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Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: gun juice, step slap, shaking shaking, Mistress Gloria, Cloth Seller, The Bible (more...)

3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (46 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Iweala's visceral debut is unrelenting in its brutality and unremitting in its intensity. Agu, the precocious, gentle son of a village schoolteacher father and a Bible-reading mother, is dragooned into an unnamed West African nation's mad civil war—a slip of a boy forced, almost overnight, to shoulder a soldier's bloody burden. The preteen protagonist is molded into a fighting man by his demented guerrilla leader and, after witnessing his father's savage slaying, by an inchoate need to belong to some kind of family, no matter how depraved. He becomes a killer, gripped by a muddled sense of revenge as he butchers a mother and daughter when his ragtag unit raids a defenseless village; starved for both food and affection, he is sodomized by his commandant and rewarded with extra food scraps and a dry place to sleep. The subject of the 23-year-old novelist's story—Iweala is American born of Nigerian descent—is gripping enough. But even more stunning is the extraordinarily original voice with which this tale is told. The impressionistic narration by a boy constantly struggling to understand the incomprehensible is always breathless, often breathtaking and sometimes heartbreaking. Its odd singsong cadence and twisted use of tense take a few pages to get used to, but Iweala's electrifying prose soon enough propels a harrowing read. (Nov. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

This startling début by a young American-Nigerian writer follows the fortunes of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country. Iweala's acute imagining of Agu's perspective allows him to depict the war as a mesh of bestial pleasures and pain. As seen through Agu's eyes, machetes sound like music, and bodies come apart on roads so cracked that you can see "the red mud bleeding from underneath." Agu has a child's primitive drive that enables him to survive his descent into hell, and, despite the brutality he witnesses and participates in, to keep hold of something resembling optimism. The contrast between his belief in the future and the horrific descriptions of the world around him makes Agu a haunting narrator.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins; First edition. edition (November 8, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 006079867X
ISBN-13: 978-0060798673
Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.8 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (46 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #338,782 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
gun juice, step slap, shaking shaking

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Mistress Gloria, Cloth Seller, The Bible, Father Festus, Please Sah

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1 book cites this book:

How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide by John Sutherland on page 165, and Back Matter

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Customer Reviews

46 Reviews

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
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Average Customer Review

3.7 out of 5 stars (46 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunningly Horrific War Story Told by a Child Soldier , December 12, 2005

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

A young boy named Strika pulls another young boy named Agu out of his hiding place and into the middle of a senseless civil war in an unnamed African country. Agu is dragged before the Commandant, the ruthless leader of a troop of soldiers, and given a choice: join or die on the spot. It is a devil's bargain, since the price of Agu's joining and saving his own life is to hack another person to death with a machete. "I am not a bad boy," Agu reasons to himself (in so many words) over the killing. "I am a soldier now, and soldiers kill, so I am only doing a soldier's job and not being a bad boy."

Uzodinma Iweala's stunning first novel tells the story of Agu's indoctrination into an adult world of civil warfare, a world of fear and hardship and stomach-churning violence. More significant, Agu enters a world of loss - separation and possibly death of his family, loss of his faith, and loss of his childlike (and sexual) innocence. If he survives the war, regardless of its outcome, he is clearly scarred for life psychologically as well as physically.

Two aspects of BEASTS OF NO NATION contribute to its narrative power. The first is Iweala's ability to convey a sense of blind irrationality. He gives us no sense of what country we are reading about, we have no idea who the competing factions are or what they are fighting for (or against) -- we don't even know into which side Agu has been conscripted. At the same time, Iweala offers no plan of attack, no pattern to the Commandant's movements, and no military objective being sought. The Commandant and his troop are little better than the scurrying ants to which Agu constantly refers, skittering about the countryside pillaging and destroying whatever they find and otherwise simply fighting the enemy and their hunger and fear to stay alive.

The second source of narrative power derives from the author's choice of narrator and narrative style. The entire story is rendered through Agu's eyes and voice. We see the civil war through a child's uncomprehending eyes and we are as confused about the issues and reasons for killing as he is. We hear the story in Agu's voice, a mixture of childlike innocence and a broken, pidgin English that makes us see events and feel emotions through a child's limited vocabulary and his struggles to articulate the utter senselessness of what he is witnessing. This language may grate for some or seem like a novelistic contrivance (after all, assuming Agu really thinks and speaks in his native tongue, why must we see it translated in such mangled English from a boy who appeared to be moderately well-educated?). It is also fraught with the writerly complication of having a semi-articulate narrator who somehow has enough command of the language to summon up words like camouflage, crater, masquerade, junction, verandah, catarrh, vomit, and insubordination.

In the end, despite the inhuman violence and sexual degradation he has experienced, Agu claims for himself the mantle of humanity. "I am having mother once," he asserts, "and she is loving me." This is a marvelous short novel and a deeply disturbing look at genocidal civil war through the eyes of one of its innocent young victims.

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41 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Harrowing but not Special, January 9, 2006

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Titled after the classic Fela Kuti album, this debut novella from the son of Nigerian immigrants tackles the horror of child soldiers with mixed results. In an anonymous West African country torn apart by civil war, a young boy named Agu is dragged from his hiding place by rebels destroying a village and given the traditional choice: Join or die. In the harrowing scene, his initiation into the rebel forces involves killing a screaming man with a machete. In psychological self-protective logic rather unlikely for a young boy, he tells himself that since he is now a soldier, he is only doing his job by killing. Agu has no clue what the civil war is about or what constitutes an enemy, he is simply another weapon in the hands of the charismatic brutal leaders, pointed toward the enemy and told to kill. Of course, when humanity is degraded to the point children are forced into soldiering, the reasons why aren't really of any relevance, and Iweala is wise to avoid trying to explain the context for Agu's nightmare. Instead, the dislocation of his kidnapping is felt all the more, as his rebel unit wanders around, apparently aimlessly, often on the brink of starvation. Agu's experience is awful and certain scenes are moving, but it is somewhat lacking in drama or tension. There's a certain roteness to the story: gentle child (check), sexual abuse (check), flashbacks to better times (check), carnage (check), caring Western aid worker (check), triumph of the human spirit (check). Agu narrates his tale in a kind of pidgin English that will either enchant or enervate the reader -- I found it exceedingly tiresome, inconsistent, and artificial. It is tragic that child soldiers exist, however to truly move the reader, fiction has to work a little harder than this does. It's not a bad book, just not great, and not even the best novel about child soldiers this year. That would be either Johnny Mad Dog by the Congolese writer Emannuel Dongala or Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley, the daughter of Sierra Leonians. Another worth checking out is Peter Dickinson's 1990 Whitbread-winning novel, AK.

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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a powerful, moving and disturbing tale, December 2, 2005

By	Charlie_in_la "charlie" (los angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I am not sure how to write this review. I was profoundly affected by the book. I've tried to re-edit it to convey just how special and moving it is, and words fail me. Fortunately, they did not fail the author.

The author chose his words well, using them to convey the youth, innocence and intelligence of Agu. Each sentence is a gem.
The character in this book is a child who has gone through hell. I understand a little through the book about how and why he became a mercenary (or rebel soldier, which was he? and is it different?)
What makes a child kill for a cause he does not completely understand? This book answers both everything and nothing.

Maybe the answer is survival. Or, maybe it is in the words of Agu "I am also having mother once, and she is loving me."

What stikes me the most about this book is that Agu somehow keeps his true self alive, hidden in a part of himself.

The author does not tell us what Agu's future will be, but, I hope that with the love and education his parents have given him, he will do well. Yes, I know that he is only a character, but to me, he is real, and I worry about his future.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars very heavy subject matter, great book
I've been putting off writing this review for far too long, mainly because I kind of don't know what to write about Beasts of No Nation. The book is heavy. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Heather O'Roark

4.0 out of 5 stars The inner workings of child soldiers- amazing!
A boy soldier, Agu, a child of a nondescript age (between 9 and 12) and from an unnamed West African Nation, speaks forth of the reality of child soldiers everywhere. Read more

Published 8 months ago by Bethany L. Canfield

2.0 out of 5 stars A Rather Messy Novella
When I picked up this novella, I was captivated by the subject matter. The whole psychology and sociology of boy soldiers in Africa is one difficult to understand by American... Read more

Published 14 months ago by M. D. Stern

2.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful idea, ruined
This is a novel that has all the ingredients of greatness, but fails, miserably, in effect. Here is a story told in the first person by a child soldier, written by an... Read more

Published 19 months ago by WPBIP

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book but will leave you with nightmares...
This book is phenomenal. However, after reading it, I really had nightmares about young boys being forced to be child soldiers. Perhaps it was too graphic.

Published 21 months ago by Sabrina L. Williams

4.0 out of 5 stars Great start, loses strength at the end
This book really grabbed me at first. Agu, a young African boy, survives an attack in his village, is found by a rag tag army and is and is given a choice. Read more

Published 22 months ago by Derrick Peterman

5.0 out of 5 stars War in Africa
A first-person acccount of the experiences of a young boy, forced into a war. Vivid and credible. Hard to set it down before finishing. Then impossible to forget it. Read more

Published on July 29, 2007 by Paul R. Mcclenon

2.0 out of 5 stars I Am Killing, Killing, Killing
In a special wing in the House of Fiction there lives a notable band of young characters and child narrators. Read more

Published on May 15, 2007 by Panopticonman

4.0 out of 5 stars a universal language of conflict
Iweala's book is an introspective take on what geos on on the inside of those caught in rthe middle of all kinds of conflict. Read more

Published on April 1, 2007 by Adepeju Adeniran

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended
The abuse and systematic identity-destruction of this boy-child is stunning for its clarity in conveying the possibility of something that seems so impossible that it cannot even... Read more

Published on February 17, 2007 by D. J. Marquart

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