Manituana
Verso hardcover edition
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| Author | Wu Ming |
|---|---|
| Original title | Manituana |
| Translator | Shaun Whiteside |
| Language | Italian |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Verso Books |
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Publication date
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2009 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 396 pp |
| ISBN | |
Manituana is a novel by Wu Ming first published in Italian in 2007.
Wu Ming is a collective of five authors founded in 2000. The members were formerly associated with the Luther Blissett Project and wrote the international best-selling novel Q.
Manituana is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which the authors call "the Atlantic Triptych". All novels will be set in the 1770s, all across the Atlantic Ocean (North America, Europe, the West Indies and Africa), before and during the American Revolution.
Manituana is set in the years 1775-1783 in New York's Mohawk Valley, Quebec and London.
The novel is divided into three main sections entitled "Iroquireland", "Mohock Club" and "Cold Cold Heart". There are two brief interludes between the sections, entitled "The Crossing" and "The Return".
Among the numerous real historical characters that populate the book, the most important ones are Joseph Brant, war chief of the Mohawk nation, and Molly Brant, a matron of the Wolf clan in the Iroquois Six Nations.
In the springtime of 2007, Manituana reached #4 in the Italian best-seller charts. In the following months, it was awarded the Premio Sergio Leone 2007 and the Premio Emilio Salgari 2008. The US, UK, Spanish and French editions were all published in 2009. The novel was translated into English by Shaun Whiteside. In November 2010 the novel was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In an entry on their weblog, Wu Ming wrote that "Manituana was written between 2003 and 2007, and it soaked up all the tensions of that period: S11, the Neoconservative hegemony on US foreign policy, the lies on Saddam allegedly keeping weapons of mass destruction hidden in the desert, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush winning his second term thanks to the Christian right in 2004, Silvio Berlusconi conquering the hearts and minds of the majority of Italians etc."
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Wikipedia