Snakepit
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Praised on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the author’s native Uganda, Moses Isegawa’s first novel Abyssinian Chronicles was a “big, transcendently ambitious book” (Boston Globe) that “blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world” (Elle).
In Snakepit, Isegawa returns to the surreal, brutalizing landscapes of his homeland during the time of dictator Idi Amin, when interlocking webs of emotional cruelty kept tyrants gratified and servants cooperative, a land where no one–not husbands or wives, parents or lovers–is ever safe from the implacable desires of men in power. Men like General Bazooka, who rues the day he hired Cambridge-educated Bat Katanga as his “Bureaucrat Two”–a man too good at his job–and places in his midst (and his bed) a seductive operative named Victoria, whose mission and motives are anything but simple. Ambitious and acquisitive, more than a little arrogant, Katanga finds himself steadily boxed in by events spiraling madly out of control, where deception, extortion, and murder are just so many cards to be played.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of 2000's Abyssinian Chronicles sets another ambitious narrative of trouble and turmoil near the end of Idi Amin's dictatorship in Uganda, a country "like a madwoman of untold beauty; efforts to save her were bound to be doomed." Bat Katanga, native son and recent postgraduate student at Cambridge University, returns to Uganda to seek his fortune during the chaotic scramble for economic independence and personal enrichment in the 1970s. His education and intelligence immediately albeit slightly improbably land him a high-level job in the Ministry of Power and Communications, working for the bloodthirsty, power-hungry General Bazooka, head of the corrupt Anti-Smuggling Unit. The notorious excesses and infighting of the Amin regime are detailed from General Bazooka's perspective as well as that of several others, including beautiful Victoria, the general's former mistress who's now angling for Bat, and mercenary Englishman Robert Ashes, who intends to come out on top, no matter what the cost. When Bat is intimidated into taking a bribe from a Saudi official, the general, whose own standing is in question, has him abducted. In prison, Bat, who is nearly as calculating and Machiavellian as his employers, is forced to re-evaluate everything. Even after his release, the downward trajectory of his life continues, while the country itself plunges toward anarchy. This is a headlong and blurry novel filled with violence and sex, deceit and revenge a messy, captivating portrait of a desperate time and place.
