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Read Chronicler Of The Winds (2006)

Chronicler of the Winds (2006)

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3.84 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
1595580581 (ISBN13: 9781595580580)
Language
English
Publisher
the new press

Chronicler Of The Winds (2006) - Plot & Excerpts

看完了Hanning Mankel的”chronicler of winds”. (11~17,200页,看了7天)The first half is 4 star; the other half is 3 star. I did not read any other novels by Mankell although I know he is a thrilling or detective writer. But Chronicler of the winds is hardly matched to his style.Actually the story is a fable rather than a general fiction story, which is touching and revealing.Below are the digests. The last words Nelio said before dying “My body is so small” implies lot. How could we to face the world full of crimes? How could we be able to make something for it? Maybe the dreams exist only in children’s minds.很难用英文表达自己的思想。 用中文说吧。前半部Nelio痛苦和悲惨的命运让人动容,世界是如此的残酷,为什么有这么多的罪恶存在,这个问题似乎没有答案。全书唯一的悬念是Nelio的枪伤。 但最后,原因已经无足轻重了。在这个什么罪恶都可能发生的社会里,谁都有可能见不到明天的太阳。 一个10岁男孩,一个心理上似乎已经很老的10岁男孩, 一个善良纯真有正义感的男孩,是无法被这个充满罪恶的社会所容的,就像那个白化病的矮人Yabu Bata一样,即时花更多的时间,也无法在这里找到自己真正想要的路。书写的很绝望,Nelio死后的地震似乎在报复这个残酷的社会. 这不是一本作者擅长的惊悚小说,而是一本社会小说。整体语言比较简洁,故事讲的不错,但后半部的部分情节有些拖沓。=========='If you're afraid, it's like you're suffering from an insatiable hunger,' he said. 'But if you're anxious, you can fight off your anxiety.’害怕和担忧的区别。 害怕如同忍受饥饿;而担忧能够击退焦虑。?==========If we refused to be liberated, he would kill us all.如果我们拒绝被解放,他就会杀死我们全部。==========I kept asking myself: Where does the evil in human beings come from? Why does barbarism always wear a human face? That's what makes barbarism so inhuman.野蛮为什么长着人的面孔?==========Hermenegildo, had told him that the worst thing that could happen to anyone was to find himself alone. A person without a family was nothing.对任何人来说,最糟糕的事情就是发现自己孤独。没有家庭的人没有一切。==========A road can be both long and short. It depends on where you're coming from and where you're going.’路可长可短,取决于你从哪来和到哪去。=========='There are only two roads in life. The road of foolishness, which leads a person straight to ruin. It's the road you take if you act against your own judgement. The other road is the one you must follow, the one that leads a person in the right direction.’两条路,1条愚蠢一条正确。 简化了活着的意义,但是否事实即时如此?==========It was pure chance that I was there. But isn't life made up of a long chain of chance moments?’生命不就是由各种机遇串成的长链么?======='Isn't there something that is greater than everything else? Greater than mothers and full stomachs and distant villages and clothes and cars and money?' They lay there in silence while Nelio considered. An ID card,' he said at last. 'A document with a photo that says that you are who you are and nobody else.' 'I knew you would think of it,' said Cosmos. '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.’什么更重要?那些让你有别于他人的东西。=========='There are two roads. One will lead you in the right direction, the other is the path of foolishness and will lead a person straight to ruin.’又说了一遍。=========='A shadow is not a house that can be owned,’阴影不是可占有的房子。==========He was living in a world where bandits burned villages, where people were constantly fleeing, where the roads were lined with all the dead and all the bombed and burned wrecks of cars and buses and carts. He was living in a world where the dead were not allowed to be dead. They were chased out of their graves or out of their trees; they were in flight just like those who were still alive. And the living – they were so poor that they were forced to send their children to live on the streets like rats. But even the rats were better off, because at least they had their fur coats when the nights were cold.人不如鼠,在某些地方,这仍是现实。==========I thought that for the poor, for people like Nelio and myself, death is the one thing that life gives us for nothing.死亡是生命不求回报的给予。=========='He taught me to look at the stars when life was hard. When I returned my gaze to the earth, whatever had been overwhelming would seem small and simple.’生活艰难时抬头仰望漫天星斗,再回望四周,所有喧嚣都如此渺小简单。==========My body is so small.==========the insight that Nelio had given me up there on the roof, that a human being is always at the centre of the world, no matter where he finds himself, now seemed to me quite self-evident.无论在哪里发现自己,哪里就是世界的中心。==========

The CHRONICLER OF THE WINDS is a work of such haunting imagery, vivid emotional appeal, and serious intent that any attempt to characterize it or review it is doomed to reveal the faltering skills of the commentator. This is a novel of such infinite interpretation, mythic splendor, and humanistic intent that it cannot simply be read, but must be savored as a rare literary treat.Mankell, noted for his Wallander detective series, provides a diversion from his earlier writings to enter the world of Magic Realism...and indeed, this is a CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, although I would argue that the influences are largely African (notably, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, and, most importantly, Mia Couto) rather than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and other Latin American authors. Mankell, director of the Teatro Avenida, spends much of his time in Mozambique, which is the setting for this novel. (Although unnamed, I can verify that Maputo is the city in which the action takes place.) Clearly, however, the tale is one that could be related among the unwanted urchins of any major city, but most tragically in the Third World.The narrator, Jose Antonio Maria Vaz, is a baker by trade until he meets the novel's protagonist Nelio, a dying 10-year sage of the streets, who has a Scheherazade-like tale to relate over nine nights. After escaping the death and destruction of his village by bandits, Nelio begins his metaphysical and actual journey by meeting a "white dwarf," who has lost his way for "nineteen years, eight months, and four days," a wise old lizard woman, and a drunken con man much like Fagin. Later, after finding a sleeping space within the belly of a colonial equestrian statue, he encounters a variety of street kids, some of whom envisage sea monsters, grow vegetables with dirt in their pockets, and even seemingly turn themselves invisible to invade department stores and the presidential palace. Nelio, despite his youth and small stature, possesses both the moral and spiritual authority to lead this band of children in their efforts to survive the horrific threats and relentless cruelties of the mean urban streets. The ordeals of Nelio's life and death so overwhelm the narrator that he determines to abandon his profession and devote himself to reciting the cautionary tale that he has listened to over successive nights.Although Mankell offers an almost Hobbesian view of life as "solidary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," there is a redemptive quality to the strength of Nelio and the street children as he depicts their efforts to fight for the right to dream, hope, and live.

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

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