Mda, Zakes. Ways of Dying. Picador Press, 1995.
Reason read: Ways of Dying was awarded the M-Net Book Award in September. Read in recognition of that event.
Told in the collective voice of “we,” Ways of Dying unfolds the story of Toloki and Noria. The community owns the story, but keeps an emotionally safe distance. Toloki makes his living as a professional mourner. What an interesting vocation. Toloki will be there if you need someone to help carry a casket; he will wail as if he just lost his own best friend, or he can rescue a body from the morgue before officials dump it into a mass grave. Toloki’s most important task is to attend funerals to comfort the mourners. It is at one such funeral that he reconnects with someone from his childhood. As children, Toloki was always jealous of the beautiful and mysterious Noria. No matter how hard he tried to please his father, Noria was the only one his father had eyes for. Noria acted as Toloki’s father’s artistic muse. Now, years later, Noria is a changed woman after suffering so much heartache and loss. Together, they forge a new friendship.
Confession: there was so much misery in Ways of Dying that I could not trust a happy ending.
Lines I liked, “That Mountain Woman had razor blades in her tongue” (p 30), “If you don’t praise yourself while you are alive, no one else will” (p 147), and “He is willing to find more ways of living” (p 192).
Author fact: Mda was a visiting professor at Yale at the the time of Ways of Dying‘s publication.
Book trivia: Ways of Dying won the M-Net Book Prize.
Setlist: “Silent Night”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “South Africa” (p 215).
~*LunaSea*~ 