A Storm Blew in from Paradise

by Johannes Anyuru, Rachel Wilson-Broyles (Translator)

Overview

“Hypnotic…a sophisticated meditation on politics, race and ethnicity. (…) Anyuru’s prose is incandescent.” —Peter Kimani, The New York Times Book Review

"An extraordinary life in exile inspires a multilayered novel. (...) A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction." —Kirkus Review

P’s greatest dream is to fly. He sets out to become a Ugandan fighter pilot, training in an academy in Greece. When the 1971 Idi Amin coup in his homeland disrupts his plans, he defects and becomes a man on the run.

In this extraordinary novel based on his own father’s fate, Anyuru evokes P’s struggles in gorgeous, vivid prose. As a refugee, military-camp prisoner, and exile, P never gives up hope and continues to dream of life as a pilot. In a story told across two generations, P searches for identity and purpose in a world in which nowhere is home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642860511
Publisher:	World Editions
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Johannes Anyuru (Sweden, 1979), the son of a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, is a novelist and poet. A Storm Blew in from Paradise enjoyed immense success in Sweden and was awarded two major Swedish literature prizes: the Svenska Dagbladet Literature Prize and the Aftonbladet Literature Prize.

Read an Excerpt

‘Why did you come back?’ P has been sitting with his chin on his chest; he raises his eyes and looks across the table again. ‘I’ve already told you,’ he says. The room is windowless, and despite the fact that both men have unbuttoned several of their shirt buttons, they are sweating profusely; there are large wet spots on their backs and under their arms. The interrogator spreads out his fingers and drums his fingertips against each other. P looks down at the floor again. The concrete looks rough and desolate, like a photograph of the moon’s surface. ‘I was promised a job at a company outside Lusaka.’ P doesn’t understand why they’re holding him here, why they have brought him here at all. ‘I was going to fly a crop duster.’ ‘You were going to fly a crop duster.’ The men are speaking Swahili with one another. The interrogator looks through the papers on the table. His body is wiry, his face is fleshy and his features crude, his moustache is sprinkled with grey, he is nearly bald. His facial expressions are amused, cruel, sometimes artificially friendly. ‘A Ugandan fighter pilot travels from Rome to Zambia to fly a crop duster over fruit plantations?’ P wipes the sweat from his brow. They brought him here straight from the airport, and he hasn’t had anything to eat or drink all day. He is tired; he has the sense of being caught in a dream that is far too long, of swimming underwater, of being outside himself. The walls of the room are blue. Tendrils of bare cement appear where the paint is flaking. They look like continents on a map from another time, another world. ‘Send me back to Rome if you don’t believe me.’ A guard is standing in the corner of the room to the left, behind P’s back; his presence makes itself known only by the scraping of shoes against the floor. The interrogator changes position, rests his chin in his hand, places an index finger over his lips in reflection. He refuses to believe that anyone would return to this devastated continent without aims beyond the one P has given time and again: that he wanted to fly, that his only chance to fly was at a small company outside Lusaka in Zambia that sprays fruit plantations using propeller planes from colonial times. P screws up his eyes and feels the exhaustion rising in his head like a white roar. He feels ill. ‘It’s time you realize you won’t be allowed to return to your contact in Rome.’ ‘My contact?’ The interrogator pounds the table with his hand. ‘Who sent you to Zambia? Who do you work for?’ The guard behind P moves; his shoes scrape against the floor. ‘Well. How could we send you back to Rome? Officially, you already went back there, from Lusaka, didn’t you? You signed the deportation order yourself.’ The bald Tanzanian points at a document, then takes out yet another piece of paper and places it on the table. ‘Right here, you signed a statement to attest that you have been sent back to Lusaka, from here.’ P stares straight ahead, trying to think of something to say. He hasn’t been beaten, but violence is hanging in the air. ‘You ought to be more careful about where you put your signature. You no longer exist. It’s time you start answering our questions.’

Editorial Reviews

In his hypnotic semiautobiographical novel…Anyuru's prose is incandescent, effortlessly navigating the turbulence in his hero's life. The story frame is tight, focusing on a few months of P's incarceration and his subsequent exile, but it opens out into a sophisticated meditation on politics, race and ethnicity.

The New York Times Book Review - Peter Kimani

[A Storm Blew in from Paradise] is a tour de force of significant talent and deceptively understated craft in every paragraph and on every page. Written in easy, quiet diction and register, with painstaking attentiveness to the beauty and richness of literary language, it is an unblinking exploration of suffering, isolation, and physical and mental pain…Johannes Anyuru’s novel takes pains to gesture at the crisis of the survival of not just refugees and postcolonial migrants, but for the Anthropocene.” —Nandini Bhattacharya, The Literary Review

“In January 1971, Uganda’s president, Milton Obote, was deposed by his army commander, Idi Amin, (…) followed by a reign of terror. (…) In his hypnotic semiautobiographical novel, Johannes Anyuru, born in Sweden in 1979 to a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, peels back these layers of turmoil, revealing how Amin’s rise to power altered his father’s life and provided a prologue for his own. (…)Anyuru’s prose is incandescent, effortlessly navigating the turbulence in his hero’s life. The story frame is tight, focusing on a few months of P’s incarceration and his subsequent exile, but it opens out into a sophisticated meditation on politics, race and ethnicity.” —Peter Kimani, The New York Times Book Review

"A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction." —Kirkus Reviews

"While a resilient human can be broken, resilience itself can’t….a lesson that comes across clearly in Anyuru’s effective debut novel." —Rain Taxi

"Johannes Anyuru tenderly and poetically paints a masterful portrait of his father, of a voyage, of a quest, and of a life trapped by history. A sometimes terrible and unforgettable destiny which resounds like a cry of hope in the greatest hopelessness. A dangerous but life-saving voyage—be it simply to serve as reminder never again to be forgotten to lift our eyes to the heavens." —Actes Sud

"A strikingly beautiful text pierced with today’s doubts and theories about what creates true meaning in the life story of a single human being, as well as in history. This is a personal and universal novel about fatherlessness and identity, about the power of violence and about how we are all prisoners of time." —Aftonbladet

"Johannes Anyuru’s language hurls itself, like the main character of this book, straight into the sun, burning and scorching." —Helsingborgs Dagblad

"You feel the breeze from the storm out of paradise, you feel the large movements, you feel the hypnotic effect of a prose that can make you visualize the Angel of History zooming in on a building in Växjö. It is fantastic." —Expressen

"Anyuru’s searingly poetic style rescues his writing from bleakness and sentimentality alike as he confronts the lies we live by." —The Independent

"A tense, sparse re-telling of a life. This novel is a shining example of literature’s ability to give its readers a new perspective on the world, and an excellent way to learn about the emotional consequences of war and exile. I can honestly say that A Storm Blew in from Paradise is the best Swedish novel I have read in a long time. I would advise anyone interested in the writing process, in familial and national ties, in pain, healing, loss and rediscovery to read it." —Swedish Book Review

"A Storm Blew in from Paradise touchingly portrays the drama, absurdity, and insignificance of life as a political refugee." —MO Magazine

From the Publisher

2019-08-19
An extraordinary life in exile inspires a multilayered novel.

With perhaps a nod toward Kafka, Swedish novelist Anyuru (They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears, 2019, etc.) opens on a protagonist named only as P facing his interrogators, who ask him, "Why did you come back?" "Back" is to Africa, where P says he has returned with an offer to fly a crop duster in Zambia. He had left his native Uganda some years earlier to train as a fighter pilot in Greece. After Idi Amin staged his coup in 1971 and began executing some of those who had resisted him, P felt he could not return home. Greece, in the midst of its own political upheaval, said he could no longer fly. He had no home to return to in Africa, no home that would accept him in Europe. His passport had become worse than useless; he feared it might provide evidence against him. He has no idea what those holding him think his crimes might be. They have no idea where his loyalty lies. Perhaps he has no idea where his loyalty lies. "If you disappeared one day, just disappeared, who would miss you?" he was asked. And now he knows that no one would. Until a different narrative perspective enters the novel, a first-person narrator that the reader identifies with the author, an unnamed narrator who says that P is his father and that P has been telling him the stories that have filled the novel, stories that the novelist has perhaps embellished, has certainly recast in his own words. Like the father, the son has no country, no place where the marriage of his Swedish mother and Ugandan father, who are now divorced, makes him feel at home. "I travel between places I try to form into a nation," says the son. "I think about how I am a tree with its roots pulled up." In other words, like father, like son. The presence of the son signals to the reader that P survived and escaped, that he lived to become a father, while the son's story illuminates his father's final days. As the father's story progresses forward and the son's looks backward, they meet in a place filled with "all these stories that try to figure out my origins," says the son. "There is no history. I just come from here. From this summer, when my father is dying."

A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction.

Kirkus Reviews