What do You think about Chronicler Of The Winds (2006)?
Both horrifying and awesome at the same time, this tale takes us among the street kids living in the shadows of Maputo. Mankell includes details about the city that I've read in his other novels, such as the theater with a bakery inside, that make it specific to Maputo. But as with his other novels set in Africa, he shows general details that he might consider "universal truths" of life in Africa that make his novels wider than the country or city where they are set, eschewing the arbitrary geopolitical borders of modern Africa.I often find myself drawn to tragic tales. This is indeed a tragic story, but Mankell manages to stave off despair through the retelling of Nelio's life story by Jose Antonio Maria Vaz, the Chronicler of the Winds. At the completion, I was left feeling enriched, not empty and shell-shocked as some authors seem to strive for.Here are some of my favorite parts:"Nelio once asked me, 'Do you know what the wind tastes like? ... Mysterious spices ... that tell us about people and events far away. That we can't see. But that we can sense if we draw the wind deep into our mouths and then eat it.'" (7)"He was re-elected over the next sixty years by an ever growing majority, in spite of the fact that the population decreased drastically during this period." (13)"Often ... he would think that they all seemed to have been born of the same mother. A woman who was young and full of energy, but who had been broken by bandits, by monsters and by poverty to become a toothless, shrunken shadow. He knew that this was what they actually had in common: possessing nothing, having been born into a world against their will, and having been flung out into a misery created by bandits and monsters. They had only one mission in life: to survive." (114)"That's what we dream about. ID cards. But not so that we'll know who we are. We already know that. But so that we'll have a document proving that we have the right to be who we are." (119)"Each time a child is born, a tree is planted. You could see from his tree how old a person was. The tall and thick tree trunks, which gave the most shade, belonged to people who had already returned to the spirit world. But the trees of the living and the dead stood in the same grove, sought their nourishment from the same soil and the same rain. No one could tell from a tree whether someone was dead, only that he had been born." (146)
—Margot
If I tried to be funny I could say that Henning Mankell's Chronicler of the Winds is, in a way, a mystery novel. It is a story about street kids in Maputo, capital of Mozambique. Towards the end, it grows into a story about life and death in general and - beyond that - about justice and injustice in the (third) world. The book's hero is Nelio, a leader of street kids, was shot because he was trying to do good to someone else (I won't tell what happened). So why do I say it is a mystery novel? The story and the social message are straightforward enough. However, I found that reading the book was like trying to solve a mystery. The question on my mind was: why is it not working? The better the book gets - and it does get a lot better towards the end - the more difficult it is to understand what it is that it is lacking. I think I know the answer: the book is so good that it defeats its own purpose of painting a truthful picture of the life of street kids in the third world. The novel is masterfully built. It has two interlaced narratives, one told about Nelio by the narrator in the first person and the other told by Nelio himself. Structurally, it is divided into nine nightly sessions, during which Nelio tells his story in a perfectly coherent fashion, respecting the chronological order of the events to a T. But when the reader realizes that there are no cracks, it is then that the cracks appear. How can a ten-year-old unschooled street kid tell a story as eloquently as some sophisticated middle-class and middle-aged Swedish crime writer, namely Mankell himself (who divides his time between Sweden and Maputo in real life)? The problem is compounded, rather than alleviated, by the superimposition of the first-person narrator, Jose Antonio Maria Vaz, who is quite self-consciously eloquent and aware of his mission of telling Nelio's story in the pages of this book. It is difficult to describe the sense of disorientation that one has while reading a book about the third world when the fingerprints of Mankell are all over the place. That is why the book turns into a curious "whodunnit" very quickly, which clearly is not its purpose. But never mind the discrepancy between the author and the subject matter. How truthful is the picture that we see here? Isn't Nelio just a reincarnation of Rousseau's noble savage? Nelio has a surprisingly clear understanding of the social situation around him for someone who can't even read. He is fair, wise and all those things that we admire in a leader. Fortunately, Mankell has an antidote to the reader's incredulity. He describes Nelio's encounters with some unlikely characters, including an albino dwarf and a lizard woman on his way to the big city. After that, the reader is willing to accept almost anything. Yet, Mankell is right: Nelio's story needs to be told, as Jose Antonio Maria Vaz often says in the book. Could an illiterate ten-year-old tell it? No, Mankell has to do it. I just want to add that I am by no means the only one who has drawn attention to the discrepancy between the message and the medium. The reason I read the book in the first place was that Slavoj Zizek had pointed to the problems bedeviling Mankell's mission. But maybe those are the problems that are really worth solving. Can these kids every get a mouthpiece? If there is a unbridgeable gulf between them and us, is there anything we can we do to help?
—Jonathan Widell
For those of you who are fans of the Henning Mankell Wallander books you would be surprised and most likely disappointed to read this particular novel which is a fable of Africa. Set in a fictional country on the west coast (I assume) of the continent it tells the story of a street boy named Nelio who is found wounded in a theater by a baker who works nights baking bread in the bakery attached to the theater. He tells his story to this baker over a series of nights. The novel includes a history of the country which obviously is meant to suggest the history of colonialism and internal unrest in much of Africa. Mankell's Wallander series crime novels are sophisticated and well written with characters that are fully developed psychologically. This novel is surprisingly flat and without the depth of his other writing. The relationship between Nelio and the baker concludes in a way that doesn't seem plausible and left me feeling unmoved. So, in some ways the book is a disappointment.
—Alan
