Cannibal

9780814780121

0814780121

"A harrowing first novel...Svoboda's heroine is a white ethnographer slowly being starved to death by her lover as they trek across the Sudan. An obsessive monologue told in a measured whisper, desperate, chilling, seductive." -Vogue "I am still hungover from reading this book . . . Most writers cannot sustain their premises but Svoboda does and even strengthens hers . . . I am very excited about this book being put into the world." -Mark Richard Author ofFishboy: A Ghost's Story "Like another poet-turned novelist, Denis Johnson, Svoboda turns a shrewd and lucid gaze on sights that make others turn away. Her diction is as precise as her territory is vast. What happens in Africa haunts her, it inhabits every word. -Amy Hempel Cannibalis Africa from the inside-inside the head of a woman who fears that the man she loves is CIA, that the film the're supposed to make is his cover, that she might be pregnant. A haunting story of survival, Cannibal lays bare a woman's greatest hungers. Known as Good-for-Nothing by the Africans -unfit for the climate, the work, or frienship, she struggles for recognition, and for her life. What she finds, wandering the savannah for months, are the "blue people", those with AIDS who have been left to die in an abandoned British outpost. But this is only counterpoint to her own predicament. "Trust hasn't enough syllables," she says, regarding her lover walking ahead of her. "He doesn't look at it. I can't not look, but he won't look." InCannibal, nobody wants to look-the differences are too frightening, the truth too stark, the love too little. A step beyondHeart of Darkness,Cannibalis the virtual reality of exotic paranoia where, when the images break apart, Death grins out.