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Summary
Summary
Interweaving past and present, Sweden and Zambia, The Eye of the Leopard draws on bestselling author Mankell's deep understanding of the two worlds he has inhabited for more than 20 years.
Author Notes
Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm, Sweden on February 3, 1948. He left secondary school at the age of 16 and worked as a merchant seaman. While working as a stagehand, he wrote his first play, The Amusement Park. His first novel, The Stone Blaster, was released in 1973. His other works included The Prison Colony that Disappeared, Daisy Sisters, The Eye of the Leopard, The Man from Beijing, Secrets in the Fire, The Chronicler of the Wind, Depths, and I Die, But My Memory Lives On. He also wrote the Kurt Wallander series, which have been adapted for film and television, and the Joel Gustafson Stories series. A Bridge to the Stars won the Rabén and Sjögren award for best children's book of the year.
He was committed to the fight against AIDS. He helped build a village for orphaned children and devoted much of his spare time to his "memory books" project, where parents dying from AIDS are encouraged to record their life stories in words and pictures. He was also among the activists who were attacked and arrested by Israeli forces as they tried to sail to the Gaza strip with humanitarian supplies in June 2010. He died from cancer on October 5, 2015 at the age of 67.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Best known for his Kurt Wallander mysteries (Firewall, etc.), Mankell alternates between the coming-of-age story of Hans Olofson, a provincial Swede who grows up in a motherless home with an alcoholic father, and Olofson's later experiences in Zambia in this fine, unsentimental exploration of vastly different cultures. Having come to believe that Sweden holds nothing for him, Olofson decides to go to Africa to visit a mission, prompted by the strangest woman in town, Janine, who's shunned because of an operation that left her with no nose. Olofson stays in Zambia for 18 years, running a struggling egg farm and dealing with a culture he never fully understands. Mankell is terrific at sketching the cultural differences between the West and Africa--in particular, "the anguish of the independent states." Sweden and the West may be more pragmatic and less superstitious than Africa, but greed and corruption are universal. Still, it's the character of Olofson and his complex, unsettling relationship with the Zambians and Africa that make this disquieting novel so compelling. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* American readers only familiar with Mankell's Kurt Wallander crime novels are in for a delightful surprise. In The Eye of the Leopard, he creates a beautiful, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful coming-of-age novel set both in Sweden and Zambia. The story of Hans Olafsson opens with him suffering through a bout of malaria, convinced he is about to be attacked. This tense opener is followed by a series of flashbacks to Hans' lonely childhood in the forests of northern Sweden as well as his eventual arrival in Africa. Mankell's signature ability to evoke a sense of place is evident in this early work, published in Sweden in 1990, as he takes us from the cold and claustrophobia of a tiny cabin in Sweden to the heat, dust, and violence of postcolonial Africa, each setting brought to life with an immediacy that leaves the reader alternately frozen and overheated and altogether unable to break away from this engrossing and tense tale. Much of the drama here comes from Hans' Zambia years, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, when his stature as a mzungu, or rich man, forced him to come to terms with being a white man in a hostile black country. A powerful exploration of the stresses and challenges of freedom.--Moyer, Jessica Copyright 2008 Booklist
Guardian Review
Shifting away from his usual police procedurals and Swedish glums, Mankell turns to Africa, which he knows through his work for Aids charities. He sticks to the template laid down by Conrad, Celine and Greene for a familiar journey into a heart of darkness, mitigated by the fact that The Eye of the Leopard is about northernness too. Hapless Hans Olafson grows up in the benighted interior of Sweden, his country and childhood symbolised by damage, in sections that would be gothic if he weren't such a deliberately washed-out protagonist: weighted with handicaps, his mother missing, his father a drunken, stranded seaman, banished to the forests where he cuts trees as some terrible form of penance and exile. His one childhood friend ends up paralysed in an iron lung; and the love of his life is minus a nose, thanks to a careless surgeon's knife. All this is treated with a doggedness that refutes sniggering, in a tone less Scandinavian than Germanic, which perhaps explains why Mankell is so popular in that country. Alone and adrift, Olafson fetches up in northern Zambia in 1969, where he spends the next two decades managing a farm. There his torpor finds its match, Zambia being a sick country of recurring fevers. Olafson contemplates his contradictory emotions and entertains vague notions of doing good in a place where everything comes with an agenda. He listens to the usual white racist mantras and sees that none of the European systems of logic and organisation apply, however much "insane empire-builders changed into their dinner jackets deep in the rainforests and on the plains of elephant grass". In a book free of humour (that traditional European resistant), the one joke is at white expense: "'Stop calling me Bwana!' 'Yes, Bwana.'" Events turn around an ironic conceit: Olafson's gloomy Swedish childhood is shown to be more sombre and adult than the regressive, dangerously childish state he finds in Zambia, but Mankell's general worthiness lacks the savage, demented glee of Celine's colonial collapse in Journey to the End of the Night . With Mankell, malaise becomes a form of suspense, but is equally responsible for monotony of tone; and the nagging theme of insufficient motive can prove contagious to the reader. Olafson, while exempt from the overt racism and sexual predation of most whites, becomes ensnared in a complex tangle of bribes and illegal financial transactions, which he decides is no less corrupt than Sweden - the difference being in the candour of it. What develops is too etiolated to qualify as a psychological thriller, although Olafson's life is threatened when whites are targeted for ritual slaughter by a shadowy black revolutionary force. Panic, however, does make a flawed man more interesting, turning him into a combination of self-loathing and sentimentality. Forced to defend himself, he kills a man, then another for moral reasons. Given his nationality, Mankell is preoccupied by concepts of neutrality. As Olafson is forced to engage, the writer becomes clear about his authorial target, which is to expose the myth of Swedish neutrality with a savage portrait of its foreign aid system, revealed here as colonial corruption by other means. To order The Eye of the Leopard for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-fiction03two.1 In a book free of humour (that traditional European resistant), the one joke is at white expense: "'Stop calling me Bwana!' 'Yes, Bwana.'" Events turn around an ironic conceit: [Hans Olafson]'s gloomy Swedish childhood is shown to be more sombre and adult than the regressive, dangerously childish state he finds in Zambia, but [Mankell]'s general worthiness lacks the savage, demented glee of [Celine]'s colonial collapse in Journey to the End of the Night . - Chris Petit.
Kirkus Review
This previously untranslated novel from the Swedish author, best known for his Kurt Wallender mysteries, tells the complex story of a rootless Swede's perilous and disillusioning African experience. In juxtaposed parallel chapters, Mankell (Kennedy's Brain, 2007, etc.) vividly chronicles protagonist Hans Olofson's early years in rural Sweden, living with his alcoholic father during the 1950s, and Olofson's ordeal in Zambia in the early 1970s, whence he had relocated hoping to complete an odyssey that was only dreamed about by a boyhood acquaintance unable to make the journey herself. Young Hans, who seeks relief from his father's depressive rages (after Hans's mother had abandoned them) in friendships with a well-to-do older boy (Sture) and a young woman (Janine), facially disfigured in a surgical accident, loses both of them. He bullies Sture into an incapacitating misadventure, and has perhaps inadvertently driven Janine to suicide. Subsequently, determined to honor Janine's dream of service to Africa's suffering natives, he arrives in Zambia shortly before violence sparked by warring tribes claims the lives and property of well-meaning white settlers, and incarnates the indigenous myth of a leopard and crocodile locked together in unending mortal conflict. This image mocks the white man's fantasy of reclaiming a land with no future, and eventually drives Olofson away from the egg farm he had coincidentally acquired, and the destiny he had naively believed lay ahead of him. This impressive novel is intensely detailed and beautifully constructed, and it vibrates with a palpable and genuinely frightening sense of doom. But it suffers intermittently from the redundancy and slow pacing that likewise afflict Mankell's mystery novels. The tension never relaxes, and most readers will surely persevere through the final blood-soaked, despairing pages, which attain a truly mesmerizing power. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As in his recent Kennedy's Brain, the author of the best-selling Kurt Wallander mysteries here turns his eye to the differences between Africa and the West, juxtaposing personal struggles with the growing pains of a newly independent state. When Hans Olofson arrives in Zambia in 1969, he is ostensibly fulfilling a dead friend's greatest wish. In fact, he is fleeing the only life he knows, his motherless childhood and alcoholic father, his failed studies and stifling social circumstances, and the loss of all those closest to him. The narrative alternates between Olofson's coming of age in Sweden and his increasingly difficult life in Zambia, where he runs an egg farm. Even after 18 years, Olofson does not fully grasp his position as a white mzungu (rich man) among the native blacks and how inappropriate his Western ideas are in a country so completely resistant to them. As the narrative continues, the paranoid fever dreams that open the novel are horrifyingly revealed to be all too plausible given the political situation. Dark and atmospheric, insightful and compelling, this book is appropriate for large fiction collections.--Karen Walton Morse, Univ. of Buffalo Libs., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One He wakes in the African night, convinced that his body has split in two. Cracked open, as if his guts had exploded, with the blood running down his face and chest. In the darkness he fumbles in terror for the light switch, but when he flips it there is no light, and he thinks the electricity must be out again. His hand searches under the bed for a torch, but the batteries are dead and so he lies there in the dark. It's not blood, he tells himself. It's malaria. I've got the fever, the sweat is being squeezed out of my body. I'm having nightmares, fever dreams. Time and space are dissolving, I don't know where I am, I don't even know if I'm still alive . . . Insects are crawling across his face, enticed by the moisture that is oozing from his pores.He thinks he ought to get out of bed and find a towel. But he knows he wouldn't be able to stand upright, he would have to crawl, and maybe he wouldn't even be able to make it back to bed. If I die now at least I'll be in my own bed, he thinks, as he feels the next attack of fever coming on. I don't want to die on the floor. Naked, with cockroaches crawling across my face. His fingers clutch at the wet sheet as he prepares himself for an attack that will be more violent than the ones before. Feebly, in a voice that is hardly audible, he cries out in the darkness for Luka, but there is only silence and the chirping cicadas of the African night. Maybe he's sitting right outside the door, he thinks in desperation. Maybe he's sitting there waiting for me to die. The fever comes rolling through his body in waves, like sudden storm swells.His head burns as if thousands of insects were stinging and boring into his forehead and temples. Slowly he is dragged away from consciousness, sucked down into the underground corridors of the fever attack, where he glimpses the distorted faces of nightmares among the shadows. I can't die now, he thinks, gripping the sheet to keep himself alive. But the suction draught of the malaria attack is stronger than his will. Reality is chopped up, sawed into pieces that fit nowhere. He believes he is sitting in the back seat of an old Saab that is racing through the endless forests of Norrland in Sweden.He can't see who is sitting in front of him: only a black back, no neck, no head. It's the fever, he thinks again. I have to hold on, keep thinking that it's only the fever, nothing more. He notices that it has started to snow in the room.White flakes are falling on his face and instantly it's cold all around him. Now it's snowing in Africa, he thinks. That's odd, it really shouldn't be doing that. I have to get hold of a spade. I have to get up and start shovelling, otherwise I'll be buried in here. Again he calls for Luka, but no one answers, no one comes. He decides to fire Luka, that's the first thing he'll do if he survives this fever. Bandits, he thinks in confusion. Of course, that's who cut the electrical line. He listens and seems to hear the patter of their feet outside the walls of the house.With one hand he grips the revolver under his pillow, forces himself up to a sitting position, and points the gun at the front door. He has to use both hands just to lift it, and in desperation he fears he doesn't have enough strength in his finger to pull the trigger. I'm going to give Luka the sack, he thinks in a rage.He's the one who cut the electrical line, he's the one who lured the bandits here. I have to remember to fire him in the morning. He tries to catch some snowflakes in the barrel of the revolver, but they melt before his eyes. I have to put on my shoes, he thinks. Otherwise I'll freeze to death. With all his might he Excerpted from The Eye of the Leopard by Steven T. Murray All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
