WorldCat Linked Data Explorer

Turtle N-Triple JSON-LD RDF/XML HTML Contact Us Home

http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1107043660

The magic of Saida

The Magic of Saida tells the haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood--mysteries compounded by the fact that Kamal is the son of an absent Indian father from a well-to-do family and a Swahili African mother of slave ancestry.

Open All Close All

type

about

http://schema.org/about

author

contributor

creator

description

http://schema.org/description

  • "Driven by an old regret from his life as a successful doctor and family man, Kamal Punja journeys to his mother's native Africa to keep a childhood promise and confronts his unresolved mixed racial identity."
  • "Two-time Giller Prize winner Vassanji returns to the rich and haunting world of his most acclaimed, prize-winning novels, the East African coast. The haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood."
  • "Giller Prize-winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved--and the sense of self that has always eluded him. Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery. Raised by his African mother, deserted when he was four by his Indian father, married to a woman of Indian heritage, and the father of two wholly Westernized children, Kamal had reached a stage of both undreamed-of material success and disintegrating personal ties. Then, suddenly, he "stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken, "and set off to find the girl he had known as a child, to finally keep his promise to her that he would return. The girl was Saida, granddaughter of a great, beloved Swahili poet. Kamal and Saida were constant companions--he teaching her English and arithmetic, she teaching him Arabic script and Swahili poetry--and in his child's mind, she was his future wife. Until, when he was eleven, his mother sent him to the capital, Dar es Salaam, to live with his father's relatives, to "become an Indian "and thus secure his future. Now Kamal is journeying back to the village he left, into the maze of his long-unresolved mixed-race identity and the nightmarish legacy of his broken promise to Saida. At once dramatic, searching, and intelligent, The Magic of Saida"
  • "The Magic of Saida tells the haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood--mysteries compounded by the fact that Kamal is the son of an absent Indian father from a well-to-do family and a Swahili African mother of slave ancestry."@en

genre

http://schema.org/genre

  • "Ausgabe"
  • "Electronic books"@en
  • "Electronic books"
  • "Love stories"
  • "Love stories"@en
  • "Fiction"@en
  • "Fiction"
  • "Text"

name

http://schema.org/name

  • "The Magic of Saida"
  • "The magic of Saida"
  • "The magic of Saida"@en
  • "Magic of saida"@en

workExample