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Ambiguous Adventure

Ambiguous Adventure

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Add This - Ambiguous Adventure

Written by Cheikh Hamidou KaneAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
Afterword by Wole SoyinkaAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Wole Soyinka
Translated by Katherine WoodsAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Katherine Woods

  • Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
    •  
  • Publisher: Melville House
  • On Sale: April 10, 2012
  • Price: $15.00
  • ISBN: 978-1-61219-054-9 (1-61219-054-5)
Also available as an eBook.
about this book

The celebrated classic by a groundbreaking figure in African literature addresses a critical contemporary issue–the collision of Islamic African values and Western culture

Hailed by Chinua Achebe as one of the greatest African novels ever written, this long-unavailable classic tells the tale of young Samba Diallo, a devout pupil in a Koranic religious school in Senegal whose parents send him to Paris to study philosophy. Unknown to Samba, it is his family’s desperate attempt to better understand the French colonial forces transforming their traditional way of life.

But for Samba, it’s an exciting adventure, and once in France he excels at his new studies and is delighted by both the French language and his new “marvelous comprehension and total communion” with the Western world. But Samba’s joy soon turns to doubt, as he finds himself torn between the materialistic secularism and isolation of French civilization and the deeper spiritual influences of his homeland. As Samba puts it: “I have become the two.”

Written in an elegant, lyrical prose, Ambiguous Adventure is a masterful expression of the immigrant experience and the repercussions of colonialism, and a great work of literature about the uneasy relationship between Islamic Africa and the West–a relationship more important today than ever before.

“Exceptionally beautiful... highly original... [and] oddly moving. Ambiguous Adventure is an indispensable book for anyone wishing to delve into the psychology of colonialism.”–Words Without Borders