The Cattle Killing

by John Edgar Wideman

Overview

In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing—the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination—the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395877500
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/15/1997
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and the story collection God’s Gym. He is the recipient of two PEN/ Faulkner Awards and has been nominated for the National Book Award.

Table of Contents

In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young black itinerant preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets him into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itslef into white and black, white over black. Spiraling outward from its core image of the Xhosa people's ritual destructuion of their herd in vain attempt to resist European domination - the cattle killing - the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, England, and South Africa of yesterday and today. About anscestors, about family, about spiritual as well as actual enslavement, The Cattle Killing is ultimately a triumphant book of reckoning.

Editorial Reviews

"Captivating Language and emotion" The San Francisco Chronicle

"Fiercely beutiful and deeply affecting" Vanity Fair —

From the Publisher

"Fiercely beautifuly and deeply affecting."

Vanity Fair

A complex and challenging new novel from the author of Sent For You Yesterday (1985), Fever (1989), and other rich, provocative examinations of America's heritage of racial injustice.

Wideman's narrator tells the "story" his book promises to contain to his father, who is also a writer. It's a static one, essentially a series of tableaux, with many protagonists. Among them is an 18th-century black preacher who has escaped from a "stricken city" (Philadelphia) in time of plague "to seek refuge in the peaceful environs of the countryside where I wandered preaching the word of God." The book's title refers to the African Xhosa tribe, who also figure in the narrative: Following the dictates of a false prophecy, they destroy their cattle herd believing that this will prevent their enslavement by European colonizers. Also central to the complex narrative are the mysterious appearances of a disabled young African woman (sometimes mute, sometimes blind) who represents to those who view her, variously, a teacher, a savior, an accuser, and a judge. The novel quite deliberately eschews linear plot, ranging across three centuries, circling back repeatedly to focus, from constantly shifting perspectives, on retold and transformed stories: of a racially mixed couple murdered by their neighbors; a black bishop who courageously removed his congregation from "the white people's church" in 18th-century Philadelphia; and an aristocratic white family that casts out a baby infected with the plague, bringing on its own eventual annihilation. Wideman, two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, is an accomplished and powerful stylist, and the sheer formal beauty of his tense, dramatic, image-filled sentences gives his angry summa of our violent history a commanding authority.

A dazzling apocalyptic meditation—and a brilliantly imagined portrayal of 18th-century America—that nevertheless lacks coherence and presents a web of enigmatic symbolism so thickly woven that many willing readers simply won't know what to make of it.

Kirkus Reviews