The Eye of the Leopard [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Once again Henning Mankell offers readers a moving, thought provoking, novel that addresses the human condition as it plays itself out on two continents and in the psyches of the players. The landscape moves from a frozen, rural Swedish town to the smothering heat of Africa. Mankell changes narrators and moves back and forth in time as his hero tries to find a place in the world where he can be his own person.
He is haunted by much childhood trauma and his nightmares are so real and potent, the reader is drawn into them with chilling provocation. Yet somehow, he is both frightened and curious to see what will happen if he doesn't run away. Fate intervenes keeping the main character in a state of semi-stasis which is filled with silence, chaos, introspection, confusion and an constant underlying senes of catastrophe to come. The white landowners that remain in Africa after the freedom given to the black folks creates a dangerous chasm, know that their safety can no longer be taken for granted. They expect that a war with the natives is simmering. How or when it explodes is a daily mystery.
Reading this riveting story leaves readers with a similar feeling one gets reading Joseph Conrad's, HEART OF DARKNESS.
At times in the telling Mankell's characters ask questions like, "why me" or "who am I really"? "What is my purpose?" But unlike Conrad this novel burrows deeper into the minds and hearts of a population of people who hate each other and can barely keep those feelings in control.
Henning Mankell is best know for his police procedurals but here he enters a new terrain with a different direction in his fiction. Written with his accomplished hand THE EYE OF THE LEOPARD is a great read that grabs readers right at the beginning.
BARBARA LIPKIEN GERSHENBAUM

Before we go any further, this is not a Kurt Wallander mystery. It was written many years ago, and is just appearing here in the US. The novel takes place in the author's native Sweden and in Africa, between which countries he divides his time. It is the story of someone who drifts through life, ending up inheriting by chance an egg farm with 200 native employees and trying to cope with the continent's mystique, superstitions and racial conflicts.

The chapters alternate between past and present, Sweden and Africa, in an attempt to give the reader an understanding of Hans Olofson's development through boyhood and his more mature years, as he attempts to understand what is happening around him and even attempt to do something about the inequities of the indigenous population.

The novel is not for everyone. It is deep in its way of studying Hans as a person, and its depth is far more penetrating in its analysis of the African mind. It is a far cry from the more intriguing Wallander mysteries, but well worth the effort if you so choose to read it. While recommended, bear in mind that it may not be for everyone.

I finished reading Henning Mankell's The Eye of the Leopard a while ago, but realized I had not posted my review. It is a much more assessable book than his previous Kennedy's Brain or the very dark depressing, Depths. It is, like Kennedy's Brain, a pointed political novel. And like the previous book the "villains" in Africa, are an amorphous, hard to pin-down, but serious cultural/political threat to native stressed Africans. In Kennedy's Brain it was the drug companies and their every unethical abuse of the Africans in testing new "cures" for AIDS and other diseases. In The Eye of the Leopard, the "villains" are the very corrupted nature of the local and national governments, and the desire of two different cultures trying to hang on to what they have, both real and imagined. In both books the connection is the all mighty debasing/corrupting nature of money. In both books the disappearing mores of what it means to be African is scary reality. In both books the main character is discovering things about themselves as we discover how bad the reality is in under-developed Africa, whether it be Zambia or Mozambique or ...
Unfortunely, for me, the novel does suffer from a lot of recycled imagery and characters from some of Mankell's previously published works. The childhood memories of his main character are very much like those the characters in his books Shadows in the Twilight and A Bridge to the Stars. The character without a nose, which is a pivotal guiding figure, is almost the same. The imagery of climbing/mastering the iron bridge over the local river is also drawn from these books. The model boat, the woodcutting father, the mother who left with only a photograph to remember her from, are just some other segments of these two books published in 1990. It is interesting that this thenewest book to his English readers was also published first in 1990. The character, Lars Hakansson, in The Eye of the Leopard is the same Lars Hakansson in Kennedy's Brain. Kennedy's Brain was first published in 2005, but released here in 2007, so in which direction was Lars moved? Although they have different jobs in each book they each start out as being helpful, but end up being the same morally corrupt individual. Can one self-plagiarize? If so Mankell has done it with this book. In his newest book Mankell does manage to knit these characters and images together to create an appealing book. Like Dan Brown who seems to have tested ideas and characters in his books, before getting it right in The DiVinci Code, Mankell is trying to weave old threads into a new book. Unlike Brown, Mankell has not yet done the magic to make the old disappear. Authors do recycle ideas, just think of how many times bears, motorcycles, and wrestling show up in John Irving's books. But here the characters and images are direct transplants. A first time-reader of Henning Mankell won't notice, but if they start reading his old books, because they like what they have read, like me, they will find the "lifted" characters and images.
In his Kurt Wallender books, the reason I started reading Mankell, the stories of Kurt's father painting the same image and his description of these painting are illustrative of the struggle he and his father had. In these books, the paragraphs about the paintings, with or without the grouse, could be the same from book to book, (I don't have them around to check) but the inner dialog with Kurt, about them is the important thing. The transplanted pieces from his earlier books into this newest one are jarring to a longtime reader, (I think I have read everything that has been translated into English) however I still would strongly recommend this book. Of the non-Kurt Wallander books it is my favorite!

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