The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

February 6, 2006
Orner's poetic, episodic examination of the varieties of life at an isolated Catholic primary school deep in the veld of Namibia coheres around the title character, a beautiful guerrilla fighter turned kindergarten teacher. Set in the early 1990s, soon after Namibia won independence from South Africa, this impressive debut novel (after Esther Stories
) is mostly narrated by Larry Kaplanski, a young volunteer who leaves Cincinnati, Ohio, to teach English and history at Farm Goas. Orner captures Goas's glacial rhythms, the extraordinary contrast between the desert's night and day, and the community's daily privations, including—for the single male teachers—a lust arising from boredom and loneliness. Mavala Shikongo, the principal's sister-in-law and the object of her colleagues' desires, reluctantly settles at Goas with her illegitimate baby boy, Tomo. Orner punctuates Larry's observations with brief interludes told from the points of view of other inhabitants of the school, and with haunting, cinematic imagery—boys do pull-ups on a huge cross; Mavala and Larry, who become friends and intimates, hold their afternoon trysts on the graves of Boer settlers. These telling snapshots stand in for the larger sociopolitical, cultural and religious issues facing a country emerging from a century of colonization.

Starred review from April 15, 2006
In Orner's beautiful debut, Larry Kaplanski, a teacher from Ohio, volunteers at a boys' Catholic primary school in the newly independent Namibia. The climate and landscape in the remote town of Goas are relentless -too hot or too cold, drought-stricken, and barren. Solace comes from the school's collection of characters and the stories they tell one another, stories fraught with both public and private devastation. Mavala Shikongo, a combat veteran who returns to the school to teach, a child unaccountably in her wake, is the irresistible force of gravity in a place occupied by men and boys who, for scarcity, are starving for -woman. - But the restless and searching Mavala is not as sure as gravity after all. Author of the short story collection "Esther Stories", which received the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Goldberg Prize from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture, Orner is a miraculous writer with a stunning ability to compel the reader softly with ever-increasing increments. Inspired by Orner's own experiences in Namibia, this novel so evokes the place and its people that, by the end of the book, readers will find themselves reluctantly brushing the sandy loam of Goas off their feet to the reverberating voices of its inhabitants. Highly recommended for all public libraries." -Jyna Scheeren, Troy P.L., NY"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2006
Talk about stories never told. Larry Kaplanski from Cincinnati is a volunteer teacher in a small, rough all-boys Catholic school in the Namibian desert in 1991, just after independence. He shares a shack with colleagues and is in love with beautiful Mavala Shikongo, who is a kindergarten teacher and veteran guerilla fighter from the antiapartheid "struggle." The weight of the brutal colonial and apartheid past is always there, but the freedom story is never reverential, and the taut vignettes, anguished and sometimes hilarious, are about ordinary people now. The novel is more situation than story, but there are scenes that will stay with you forever: the three illegal refugee children from across the border, who only want school, and then are gone after three days; the drought stories; the fence building (Why? How?); the farce of the Cincinnati community that sends an old broken piano "for the adorable little school somewhere in deepest Africa." Orner, a prizewinning short story writer, has lived in Namibia, and his debut novel brings close those far from the centers of power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)