Cannibal

By Terese Svoboda

"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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814780121
• ISBN13: 9780814780121
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: NYU Press
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

One woman's journey through Africa.

Terese Svoboda's Cannibal can best be described as haunting.Its terse prose is well written. Cannibal tells the story of awoman's trek through Africa; following the man she loves. As their journey unravels she begins to suspect that he is not what he appears to be, and in fact he may be starving her. The story is told from inside the woman's head. It is all reflective dialogue; in this case it works, and keeps the reader's attention. If you are interested in Africa, and like dark psychological discourse in literature; then this book is for you.