Daniel

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Daniel

Title:

Daniel

Added Title:

Vindens son.

Author:

Mankell, Henning, 1948-2015, author.

Murray, Steven T.

Summary:

Hans Bengler travels from his native Sweden to Cape Town in the 1870s for entomological purposes and impulsively adopts a San orphan whom he names Daniel, but when he brings Daniel back with him and asks Daniel to begin calling him "father" and adopt European customs, Daniel starts having nightmares about his late parents and becomes determined to return to his home.

Audience:

Adult Follett Library Resources

General Note:

Originally published in Swedish as Vindens son.

Physical Description:

279 p. ; 25 cm.

Subject Term:

Boys -- Fiction.

San (African people) -- Sweden -- Fiction.

Africans -- Sweden -- Fiction.

Author(s):

Murray, Steven T.

Publisher:

New Press,

Publication Date:

2010

ISBN:

9781595581938

Publication Information:

New York : New Press, c2010.

Call Number:

MANKELL

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607002390527	Adult Fiction	MANKELL	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander novels: The "haunting and fascinating" tale of a young boy's harrowing odyssey from Africa to Sweden ( Booklist ).

In the 1870s, Hans Bengler arrives in Cape Town from Småland, Sweden, driven by a singular desire: to discover an insect no one has seen before and name it after himself. But then he impulsively adopts a young San orphan boy whose parents have been killed by European colonists. Christening the boy Daniel, Hans brings him back to Sweden--a quite different specimen than he first contemplated.

Daniel is told to call Bengler "Father," and to knock on doors and bow. He continually struggles to understand this strange new land of mud and snow that surrounds and seemingly entraps him. At the same time, he is haunted by visions of his murdered parents calling him home to Africa. Knowing that the only way home is by sea, he decides he must learn to walk on water if he is ever to reclaim his true place in the world.

Evocative and sometimes brutal, the novel follows Daniel through a series of tragedies and betrayals that culminate in a shocking act. Henning Mankell, a world-renowned "master of atmosphere," offers this "quiet tragedy" with a ruthless elegance all his own ( The Boston Globe ).

Author Notes

Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm, Sweden on February 3, 1948. He left secondary school at the age of 16 and worked as a merchant seaman. While working as a stagehand, he wrote his first play, The Amusement Park. His first novel, The Stone Blaster, was released in 1973. His other works included The Prison Colony that Disappeared, Daisy Sisters, The Eye of the Leopard, The Man from Beijing, Secrets in the Fire, The Chronicler of the Wind, Depths, and I Die, But My Memory Lives On. He also wrote the Kurt Wallander series, which have been adapted for film and television, and the Joel Gustafson Stories series. A Bridge to the Stars won the Rabén and Sjögren award for best children's book of the year.

He was committed to the fight against AIDS. He helped build a village for orphaned children and devoted much of his spare time to his "memory books" project, where parents dying from AIDS are encouraged to record their life stories in words and pictures. He was also among the activists who were attacked and arrested by Israeli forces as they tried to sail to the Gaza strip with humanitarian supplies in June 2010. He died from cancer on October 5, 2015 at the age of 67.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Set in the 1870s, this earnest and heartbreaking story opens with the unsolved murder of a mentally retarded Swedish girl, but this isn't a mystery in the mode of Mankell's international bestselling Kurt Wallander novels (Firewall, etc.). Hans Bengler, a Swedish entomologist, travels across southern Africa in search of undiscovered insects. In the desert, he finds an orphaned native boy, whom he adopts on impulse and calls Daniel. Bengler brings Daniel back to Sweden to exhibit him for money. A link eventually emerges between the girl's murder and Daniel's story, which dramatically illuminates the evils of colonialism (Bengler notes that he "had to make the important decisions for these black people") and the cultural chasm between Europeans and Africans. Mankell fully understands Daniel's radically different cultural perspective and indelibly captures the boy's longing to return to his homeland and the tragic consequences of his forced exile. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Review

Although it opens with the discovery of a corpse, this newly translated stand-alone work by the author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries is a mournful historical novel, not a detective story. In the late 1870s, amateur Swedish entomologist Hans Bengler journeys to the Kalahari Desert to discover an insect he can name after himself. Instead, he encounters an African boy whose family has been massacred. Bengler impetuously adopts the child, whom he calls Daniel, and the two sail to Sweden, where the book shifts primarily to Daniel's perspective. As Bengler exhibits him to ogling whites in cramped lecture halls, Daniel desperately yearns for the desert, a longing sharpened by dreamtime visions of his dead parents. Mired in loneliness, he conceives a fateful plan to learn to walk on water so that he can traverse the seas and return to Africa. VERDICT Glum by even Scandinavian standards, Mankell's narrative radiates a haunting intensity despite measured pacing. The dearth of suspense likely will disappoint Wallander fans; this is strictly for readers unafraid of bleak literary fiction and those who enjoy Mankell's other fiction (e.g., The Man from Beijing).-Annabelle Mortensen, Skokie P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.