Product Description

Hans Olofson is the son of a Swedish lumberjack. His childhood was unsettled: an alcoholic father, and a mother disappeared, only alive in old photographs. His adolescence was no easier as he lost both his best friend and his lover tragically. Alone and adrift, as a young man his only desire is to fulfil his lover's dream and visit the grave of a legendary missionary who survived alone in the remote hills of Northern Zambia. On reaching Africa, Olofson is struck by its beauty and mystery. After fulfilling his initial quest, an opportunity of employment in the region tempts him to stay. Time passes quickly. Though dismayed by the attitude of the white population to their adopted country, which is compounded by their vulnerability to alcohol and malaria, he is interested enough to take up sole responsibility for the farm he manages. For almost two decades Hans Olofson battles with a hostile environment and a placid, but resistant workforce. Set in the 1970s and 1980s, The Eye of the Leopard explores the relationship between the white farmers and their native workers. Through Olofson's descent into near mental collapse it becomes clear that many years spent in a foreign land do not necessarily breed an understanding of its people: a handful of generations of white settlers cannot change a continent underpinned by myth and superstition. The Eye of the Leopard is a first-rate and original psychological thriller delving deep into the mind of a man lost in an unknown world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #393005 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-03
• Original language: Swedish
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Sunday Telegraph
`The Eye of the Leopard is a thriller of the mind: a chilling journey into the depths of fear, alienation and despair'

Guardian
'expose[s] the myth of Swedish neutrality with a savage portrait of its foreign aid system.'

Telegraph
'Mankell at his best'

Customer Reviews

Brilliant novel
The novel juxtaposes the bereft childhood of Hans Olofson
in rural Sweden,abandoned by his mother and brought up by an
alcoholic father-with his subsequent life as a egg farmer in
Zambia.The picture of Africa described is sinister,corrupt,
violent,racist and superstitious as Hans endeavours to come
to terms with both the Africa he finds and himself.This is a
fine psychological thriller,that is far more than a white man
in Africa tale,as it journeys into the depths of Hans'mind
with considerable acuity.

'Your dream might be my nightmare'
'He wakes in the African night, convinced that his body has split in two'.

Hans Olofson, lies wracked with malarial fever in the opening of this novel, terrified that his African employees, or bandits, or both, will murder him. This is a bleak novel, a Heart of Darkness novel, alternating chapters of Olofson growing up in cold Sweden with chapters of his progression to middle-age on an egg farm in Zambia.

If you're looking for the latest Kurt Wallander then keep looking. For me, this is no `psychological thriller' either but an exploration of two different cultures and the mess that colonialism has caused in Africa. Olofson hears of an African legend that at the end of the world only two creatures will survive; the leopard and the crocodile, these two craftiest animals will fight each other for ever - or until rebirth.

That is the lasting image of fighting black and white in Mankell's Zambia - together with corruption, violence, distrust, poverty, the impossibility of redemption though foreign aid or any other means.

Anarchy in Africa
The Eye of the Leopard

Hans Olofson leaves his native Sweden to travel to Africa to fulfil the dream of another, Janine, `the noseless one'.

With each recurrent malarial bout, and the accompanying fevers and hallucinations, he takes us back to his life in Sweden, with a drunken father, a missing mother, his childhood friend, Sture, with whom he is fiercely competitive just once too often; and of course Janine, who is a source of fascination for both boys.

In Africa, a chance meeting with Ruth and Werner Masterton leads to him settling in Africa, initially as a temporary manager for Judith Fillington on her egg farm. When he takes over the farm he decides to lessen the huge divide between white and black, being more generous with pay and conditions for his workers. This does not have the results that he had hoped for.

Black violence escalates and you can feel his fear, which initially sounded like the neurosis of his malarial episodes, but later becomes fully justified.

Well written, you can really feel the deprivations, the misunderstandings, and the sheer terror.