Reviews

Beyond the River Yei: Life in the Land Where Sleeping Is a Disease by Binyavanga Wainaina

liralen's review

3.0

Curious little quirk of a book. Ostensibly it's a chronicle of the author's trip to Sudan* to learn about sleeping sickness (and spread the word to the greater world), but the result is, as the foreword indicates, a kind of diary that constantly moves between fact and fiction (7). Many of the photographs are of those suffering from sleeping sickness, and there's some more straightforward/factual information at the end, but much of the book is a hazy wander through Sudanese villages, a steeping in communities and confusion and lyricism.

What to do with this book, then? Let it soak in, study the photos, puzzle over the violence wrought by war and illness. Get lost in language for a while. Puzzle some more.

3.5 stars.

*Southern Sudan, in what is South Sudan now