, Kimbene rises from orphan to local chief to regional king and then is faced with an even greater challenge, whether to remain in the isolated world of his highest achievement or return to his agricultural roots. The conclusion turns on a search for truth which is consistently leavened by robust humour. Throughout, pretence is exposed by the integrity of the hero's primitive viewpoint. The targets range from missionaries to oil men to Japanese camera manufacturers to a producer of Sixty Minutes. Revealing as these episodes are in themselves, what makes them telling are the philosophical insights Kimbene achieves in attempting to reconcile the difference between village life and what he calls 'Best Western': TV, billboards, photography, bookstores, modern warfare.A satirist in the tradition of Cervantes, Van Wert provides us with a deeper sense of the causes of trouble in present-day Africa, as well as with what means to have lived life to the full in any culture.
Read Less
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Shelf wear, stamp inside front cover Hardcover Used-Good 1996 First Edition All purchases support Project HOME-ending homelessness in Philadelphia.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very Good in Near Fine dust jacket. 0917635205. Light edgewear; Dust Jacket slight wear. Crisp copy.; INSCRIBED by author on title page. "William Van Wert has conjured an avant-garde anthropology from a fictive Africa. In Stool Wives comedy and wisdom do the native dance of that most potent novelistic tradition which began with Fielding and Sterne. Hilarious, reflective, scatogical and sublime, Stool Wives is shamanism of a high order: the kind that makes the rain fall, the crops grow."-Alan Singer.; Plover Nivola Series; 209 pages; Signed by Author.
