The Whale Caller
A Novel
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration." --The New York Times
The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda's fifth novel, is his most enchanting and accessible book yet-a romantic comedy of sorts in which the changing face of post-apartheid South Africa is revealed through prodigious, lyrical storytelling.
As the novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus, on the country's west coast, is overrun with whale watchers-foreign tourists wearing floral shirts and toting expensive binoculars, determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the Whale Caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he calls Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the Whale Caller frets like a jealous lover-oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him.
After much ado-which Mda relates with great relish-the two misfits fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their on-again, off-again relationship suggests something of the fitful nature of change in post-apartheid South Africa, where just living from one day to the next can be challenge enough.
Mda has spoken of the end of apartheid as a lifting of the South African novelist's burden to write on political subjects. With The Whale Caller, he has written a tender, charming novel-the work of a virtuoso among international writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this follow-up to last year's excellent The Madonna of Excelsior, the title character, in leading an off-shore "dance" with a whale named Sharisha by blowing a kelp horn, spills his seed in his trousers. Things pretty much go downhill from there in Mda's unconvincing fifth novel, a hodgepodge of allegory, pop psychology, faux na ve diction and occasional references to the new South Africa. The Whale Caller, as he is called wearyingly throughout, is torn between his very real lust for Sharisha, whom he courts from the shore, and his inarticulate affection for Saluni, the town drunk. Saluni herself is torn between love for the Whale Caller, love of the bottle and what she calls an "addiction" to a pair of singing, nine-year old sisters whom she has dubbed the Bored Twins. Aside from Saluni's jealousy of Sharisha, all goes well until the Bored Twins get to record an LP, Saluni's lust for fame is fabricated and disappointed within the space of a few pages, and tragedy befalls both of the Whale Caller's leading ladies. But the symbolism at the heart of this novel (the unattainable whale) is pushed so ludicrously far and left so carelessly unmoored to believable characters or real-world specifics that the novel drifts away from the reader.
