Product details
- ISBN 9780241680803
- Weight: 179g
- Dimensions: 129 x 197mm
- Publication Date: 07 Mar 2024
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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‘A great novel ... bone-chilling black satire … it deserves many readings’ New York Times
A mock epic of explosive power, Bound to Violence races through the history of the imaginary African kingdom of Nakem, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Recounting the bloody adventures of successive inglorious dynasties, the arrival of white exploiters and the fates of ordinary, endlessly persecuted citizens – most notably the tragicomic, Paris-educated hero Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi – this iconoclastic, outrageous 1968 novel takes a wry, sideways look at empire and nationalism, and at the sex, violence and power that run through human relationships.
‘A startling energy of language’ John Updike, New Yorker
Translated by Ralph Manheim
With an Introduction by Chérif Keïta
Yambo Ouologuem (Author)
Yambo Ouologuem was a Malian writer born into an aristocratic family. His poetry has been anthologized in Poems of Black Africa, edited by Wole Soyinka, and The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier. Met with critical acclaim in France, Ouologuem won the Renaudot Prize for his debut novel, Bound to Violence. He died in 2017.
Ralph Manheim (Translator)
Ralph Manheim was a Jewish-American translator of German and French literature. He translated the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Martin Heidegger and Hermann Hesse, among others. Manheim received the 1964 PEN Translation Prize, the 1970 National Book Award in the Translation category and a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship in Literary Studies. He won the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation, in 1988. He died in 1992.
