Ways of Dying

by Zakes Mda

Book Overview

Winner of the M-Net Book Prize
Shortlisted for the CNA and Noma Awards

In Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda's acclaimed first novel, Toloki is a "professional mourner" in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa. Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312420919
• ISBN13: 9780312420918
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Simply Great

This book is simply great, it was a lot more than i had expected...i recomend it very much to anyone who is looking for an intersting piece that explores what the end of of one of the darkest times in south africa

one of south africas black celebrated authors

Recently i had the pleasure of reading material from one of South Africa's most celebrated black authors, Zakes Mda. An Oxford University Press published book titled "Ways of Dying", this is a South African fiction selection. Being a fiction, it is wtitten in a very creative manner that i could hardly associate with any of the books i had read before. This is a story of love written with expectation of one's imagination to take over. The wording, grouping, style and context of this book make it so. It is mainly based on two characters and the way they live their lives. Toloki is a man consumed with the profession of mourning the dead whilst his love Noria has lost immensely through life, still has the ability to show Toloki how to live. There are various different characters in this novel, which make it as interesting. Even with their differences, they jell well together making the story line easily readable and understandably creative enough to follow. The vast lines go from Toloki who grew up as the ugliest boy in the village and people taking no note of him to the same character turning into a man who is widely respected for his chosen profession in the city outskirts where it was the only place he found recognition. In the village where he grew up Toloki had a friend who had the identity he wanted. Her name was Noria. Toloki hated and loved her with the same heart. Noria was everyone's favorite in the villafe; she had her mother's beauty and brought all the boys and towns' man attention and had the most amazing laugh that made all the village people happy whenever they heard it. When she was sad, everyone was too. The writing style used in this book is that which is very easy to follow. There are no bombastic (big) words used nor are there times where you could lose the story. Every word flows into a paragraph that combines to others that make this a brilliantly written story. One of the other things that make this an interesting read is the humor infused. This is a brilliant written book that everyone with a sense of adventure and imagination will enjoy.

A wonderful terrible book

WAYS OF DYING is one of the most fascinating novels that I have read in years. The book is set in South Africa during a period that seems to span the end of the apartheid regime and focuses exclusively on the lives (and deaths) of poor South African Blacks in rural villages and urban shanty towns near what I suspect is Durban. Fans of Marquez will feel very much at home here in a world of "magical realism", yet while Mda may have been influenced by novels like 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE he has a voice that is uniquely his own, and one that I sense is profoundly rooted in Africa. Mda's "hero" is a self-declared Professional Mourner, who ekes out an existence at the edge of society. Some aspects of his life are almost grotesque in form, and the deaths that surround him are often truly horrifying, yet somehow I found this a profoundly optimistic and human book. In spite of the worst that the world can throw at him the Professional Mourner is able to transcend mere existence & by the end I was shamelessly rooting for him. I should add that I used this book in a course on the Turn of the Century, and one of my toughest-case students, whom I had failed to excite with anything else, came into my office today saying "I just LOVE Mda" You will too,

Best South African writer I have read

Like all recent South African fiction I have read, this one is full of horrible violence. But it is a love story, and much more optimistic than Coetzee or Brink.

Painful in it's optimism.

Beautifully written. Story recalls memories of South Africa. Even though the most terrible things happen throughout the book the author makes it's tone light and somewhat ironical.The "theme" is death and ways that people die, thought the story is about two people from the same village, things that happened in their lives and how the meet again and go on from there.The optimism of the main character is painful yet not unrealistic. I enjoyed recognising the typical South Africna expressions and the atmospere.