Cannibal Book

Cannibal is Africa from the inside—inside the head of a woman who fears that the man she loves is CIA, that the film the're supposed to make is his cover, that she might be pregnant. A haunting story of survival, Cannibal lays bare a woman's greatest hungers. Known as Good-for-Nothing by the Africans —unfit for the climate, the work, or frienship, she struggles for recognition, and for her life. What she finds, wandering the savannah for months, are the "blue people", those with AIDS who have been left to die in an abandoned British outpost. But this is only counterpoint to her own predicament. "Trust hasn't enough syllables," she says, regarding her lover walking ahead of her. "He doesn't look at it. I can't not look, but he won't look." In Cannibal, nobody wants to look—the differences are too frightening, the truth too stark, the love too little. A step beyond Heart of Darkness, Cannibal is the virtual reality of exotic paranoia where, when the images break apart, Death grins out.

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the publisher's 1994 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for emerging writers, this fragmentary, darkly lyrical first novel conjures an Africa charged with menace. Svoboda, a poet and filmmaker who lived for a year in the Sudan, thrusts her nameless young American heroine into a nameless country, where she is filming a documentary with her manipulative, sexually demanding boyfriend, whom she suspects of being a CIA agent. Her other worries include her fear that she is pregnant and her struggle to earn the natives' respect. Feeling like an outsider, ``only a woman and just white,'' she goes by the epithet ``Good for Nothing,'' but by the story's end the natives rechristen her ``Daughter of the Nile.'' Horrific images of animal slaughter and dangers in the bush mingle with a grim encounter with ``blue people,'' victims of AIDS who roam the savannah or wait to die in a deserted British outpost. While Svoboda's stark imagery paints a visceral, powerful portrait of a milieu beset by mistrust and pain, the narrator's voice sometimes goes flat, and some readers may find her minutely self-analytical focus enervating. (Jan.)