By Magdalena Hernandez

Here's a tale teeming with things that can't be seen.

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo isn't a spooky story per se. Yet history, spirits, longing, and emptiness are its prominent, troubling themes. As one character says of Goas, Namibia, the book's setting, "For a small place, our ghosts are legion."

This first novel by acclaimed short-story writer Peter Orner, L'96, centers around Larry Kaplanski, a new teacher at a remote Catholic boarding school for boys in the early 1990s, not long after Namibia won its independence.

Lonely at first among his fellow instructors, the young American meets and quickly falls in love with a beautiful former freedom fighter. The relationship will teach him a great deal about Namibia's brutal past.

Harsh specters take many forms in this new nation. The war of independence from South Africa haunts Namibia. So do the decades of German colonization. The Herero genocide that began in 1904 left especially deep scars. Thousands of Hereros were driven by German soldiers into the desert, where many dug holes in a desperate search for water, holes that ultimately turned into graves.

The boys' school is situated on an old farm "on a place where the land swooped into a kind of valley, a flat stretch of sand and gravel." Goas, we're told, is no day at the beach: "Its misery is hearty. The lashing wind and the frigid mornings and the eyeball-melting afternoons eventually become what your life was always supposed to amount to."

Kaplanski—the locals compress his name to "Kaplansk"—finds the desert a disillusioning landscape, with "plants [that] looked like they'd rather be dead." The Cincinnati native volunteered to teach at the school. We never learn why. It doesn't seem a particularly good career move. His pedagogical skills are lacking. He fudges his way through grammar lessons and fills time by inviting guest lecturers to class.

Soon, though, a true passion is revealed. Kaplansk, like the other Goas men, is smitten with an enigmatic teacher, Mavala Shikongo. More than just a lovely face, she's also an experienced veteran of Namibia's struggle for freedom.

Mavala deserts Goas one day, coming back less than a month later with a toddler son in tow. Soon after her return, she initiates a romance with Kaplansk, mostly, it seems, out of boredom. The pairing upends our class expectations. Former guerrilla Mavala is descended from African royalty. Kaplansk is the grandson of a tailor.

We know better than to expect a fairy-tale ending for them. In one of their early scenes together, an omen: "A moth careens into the flame. It tries to fly with a wing on fire before that's the end of it. A sound like a wrinkle and smoke."

Mavala will prove to be as transient as water in the desert. She disappears again, leaving her son, Tomo, behind. He, in turn, will eventually forget his mother. Again and again in this way, the novel underscores the essential loneliness of the human condition. "Every moment is a death," one character says.

Yet, amid the losses, Kaplansk emerges as very good company. He's the book's principal narrator, and his insights lend a fresh perspective to the most quotidian of matters. On soccer, for instance: "If you watch the [players] without the ball it's even better. Their feet. How every move is a beautiful anticipation. The ball is only incidental to the dance."

Several other characters narrate chapters as well, buoying Mavala Shikongo with their particular, equally astute observations. Orner sidesteps the pitfall of objectifying his black characters by granting them an authority available in fiction: The Africans have a voice in this novel.

Orner, who has lived in Namibia, describes sights, sounds, and smells in an exact, imagistic manner. The characters and their veld backdrop are sublimely limned. His descriptions of the land—"the scorched plain, the rocks, the dry tufts bent to the wind"—are especially compelling.

Of course, the brutality of the surroundings serves as a palpable reminder of suffering. Cattle die covered in dust. During an unusually wet period, a boy drowns himself from sadness. Love evaporates.

Nor do the characters get much consolation from their interior lives. Most are filled with such longing and regret they seem like shadows of themselves. A butcher, for example, is so lonesome he forgets to eat, literally starving for love.

The force of the imagery, which in the hands of a lesser writer might overwhelm the story, here springs forth organically from the plot and its characters. Graves of Boer settlers cushion Kaplansk and Mavala during their trysts. In the midst of a drought, a religious woman reads Genesis to the dying cows to give them hope. Past and present, death and life intertwine.

Orner's confident novel is not, in the end, a wade through unrelenting sorrow. His sympathetic and often amused eye for human foible keeps his chronicle, and us, from sinking into helpless despair.

The author's previous book was 2001's Esther Stories, a short-story collection that met with admiring reviews. Readers of this magazine may also recall "Meyer and Silla," Orner's fictional tale of an enduring marriage, which appeared in the January 2002 issue.

Indeed, Orner's mastery of the short form is evident in Mavala Shikongo. Many chapters are so concise and jewel-like they resemble prose poems, a brevity fitting for a book that contemplates transience.

Halfway through the novel, a character quotes Romanian-French philosopher Cioran, who believed books should cure old wounds and inflict new ones. Orner has crafted a work that achieves just that. Rich in history and laden with sparse, stirring imagery, it will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.

Magdalena Hernandez, MBA'02, is a senior editor.

The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement, by Winifred Breines; Oxford University Press; 2006

Women's liberation was a cultural movement inspired by the Civil Rights struggle. Yet women's lib alienated many black women, whose experiences were colored by race and class, as well as gender.

Winifred Breines—a professor of sociology and women's studies, and a participant in both struggles for social justice—offers a fresh, insightful analysis of the racial divide. Using documents and oral histories by black women and white women, she finds both parties partly responsible for the failed sisterhood.

Today's feminists, the author finds, may be sidestepping the pitfalls that weakened their forebears' efforts.

The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland, by Kevin McKiernan; St. Martin's Press; 2006

War correspondent and documentary filmmaker Kevin McKiernan, L'79, here crafts a compelling history of the Kurds, the world's largest ethnic group without their own state.

Following their saga since 1975, McKiernan paints a portrait of a diverse people beset by genocide, wars, and poverty, detailing the plight of the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq with compassion and understanding.

McKiernan, who has covered the Iraq war, illustrates how the Kurds' fate plays a pivotal role in the Middle East dilemma. Intertwined with his personal narrative, this look at a people searching for self-determination emerges as a remarkable piece of journalism.