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Summary
Summary
The harrowing, utterly original debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala about the life of a child soldier in a war-torn African country--now a critically-acclaimed Netflix original film directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) and starring Idris Elba (Mandela, The Wire).
As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning debut novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander.
While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started--a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family, still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality continues to spin further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. In a powerful, strikingly original voice, Uzodinma Iweala leads the reader through the random travels, betrayals, and violence that mark Agu's new community. Electrifying and engrossing, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary new writer.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Iweala's visceral debut is unrelenting in its brutality and unremitting in its intensity. Agu, the precocious, gentle son of a village schoolteacher father and a Bible-reading mother, is dragooned into an unnamed West African nation's mad civil war-a slip of a boy forced, almost overnight, to shoulder a soldier's bloody burden. The preteen protagonist is molded into a fighting man by his demented guerrilla leader and, after witnessing his father's savage slaying, by an inchoate need to belong to some kind of family, no matter how depraved. He becomes a killer, gripped by a muddled sense of revenge as he butchers a mother and daughter when his ragtag unit raids a defenseless village; starved for both food and affection, he is sodomized by his commandant and rewarded with extra food scraps and a dry place to sleep. The subject of the 23-year-old novelist's story-Iweala is American born of Nigerian descent-is gripping enough. But even more stunning is the extraordinarily original voice with which this tale is told. The impressionistic narration by a boy constantly struggling to understand the incomprehensible is always breathless, often breathtaking and sometimes heartbreaking. Its odd singsong cadence and twisted use of tense take a few pages to get used to, but Iweala's electrifying prose soon enough propels a harrowing read. (Nov. 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
I am not bad boy. I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. Set in an unnamed West African country, Iweala's first novel shows civil war from a child's viewpoint. After his mother and sister escape and his father is killed, the traumatized young narrator is discovered by guerrilla fighters. Frightened and alone, he joins the men, becoming a soldier in an impoverished army of terror headed by a charismatic and treacherous leader who tells his young followers that killing is like falling in love. You cannot be thinking about it. Writing in the boy's West African English, Iweala distills his story to the most urgent and visceral atrocities, and the scenes of bloodshed and rape are made more excruciating by the lyrical, rhythmic language. In the narrator's memories of village life, biblical stories, and creation myths, Iweala explores the mutable separation between human and beast and a child's struggle to rediscover his own humanity after war: I am some sort of beast or devil, the boy says, But I am also having mother once, and she is loving me. Readers will come away feeling shattered by this haunting, original story. --Gillian Engberg Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus Review
This astonishing debut by a gifted 23-year-old American of Nigerian ancestry tracks an African child soldier's descent into hell. Resilient but terrified, Little Agu is a wide-eyed, preteen boy thrown among the demented and the depraved. At the start, in an unspecified West African country, he's being dragged out of a shack in the bush and beaten by another child. There are trucks, and soldiers in rags. They offer Agu food and water and the chance to be a soldier. Agu accepts (as if he had a choice). He has lost his loving, close-knit family. His mother and sister were evacuated by the UN, and his schoolteacher father was shot before his eyes. Agu inherited their Christian and animist beliefs; the smartest kid in his one-room school, he loved to read the Bible. Now he must kill. It's not so hard if you're high on "gun juice." Explains Agu: "They are all saying, stop worrying. Stop worrying. Soon it will be your own turn and then you will know what it is feeling like to be killing somebody. Then they are laughing at me and spitting on the ground near my feets." Agu comes across a mother and daughter and butchers them with his knife. He wants to be a good soldier, yet he is fearful of being a "bad boy"--and there is no way to resolve the contradiction. Agu is always tired, always hungry, and his ordeal stretches into the night when he is used as a sex toy and sodomized. There are no pitched battles, just these ragtag rebels killing and plundering. Iweala writes with great restraint, mindful that the most important battle is for a boy's soul: Redemption is possible, even if a return to innocence is not. The outrageous conscription of children has its own heartbreaking lament. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Educated at Harvard, where his writing won a number of prizes, the Nigerian-born Iweala breaks our hearts with the story (all too realistic) of a child soldier in Africa. One of HarperCollins's top picks for the fall. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Beasts of No Nation A Novel Chapter One It is starting like this. I am feeling itch like insect is crawling on my skin, and then my head is just starting to tingle right between my eye, and then I am wanting to sneeze because my nose is itching, and then air is just blowing into my ear and I am hearing so many thing: the clicking of insect, the sound of truck grumbling like one kind of animal, and then the sound of somebody shouting, TAKE YOUR POSITION RIGHT NOW! QUICK! QUICK QUICK! MOVE WITH SPEED! MOVE FAST OH! in voice that is just touching my body like knife. I am opening my eye and there is light all around me coming into the dark through hole in the roof, crossing like net above my body. Then I am feeling my body crunched up like one small mouse in the corner when the light is coming on. The smell of rainwater and sweat is coming into my nose and I am feeling my shirt is so wet it is almost like another skin. I want to be moving, but my whole bone is paining me and my muscle is paining me like fire ant is just biting me all over my body. If I can be slapping myself to be making it go away I am doing it, but I cannot even move one finger. I am not doing anything. Footstep is everywhere around me and making me to think that my father is coming to bring medicine to stop all of this itch and pain. I turn onto my back. The footstep is growing louder, louder, louder until I am hearing it even more than my own breathing or heart beating. Step slap, step slap, step slap, I am hearing getting louder, louder, louder and then shadow is coming into the light from under the door. Somebody is knocking. KNOCK KNOCK. But I am not answering. Then they are angrying too much and just kicking so the whole of this place is shaking and the roof is falling apart small small so that more light is coming in. And the wood everywhere is cracking until I am hearing PING PING and seeing screw falling from the door into bucket near my feets. The sound is fighting the wall, bouncing from here to there, through the net of light, until it is like the sound is pushing the door open so there is so much brightness. BRIGHTNESS! So much brightness is coming into my eye until I am seeing purple spot for long time. Then I am seeing yellow eye belonging to one short dark body with one big belly and leg thin like spider's own. This body is so thin that his short is just blowing around his leg like woman's skirt and his shirt is looking like dress the way it is hanging from his shoulder. His neck is just struggling too much to hold up his big head that is always moving one way or the other. I am looking at him. He is looking at me. He is not surprising at all to be seeing me even if I am surprising for him, but his face is falling and becoming more dark. He is sniffing like dog and stepping to me. KPAWA! He is hitting me. Again and again he is hitting me and each blow from his hand is feeling on my skin like the flat side of machete. I am trying to scream, but he is knocking the air from my chest and then slapping my mouth. I am tasting blood. I am feeling like vomiting. The whole place around us is shaking, just shaking rotten fruit from the shelf, just sounding like it will be cracking into many piece and falling on top of us. He is grabbing my leg, pulling it so hard that it is like it will be coming apart like meat, and my body is just sliding slowly from the stall out into the light and onto the mud. In the light, my breath is coming back and using force to open my chest to make me to coughing and my eye to watering. The whole world is spreading before me and I am looking up to the gray sky moving slowly slowly against the top leaf of all the tall tall Iroko tree. And under this, many smaller tree is fighting each other to climb up to the sunlight. All the leaf is dripping with rainwater and shining like jewel or glass. The grasses by the road is so tall and green past any color I am seeing before. This is making me to think of jubilating, dancing, shouting, singing because Kai! I am saying I am finally dead. I am thinking that maybe this boy is spirit and I should be thanking him for bringing me home to the land of spirits, but before I can even be opening my mouth to be saying anything, he is leaving me on my back in the mud. I can see the bottom of truck parking just little bit away from me. Two truck is blocking up the whole road and more are parking on the roadside. The piece of cloth covering them is so torn up and full of hole and the paint is coming off to showing so much rust, like blood, making me to thinking the truck is like wounding animal. And around all the truck, just looking like ghost, are soldier. Some is wearing camouflage, other is wearing T-shirt and jean, but it is not mattering because all of the clothe is tearing and having big hole. Some of them is wearing real boot and the rest is wearing slipper. Some of them is standing at attention with their leg so straight that it is looking like they do not have knee. Some of them is going to toilet against the truck and other is going to toilet into the grasses. Almost everybody is carrying gun. Beasts of No Nation A Novel . Copyright © by Uzodinma Iweala. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala 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.
