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Tim O'Brien

454. Henning Mankell - Kennedy's Brain


The book referred to above.

I think it is brilliant, but, as I thought before when I first read it, the conclusion left me baffled (or just confused).

What had Henrik discovered?? A conspiracy to use native Africans as guinea pigs for the development of an aids vaccine to benefit the white culture? Or just to murder black Africans, ie eugenics. I couldn’t get clear about this; either I am missing something or there is a deliberate ambiguity.

But otherwise a great book; the narrator, Louise, is a wonderfully drawn portrait of a middle aged woman who has lost her only son in baffling circumstances.

Echoes of Heart of Darkness, and possibly Dante’s Inferno (which I have never read) as she journeys into the African underworld to try to unravel the mystery.


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