Mount Pleasant
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A majestic tale of colonialism and transformation, Patrice Nganang's Mount Pleasant tells the astonishing story of the birth of modern Cameroon, a place subject to the whims of the French and the Germans, yet engaged in a cultural revolution.
In 1931, Sara is taken from her family and brought to Mount Pleasant as a gift for Sultan Njoya, a ruler cast into exile by French colonialists. Merely nine years old, she is on the verge of becoming the sultan’s 681st wife. But when she is dragged to Bertha, the long-suffering slave charged with training Njoya’s brides, Sara’s life takes a curious turn. Bertha sees within this little girl her son Nebu, who died tragically years before, and she saves Sara from her fate by disguising her as her son. In Sara’s new life as a boy she bears witness to the world of Sultan Njoya---a magical yet vulnerable community of artists and intellectuals---and learns of the sultan’s final days in the Palace of All Dreams and the sad fate of Nebu, the greatest artist their culture had ever seen.
Seven decades later, a student returns home to Cameroon to learn about the place it once was, and she finds Sara, silent for years, ready to tell her story. But her serpentine tale, entangled by flawed memory and bursts of the imagination, reinvents history anew. The award-winning novelist Patrice Nganang’s Mount Pleasant is a lyrical resurrection of early-twentieth-century Cameroon and an elegy to the people swept up in the forces of colonization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nganang, born in Cameroon, brings to life his home country, one rocked by the forces of colonialism first the Germans, then English, then French through the strange, poetic, and fantastical memories of Sara, "the doyenne of Mount Pleasant." In 1931 Sara, at the age of nine, is given by her mother to Sultan Njoya, the Bamum leader exiled by the French, and taken to the community at Mount Pleasant. Bertha, an academic in the present, is researching Cameroon's history when she meets Sara, who had an influential Bertha in her past: breaking an eight-decade silence, Sara recounts how she came under the tutelage of Bertha, teacher and keeper of Sultan Njoya's wives, and becomes transformed by her new master into the boy Nebu, Bertha's son. Sara is physically transformed, dressing like a boy and stunting her breast growth with scalding rocks. The narrative is also transformed, allowing Nganang to show the turbulence of early Cameroon through the eyes of Bertha's original son Nebu. Nganang's story weaves from past to present, from one genre-bending tale to the next a sculptor concerned with Platonic beauty, a man in a coma awakening to wildlife in a mystical waltz, a spirit haunting a cocoa plantation from memory to dreams, from the first Nebu to the second, from history to fantasy: "paths that twisted and turned through unexpected lives, a paradise of surprises." Readers will slowly uncover a history of Cameroon that parallels, mirrors, and subverts history in service of Nganang's brilliant mythmaking.