Yearning wrapped in gorgeous prose is the heart of “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.” This is Peter Orner’s first novel, which follows his 2001 collection “Esther Stories,” and continues to demonstrate his ability to grasp and portray the subtleties of the human spirit.
Larry Kaplanski, a young Jewish man from Cincinnati, has, for reasons that are never revealed, volunteered to teach at a Catholic boys’ school in Namibia. He arrives to find a previously unimagined emptiness: “A few crooked, bony trees here and there. Strawlike grass grew like stubble out of the gravel. Somehow I thought a purer desert might have been more comforting. Where were the perfect rippled dunes? Where was the startling arid beauty? These plants looked like they’d rather be dead.”
His headmaster, who immediately shortens his new teacher’s surname to Kaplansk, is hardly more welcoming. He tells the young man, “Of course it would have been far more advantageous to our development, yes, to our development, had you placed cash in an envelope and, well, to be frank, mailed it!” Perhaps that is true as it relates to the development of Goas, the school. It is not true as it relates to Kaplansk.
The story unfolds in snapshots, short vignettes from a variety of points of view. Kaplansk is hardly a man born to teach. First viewed with suspicion, because no right-minded man would actually volunteer for what looks to the other teachers like banishment, Kaplansk eventually is accepted by his fellow teachers. But the pressure of being the new kid is relieved on the day that Mavala Shikongo shows up.
The unsmiling beauty, a former freedom fighter, is the sister of the principal’s wife. Though rumored to have higher expectations, at the moment she is the “only single woman teacher to bless an all-boys boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons feel sorry for us.” But she lasted only three weeks before moving out and on, and the men mourn the loss of their diversion.
Mavala reappears, without explanation and with a young son in tow, giving the men a focal point for their longing, frustration and loneliness. She is no less isolated than any of the single men and eventually, makes a choice. She and Kaplansk take to meeting at the graves of three Boers buried on the school property.
“The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” is less about the relationship between the title character and a white American than it is about the totality of one man’s Namibian experience. Like Kap-
lansk, Orner spent a year teaching in Namibia. He uses everyday details to illuminate a stark, often ironic, occasionally amusing reality. This is a place where the men come out to watch a married woman dance in the rain, because it’s the only wet T-shirt they will see for months, where a fire is built from a donated piano that arrived in pieces that could not be reassembled and it is where evenings are passed sipping zorba, a local whiskey that tastes of licorice.
This is a merciless, and often bleak novel. It is also a lovely one. If one of literature’s jobs is to take the reader to a new experience, this novel richly succeeds. And while it will never be confused with a comfortable piece of armchair travel, it is powerful in its exposition of just how far from comfortable it is possible to travel – and to return.
Orner writes of a world that is physically harsh, where there is either torrential rain or drought, and of living in little more than a cell. But he captures the sense of the people and place with such clarity, and he writes with such beauty that the reader cannot help but be carried along, even if this is one journey one would never choose.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
By Peter Orner
Little, Brown, 309 pages, $23.95
