Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
When culture and love collide, March 20, 2005
Corinne Hoffman was a successful 27 year old Swiss business owner. Her shop, selling secondhand bridal dresses employed three tailors and she felt that she was on a path to financial security. She took a winter holiday with her boyfriend Marco to Kenya to enjoy the beaches and a short safari. While taking the ferry from Mombasa to her beach hotel, she sees a Masai warrior, tall, dark, with a face so stunningly beautiful that it could be a woman's; but no woman had a face with such strong muscles and defined bones. Corinne is smitten, almost bewitched by the vision of this Masai.
The rest of the trip is a disaster; she meets Lketinga, who speaks broken English. Her boyfriend Marco is understandably put out by her obsession with the Masai. Then, Lketinga flouts a local law forbidding locals from being on a beach and is thrown in jail. Corinne breaks up with her boyfriend and spends some frantic days traveling around Mombasa to find where Lketinga is being held.
Back in Switzerland, the vision of living in Kenya overwhelms Corinne, and she sells her shop, her car and heads back to be with Lketinga. The primitive lifestyle is a far cry from clean and safe and orderly Switzerland (was this the secret attraction for Corinne?) Though she lives in mud hut and though she must share her man with other wives eventually, these are not the things that result in conflict. It is the everyday jealousies and hurts, same as one would find in Zurich or Bern that drive Lketinga and Corinne apart. Corinne has a daughter by Lketinga and opens a small grocery. This impugns, somehow, her husband's manhood, though he likes the affluence it affords. He becomes as jealous as Othello and finally, he shaves his locks, sheds his red Masai robe and puts on loud jeans, shoes and a shirt. The warrior is gone--what's left is a jealous, unreasonable husband who can barely communicate with his wife.
Corinne takes her daughter and goes back to Switzerland. She once again starts a successful business and her life in a Kenyan Masai village is a closed chapter until she writes this excellent memoir.
Sadly, so far this book is available in German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Spanish but not English (I am reviewing the German edition.) However, Corinne writes simply and effectively in German and despite what I assume were a few "Swiss-isms" I was unfamiliar with, anyone who can read college German will find this accessible. I found it riveting.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent, July 11, 2004
I read this book a couple of years ago, it was incredible. It is about a woman who goes to Africa with her boy-friend and falls in love with a massai warrior. She decides to stay with him in Africa, in the middle of nowhere. She writes about everything that happened to her, like the fact that they didn't speak the same language and cultural differences, which must be enormous if there are already differences in like America and Germany( as I know for myself).
This book is incredible and I am sure that everybody who read it will agree with me.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fluffy and Feisty, June 15, 2006
I found Corinne to be a really strange mix. She falls in love with a Masai, seemingly mainly because of his physical attributes. She barely mentions any conversations they had besides being very attracted to the way he always said "no problem Corinne" which reminded me of my teenage best friend who fell in love with a hooligan because she liked the way he said "well there you are then"! There's no analysis of whether she loved him for his character or just his exotic looks which I found incredible given that she was going to change her life to be with him. So, quite frankly, I had her pegged as a complete airhead. Then I read about how she dealt with her new (self-chosen/inflicted) life and all the hardships and dramas that entailed. Airhead or not, she had guts. Will certainly search out her the sequels.
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