The Gurugu Pledge

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, Jethro Soutar (Translator)

Overview

Praise for By Night the Mountain Burns:

"A delightfully candid, deceptively sober narrative voice."—Helen Oyeyemi, author of What is Not Yours is Not Yours

"A poignant novel by one of Equatorial Guinea's most celebrated authors . . . fascinating."—Publishers Weekly

"Survival, hope and despair wrestle in this surprising work by Equatorial Guinea's leading author."—Financial Times

On Mount Gurugu, overlooking the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the North African coast, desperate migrants gather before attempting to scale the city's walls and gain asylum on European soil. Inspired by firsthand accounts, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel has written an urgent novel, by turns funny and sad, bringing a distinctly African perspective to a major issue of our time.

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea. The Gurugu Pledge is his second novel, and follows his 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-shortlisted debut By Night The Mountain Burns, which was based on his memories of growing up on the remote island of Annobón. He made headlines in 2011 by embarking on a hunger strike, in an anti-government protest. He now lives exiled in Barcelona.

Jethro Soutar translates from Spanish and Portuguese. He has translated Argentinian and Brazilian crime novels, written two nonfiction books of his own, and recently co-edited The Football Crónicas, a collection of football writing from Latin America. He divides his time between London and Lisbon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908276940
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	08/15/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea. The Gurugu Pledge is his second novel, and follows his 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-shortlisted debut By Night The Mountain Burns, which was based on his memories of growing up on the remote island of Annobón. He made headlines in 2011 by embarking on a hunger strike, in an anti-government protest. He now lives exiled in Barcelona.
Jethro Soutar: Jethro Soutar translates from Spanish and Portuguese. He has translated Argentinian and Brazilian crime novels, written two non-fiction books of his own, and recently co-edited The Football Crónicas, a collection of football writing from Latin America. He divides his time between London and Lisbon.

Editorial Reviews

2017-07-04
A group of refugees in North Africa share their stories and bide their time, agonizingly close to freedom.Mount Gurugu in Morocco is near Melilla, a sliver of Spanish territory on the North African coast. Crossing to Melilla would allow the African refugees on the mountain to continue to Europe, but law enforcement on both sides are loath to have them. So the characters in this loosely plotted novel by Ávila Laurel (By Night the Mountain Burns, 2014) are stuck, left to philosophize and tell stories that alternate from comic to bleak. One man recalls a little girl who could morph into an old woman and back again; another recalls a provocative poem his father wrote; another recalls the gluttonous appetites of an aide to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Spinning yarns can be dispiriting, though ("Why do African stories always have to have unhappy endings?" one asks), so the men take modest balm in an ongoing soccer tournament. But politics and struggle are rarely far from their collective mind, and the novel intensifies in its latter pages, with stories of beatings by the Moroccan forestry police and abuse of women by men within the camp and a push to climb the fence into Melilla. Though there's not a strong arc to the novel, Ávila Laurel's layering of anecdotes makes it clear how dehumanizing the refugee experience is, with authorities looking for any excuse to expel them from the camp. "Police would have liked nothing better than to raze the camp and clear the mountain of black people," he writes. And though Ávila Laurel's prose (via Soutar's translation) isn't very stylish, it has the benefit of plainspoken, documentary force and breadth of vision, his narrative eye exploring a variety of elements of life in the camp but concluding with a unified struggle for optimism and liberation. An understated, somber, and highly observant sketchbook of lives on the margins.

Kirkus Reviews