This is one of the most beautiful books I have read in years. Mda skillfullly evokes the tensions in contemporary South Africa for blacks caught between the tug of Western, technological culture and their identity in long-standing traditions. The story is given added substance by Mda's recounting the history of similar tensions from the nineteenth century, thus creating deep emotions that propel the characters. The story mixes family feuds, spats between the sexes, and sober deliberations about community versus individual choices, all told with a level of humor that underscores rather than undermines the importance of these issues for South Africa today.

I am an avid reader of African literature, both fiction and non-fiction (especially memoirs). I am always searching for contemporary non-white writers (the white writers are good, but it is not unreasonable to want other perspectives), so I was happy to learn about Zakes Mda from a recent New York Times book review column, and I ordered his two books immediately.

'Ways of Dying' is not about post-apartheid South Africa, though the blurb suggests that. I estimate it to be set in the late 1980s, shortly before the end of the old regime was drawing near.

It's a short book, but it's well written, and paints a vivid picture of life in South Africa. And yes, the 'black perspective' is different, and very interesting, and most welcome.

WAYS OF DYING is one of the most fascinating novels that I have read in years. The book is set in South Africa during a period that seems to span the end of the apartheid regime and focuses exclusively on the lives (and deaths) of poor South African Blacks in rural villages and urban shanty towns near what I suspect is Durban. Fans of Marquez will feel very much at home here in a world of "magical realism", yet while Mda may have been influenced by novels like 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE he has a voice that is uniquely his own, and one that I sense is profoundly rooted in Africa. Mda's "hero" is a self-declared Professional Mourner, who ekes out an existence at the edge of society. Some aspects of his life are almost grotesque in form, and the deaths that surround him are often truly horrifying, yet somehow I found this a profoundly optimistic and human book. In spite of the worst that the world can throw at him the Professional Mourner is able to transcend mere existence & by the end I was shamelessly rooting for him. I should add that I used this book in a course on the Turn of the Century, and one of my toughest-case students, whom I had failed to excite with anything else, came into my office today saying "I just LOVE Mda" You will too,

Like all recent South African fiction I have read, this one is full of horrible violence. But it is a love story, and much more optimistic than Coetzee or Brink.