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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
boring, 29 Mar 2000
By A Customer
I was shocked by how how boring this book was. The writing is good, but that's the only thing. The vision of Africa is completely romanticized, manichaean, the characters are colourless and sickly sentimental. The base of the Uganda revolution is nearly totally absent. the novel goes nowhere, except back on its own trail, it's a closed circle without any evolution. A boring Emma Bovary in an Out of Africa version.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
an extraordinary and sensuous novel of human desire, 1 Feb 2001
By A Customer
The Gravity of Sunlight by Rosa Shand is an extraordinary and sensuous novel equally brilliant in its creation of place (Uganda in the 1970's during Amin's rise to power) and its exploration of human desire. Shand's depth of image in the externals of Africa -- the smells of wood smoke and gardenias; the musical sounds in the "buzz and whir" of insects or antiphonal native song floating through the "rustling of mango leaves;" and the sights of "thick green," "dusty glitter," and flopping banana leaves -- become inseparable from the internal soul. Equally, Shand's portrayal of characters through Agnes' sensitive and urgent consciousness, as when she sees Wulf during the early stages of her attraction to him,"a figure in a gleaming pure-white jacket, a man in the dark at the bottom of her drive" deeply penetrate not only Agnes' soul but our own interior selves.Agnes is a woman who craves love and attachment to all living things. Uganda, teeming with aliveness, paradoxically both nourishes her and fosters her restlessness and need for fulfillment. So real is the experience of this book that I felt a tigtening in my own chest, becoming connected to Agnes' joy, pain, and ultimately her confusion and disorder over the mystery of love andhow it perches in one's own heart.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An absorbing, stunningly well-written debut novel, 20 Jan 2001
"The Gravity of Sunlight" is a beautiful work of fiction about a love for a country, about the confines of married love and about the excitement of illicit love and all that entails. It is set in Uganda where the author lived for 10 years, and her love of the place and its evocative atmosphere rings clear and true. The story opens with Agnes whose husband has told her she must "will herself" to love him. As she has trouble accepting the possibillity of willed love, an appealing foreigner comes into her life and completes the puzzle that is her with missing pieces. Extremely well written, compelling and tensely erotic. Especially interesting are the chapter titles -- "On Cows and Cathedrals," "On Being Honest With Friends," etc. -- and the often off-the-topic musings of introductory paragraphs of each short chapter. Rosa Shand, please hurry and write another fine novel!
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