- Published: 05/12/2013
- ISBN: 9781783780181
- Granta Books
- 144 pages
Desert Divers
Sven Lindqvist
Translated by Joan Tate
In the first half of the twentieth centruy, European writers plunged into the stony, baking expanse of the Sahara, drawn by their own strange dreams. What did they hope to find? And what was really there?
In Desert Divers – part travel book, part literary history and part confession – Sven Lindqvist follows their paths into the Sahara and drags to the surface the history of colonial slaughter and exploitation that enabled Europeans to conduct their one-sided affair with the desert.
£6.99
A polemical adventure in travel, criticism and autobiography, Desert Divers opens up a vast discursive territory. It is gripping from start to finish
Geoff Dyer
A poem to the Sahara, and those whom it has obsessed; language as bare and hard as sand and gravel ... Sensational
Guardian
Sven Lindqvist is one of the most original and imaginative authors working at the end of the twentieth century
Richard Gott
From the Same Author
Sven Lindqvist on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
To Zinder
Sven Lindqvist
Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.
