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In The House Of The Interpreter: A Memoir (2012)

by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o(Favorite Author)

3.98 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0307907694 (ISBN13: 9780307907691)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Pantheon

review 1: Ngugi's second volume of his memoir. While "Dreams in a Time of War" carried us through primary school and Ngugi's Kikuyu rite of passage, this one carries us through his High School years at a top level boarding school and his passage to legal adulthood. With the Mau-Mau uprising and the State of Emergency still in the background, Ngugi attempts to live life as a "normal" high schooler, shielded from the "Imperial Reckoning" of the Colonial State by the walls of his boarding school.As usual, Ngugi is engaging and personal. In this work he continues to straddle that "River Between" rejecting the Black vs. White and Modern vs. Traditional.
review 2: More travels with Ngugi growing up in Kenya, this time his high school experience - which ended on a very drama... moretic note that you might even call a cliffhanger. Now I have to wait and wait for his next book to find out what happened when he went off to college in Uganda! Kept learning, as I did with the previous volume of this memoir, about another country not so far away, not so long ago. I was struck in this book by what a difference good people, even with all their limitations, can make in places and times otherwise dangerous, treacherous, deeply immoral and inhumane. Kenya in the 50s/60s was not such an easy place to grow up for anyone, but especially for anyone indigenous. Fascinating to travel along with this boy as he becomes a man. I closed the book feeling hopeful for the human race and curious about what happened next. less

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