I'm not sure what I just read, but I know I'll want to reread it in a couple years. If you are into a naked lunch stream of consciousness delirium, but want something that feels a little more composed and deals with colonial politics and psychosis, you should read Marechera. Crazy interesting.

Many thanks to Jonathan Ball Publishers for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Part of The Heinemann African Writers Series.

I was looking forward to a "visceral account of a photojournalist's entanglement with a terrorist organisation" but what I got instead was a lot of confusion and a sore head.

At first, I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be, like, a blend of prose and poetry or if the author was trying something new, but I just couldn't determine when the author was internalising or continuing the story; after having used the term "black sunlight" three times in different contexts, it still wasn't clear that this was the name The Resistance.

After reading about a lot of sex, chapter seven starts off with a discussion with a man who is obsessed with defecating and being able to read the future in it - this is where I gave up.

Not every book is for every reader; this one certainly wasn't for me.

DNF

Black Sunlight is a book about Christian, a press photographer from an unnamed African country, who returns after studying at Oxford and finds upon his return a nation in utter chaos.

If you swap the name and vocation out with 'Dambudzo' and 'writer', and the nation with Zimbabwe, it fits the author's own experience. And while Dambudzo Marechera does write in a semi-autobiographical mode at times, the literary stylings of this book propels it into different territory.

Traditional foundations of novels are not really to be found here. There is no story or actual characters (they are clearly just writers' sticks) and the setting is only vaguely inferred even though a lot of time is spent musing on it (a state in a period of anarchic violence, resembling the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in the late 70's).

Dambudzo is much more of a sentence writer than a novelist. His writing talent is quite obvious; he writes with a real verve and poetic flair on a sentence level. It is tempting to call him a kind of African Rimbaud (Dambudzo was also reckless, anti-authoritarian, and died much too young).

Unfortunately, as good as the language can be, for me, it did not end up amounting to much. That is to say, the book dissolves into a state of just language. James Joyce-style streams of associate language, vaguely connected to some idea or thought that I often could not find or follow.

Much of the book is - depending on your tastes - either impenetrable quasi-philosophical speculation or Modernist consciousness-writing of the highest order. It can probably be both at the same time, but for me, it was more of the former.

It is a pity because the talent is obviously there, but as a reader, I need a bit more structure too endure this type of writing, even though the book is a very short one.

I should have probably started with House of Hunger, which I am still ready to give a chance.

Twisted.