A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali - Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Informationen zum Autor GIL COURTEMANCHE was a journalist specializing in international politics, and the author of several non-fiction works and novels. He travelled to Rwanda four times and produced an award-winning TV documentary,  The Gospel of AIDS . It was ten years after his first trip to Rwanda that he wrote  Un dimanche à la piscine a Kigali, which spent more than a year on Quebec bestseller lists and won the French version of  Canada Reads. In 2006,  Un dimanche à la piscine a Kigali  was released as a feature film. He died in 2011.  PATRICIA CLAXTON is one of Canada's foremost translators. Two-time winner of the Governor General's Award for Translation, she has worked with Gabrielle Roy, Nicole Brossard and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, among others. Klappentext The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel is a magnet for a discrete group of Kigali residents: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates and prostitutes. Among these patrons is the hotel waitress Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a foreign journalist. As the two slide into a love affair and prepare for their wedding, we see the world around them coming apart. This landmark novel confronts the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in April 1994, when the Hutu-led government orchestrated genocide against the Tutsi people. A denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali has at its heart a shattering love story, told with profound compassion and consummate control. Leseprobe Chapter One In the middle of Kigali there is a swimming pool surrounded by deckchairs and a score of tables all made of white plastic. And forming a huge L overhanging this patch of blue stands the Hôtel des Mille-Collines, with its habitual clientele of international experts and aid workers, middle-class Rwandans, screwed-up or melancholy expatriates of various origins, and prostitutes. All around the pool and hotel in lascivious disorder lies the part of the city that matters, that makes the decisions, that steals, kills, and lives very nicely, thank you. The French Cultural Centre, the UNICEF offices, the Ministry of Information, the embassies, the president’s palace (recognizable by the tanks on guard), the crafts shops popular with departing visitors where one can unload surplus black market currency, the radio station, the World Bank offices, the archbishop’s palace. Encircling this artificial paradise are the obligatory symbols of decolonization: Constitution Square, Development Avenue, Boulevard of the Republic, Justice Avenue, and an ugly, modern cathedral. Farther down, almost in the underbelly of the city, stands the red brick mass of the Church of the Holy Family, disgorging the poor in their Sunday best into crooked mud lanes bordered by houses made of the same clay. Small red houses -- just far enough away from the swimming pool not to offend the nostrils of the important -- filled with shouting, happy children, with men and women dying of AIDS and malaria, thousands of small households that know nothing of the pool around which others plan their lives and, more importantly, their predictable deaths. Jackdaws as big as eagles and as numerous as house sparrows caw all around the hotel gardens. They circle in the sky, waiting, like the humans they’re observing, for the cocktail hour. Now is when the beers arrive, while the ravens are alighting on the tall eucalyptus trees around the pool. When the ravens have settled, the buzzards appear and take possession of the topmost branches. Woe betide the lowly jackdaw that fails to respect the hierarchy. Birds behave like humans here. Precisely as the buzzards are establishing their positions around the pool, precisely then, the French paratroopers on the plastic deckchairs begin putting on Rambo airs. They sniff all th...

Product details

• Authors: Gil Courtemanche
• Publisher: Random House Canada
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 18.07.2023
• EAN: 9781039008847
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3900884-7
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 14 mm
• Series: Penguin Modern Classics (Canada)
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature