Synopsis
Frantz Fanon (1925 1961) fought to free Algeria from French rule and rallied against the oppressive grip of colonialism. In this fictionalized view of the revolutionary's life, an African-American writer travels the world to do research for a biography of Fanon. In a tale that is part love story, mystery, and biography, Fanon examines how a political radical's views apply in a post-9/11 world.
"Beautifully written ..." Publishers Weekly
The New York Times - Lee Siegel
…what Wideman has rivetingly achieved, among other things, is to find a path out of the cul-de-sac of self-consciousness that plagues the contemporary novel…By the end of this thrilling, important novel, which is by turns eloquent, crude, despairing and heartbrokenly hopeful, Fanon has come to be more than a revolutionary (and one, incidentally, who presciently described both the colonizer's morally deluded brutality and the colonized's tendency to destroy themselves with sectarian violence rising from lacerated consciences). The crushing forces Fanon hated become, in Wideman's hands, the conditions of mortality itself.