PETER ORNER

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
(Little Brown, 2006)

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, April 23, 2006:
The struggle that really concerns Orner is that low-intensity conflict between consenting adults everywhere. To read "Second Coming" is to wonder how and when he'll repackage Forster's famous epigram ("Only connect") about human need, but never to doubt that he will. Larry finally delivers the message personally, with cheerful, animal obviousness. "Those dogs are us," he notes, as two clumsy mutts try, and fail, to couple, "our own fundamental inability to connect."

Orner has a gift for language. He writes with confident economy, evoking and peopling his parched, lonely world with patient detail — the scraggled bushes that "looked like they'd rather be dead," the sky "like watered-down milk," the residual German, crazy from the heat, who is, of course, a butcher. As Orner unspools their quirks through sharp, eccentric dialogue and interior asides, his characters grow distinct without ever becoming Gothic. He hits the right notes and no others, having reworked some of the text from stories published years before. Even the chapters are perfect miniatures, averaging two pages.

Orner's thrift only heightens the longing that vibrates throughout the novel. He has written a starvation diary about desire, with as much sexual tension as a bodice-buster. The deprivation gets so extreme that Orner plays it for laughs. The men of Goas stew in their desert monastery cells, transfixed by lust, searching for redemption in risqué beer ads from ancient magazines, abject in the rare presence of flesh-and-blood females. The outline of a breast through a rain-soaked T-shirt becomes a sacred vision and the day it occurred holy, forever remembered as "The Deluge of Dikeledi." And evidence that other living things might actually be getting lucky is torture, be they "bedraggled pigeons" or old married folk.

When a young woman named Mavala Shikongo wanders onto this barren stage set, she's doomed to look like salvation. Larry is impelled toward her helplessly: she, meanwhile, decides he'll do. The reader knows how their romance will end before they touch, as Orner hints in the fate of a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. "The hopeful ones . . . drowsy from unrequited aching . . . they were simple to kill."

But they do touch, and try to connect; Mavala begins the affair by laying her head on Larry's stomach. The gesture seems almost lurid after half a book of drought. Then, lest the physical facts disappoint, the narrative turns chaste. We have only flashes of what transpires between the lovers: a clenched fist, a birthmark below Mavala's breast. Their conversations are what Orner wants to share, and words fail them. They cannot bridge the divide. "You think I don't know I'm on vacation?" Larry snaps. "This," Mavala says, "is nothing."

Their connection was a mirage. Mavala disappears from Goas; Larry returns to Ohio. Ultimately what endures is his simple bond with the other male inmates, as Orner shows with a typically frugal postscript. Ten years after his Namibian vacation, he gets a letter. "Your letters have not gone unread," says a fellow teacher. "We've heard you, is what I'm trying to say." Larry has never stopped reaching out, and this time someone has reached back.

Mark Schone is a senior contributing writer at Spin magazine.


SALON.COM:
To complete your tour, end with someone neither Zimbabwean, nor writing of Zimbabwe, but with a novel set in Namibia by an American, Peter Orner. I only include "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" (2006) as required reading because it is a book of such enviable brilliance that it is, I think, the standard by which all writing of this southern African region should be set. Based on the author's own year teaching in the veld, the protagonist, Larry Kaplanski, finds himself hopelessly in love with an African freedom fighter. Tellingly, his stolen, ecstatic afternoons with her are spent on the tombs of three Boer settlers. So the themes are darkly ours, but Orner has a poet's generous soul and he somehow frees us from our skins (black or white), from our genders, our wars, our hunger. Perhaps because he is not one of us, he is able to see beauty in us where we see only shadows, and the result is heady, exultant stuff.

Alexandra Fuller, author of Dont' Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat.

GUARDIAN UK:
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, by Peter Orner (Little, Brown, US). This book, about a white American teacher in Namibia, has the same sort of episodic structure, lyrical prose and completely hypnotic effect as the novels of Michael Ondaatje. In Orner's novel, the American and his Namibian fellow teachers, stuck in a middle-of-nowhere boarding school, all fall in love with a former guerrilla named Mavala Shikongo, who's just moved to town with her toddler. The men while away the time torturing themselves about her unattainability, and through Mavala Shikongo's past we learn about the bloody history of Namibia. It's a gorgeously written book, very funny, and bursting with soul.

Dave Eggers, author of What Is The What

MIAMI HERALD:
The sweeping power of storytelling lies at the heart of this transcendent debut, an insightful and revelatory novel told with authority, historical practicality and a palpable sense of wonder. The book is set in Namibia after its brutal war for independence, specifically at a school on a remote farm called Goas, where water is a novelty, and the lonely, chatty teachers tell stories, especially about combat veteran Mavala Shikongo, who arrived and then disappeared as suddenly as rain on the African veld. Now Mavala is back with a child and no inclination to tell where she's been, and American volunteer Larry Kaplanski is doing a poor job of not falling in love with her.

Orner, author of the terrific collection The Esther Stories, lived in Namibia and brings the veld to crackling life even as it withers from paralyzing drought. Each brief chapter is an eloquent vignette of yearning, of detailed, lingering images -- starving cattle dying with their eyes open; Larry and Mavala making love atop the graves of Boer settlers in the vicious afternoon heat; a battered Datsun stuck in the sand while its owner spins stories of the past, of African heroes, desolate ghosts, love triangles, anything to remove his listeners from the hard truths at Goas.

Connie Ogle

CHICAGO TRIBUNE:
Not much has been written about Namibia by serious Western writers, but when they turn to it they write rather splendidly on the subject. Take Thomas Pynchon's novel "V," published in 1963, with its breathtaking set-piece about the early 20th Century German colonial war against the native Hereros. Welsh ex-patriate Jon Manchip White produced a fine non-fiction book a few years after that, "The Land God Made in Anger," and decades later his friend (and mine) Nicholas Delbanco published in the quarterly Salmagundi "Letter From Namibia," a long, dramatic essay about his stay on a farm in the outback of the land God made in anger.

Now all of a sudden here's a quirky, lyrical, comical, full- blown novel set in the early 1990s in the former German South-West Africa, or Namibia, the land God made--if we take novelist Peter Orner's temperature correctly--without much of anything useful except a surfeit of stiff upper lip. It's a story about a love affair between an American volunteer teaching at a church school in this drought-stricken nation and one of his colleagues, a Namibian woman, mother of a young boy, who is a veteran of the guerrilla war against the South African Defense Force. And I should say this book is not just a novel, but an art novel in which a gifted short-story writer gives us his first book-length work of fiction, and does so with flair and panache.

You can clearly see the hand of the story writer at work in this novel of 154 short chapters, some as brief as a few lines, most no longer than two pages. All the white space somehow seems appropriate for this story about discovery, affection, education and distrust set in Goas, an isolated farm turned into a Catholic school on the edge of the Namibian desert. The characters, in addition to the American, Larry Kaplanski, and the eponymous Mavala Shikongo, are varied and numerous, from eccentric teachers to overbearing administrators to daring and timid students to the itinerant inhabitants of a countryside where the sky looks "like watered-down milk" and the light has its own distinctions.

The Erongo Mountains stand to the west of Goas. "[T]hink of the mirages that pool at the base" of them, Larry, the narrator, asks us. "You walk and you walk and that water stretches away, but also, at every step, gets bigger. A pond becomes a lake, becomes an ocean. It's merely a collision of heated and unheated air causing an optical refraction. But what, I ask, do climatological proofs matter to a thirsty man?"

This variety of prose adds another level to the love story. The writer is clearly in love with the place and gives the landscape a character of its own--the compelling bitterness of a place so wrenched by drought and war that it seems, in its spareness and rough beauty, something like the backdrop of a Samuel Beckett play. The veld constantly repeats itself, the narrator notes, and there is "no sense of the land passing, or even of time. Nothing in either direction but fence-line and veld."

Against this dour vista, the smallest actions of the teachers and students become magnified. Their voices become theater. And Larry's demi-comic affair with Mavala, conducted at siesta time out in the open among the gravestones of the old Boer farm cemetery, stands out for its casualness and simplicity, as well as the passion in the banter that passes between them:

"Lonely hot afternoon and our shoes, all four of them, in a line on the grave. Us shoulder to shoulder on the tablecloth.

"She tries to scratch her back.

" 'Will you?'

"I shift around and scratch her.

" 'Harder,' she says.

" 'You go,' I say.

" 'What?'

" 'Tell something. Anything. What about your mother?' "

What about her, Mavala Shikongo? Orner presents her so elliptically that she seems part goddess, part first draft. What truly lends distinction to this novel is the writer's voice, and the way he captures the voices of the multiplicity of characters. Let's give thanks that God wasn't so angry with Namibia that he didn't cut away the tongues of its tough inhabitants, or the good ear of the American fiction writer who fell in love with the land.

Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered," a writing teacher at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of the short-story collection "Lost and Old Rivers."

Esther Stories
(Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
"A spirit of passionate tenderness broods over these stories. It is as if love, transcending itself, has become a wisdom so perfect it must cherish everything--grace, of course, and awkwardness too, and innocence, and guilt, and haplessness. And yes, clear-sighted and unhonored loss.

- Marilynne Robinson

Orner doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls...Brooding, mysterious, ineffable, beautiful.

- Margot Livesey, The New York Times

Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives
An oral history collection of real life stories by undocumented people who have come to the US from across the globe. See voiceofwitness.org and May issue of Believer Magazine for more information.

Magazines and Anthologies
Anthologies:

Orner's work has appeared in the following anthologies:

Best American Stories 2001 (Edited by Barbara Kingslover)

Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction From the Edge (Harper Collins, (2003)

Pushcart Prize Annual Anthology (Pushcart Press, 2002) and (2007)

The Future Dictionary of America (McSweeney's Books, 2004)

Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (Norton, 2006)

New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories from America and Beyond (Norton, 2007)

How Do You Spell Chanukah: 18 Writers Celebrate 8 Nights of Lights (Algonquin Books, 2007)

Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, edited by Stephen Elliott (Harper Collins, 2007)