Mukasonga unsparingly resurrects the horrors of the Rwandan geocide
while lyrically recording the quieter moments of daily life with her
family--a moving tribute to all those who are displaced, who suffer.
Mukasonga's extraordinary, lyrical, and heartbreaking book ... is
indispensable reading for anyone who cares about the endurance of the
human spirit and who hopes for a better world.
-- Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Los Angeles Review of Books
Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches is a compelling chronicle of the
author's childhood in the years leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In a spare and penetrating tone, Mukasonga brings to life the scenes of
her family's forced displacement from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi.
With a view made lucid through time and pain, Mukasonga erodes the
distance between her present and her past, resurrecting and paying
homage to her family members who were massacred in the genocide, but
also, in movingly simple language, the beauty present in quiet, daily
moments with her loved ones.
As lyrical as it is tragic, Cockroaches is Mukasonga's tribute to her
family's suffering and to the lingering grip of the dead on the living.