Speak Rwanda

Since 1994, several books of nonfiction, and now Pierce's debut novel, have tried to comprehend how an estimated one million Tutsi men, women and children came to be slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in a chilling episode of modern genocide. Pierce, who has worked and traveled in Africa, divides his unbiased novel into the short internal narratives of 10 different figures from all sides of the conflict--Tutsis and Hutus, murderers and victims, refugees and good Samaritans--whose lives are threaded together by chance and violence. Characters include Silas Bagambiki, a local Hutu petty official who sees slaughter as a way to consolidate power; Augustin Makizimana, a foolish young Hutu who is drawn quickly and unthinkingly into committing atrocities; and Innocent Karangwa, a Tutsi boy who escapes Bagambiki's militia only to become an opportunistic war urchin in Rwanda's capital of Kigali. In the midst of this graphically violent history, a few characters are able to preserve their moral centers, among them Hutu nurse Agn s Mujawanaliya and the Tutsi Uganda-born guerrilla Capt. Stephen Mazimpaka, who, by falling in love with each other at the book's end, serve as an example of Rwanda's best hopes. Despite Pierce's painstaking depiction of small-scale politics and his plain-spoken and informative incorporation of local color, the flatness of his prose and the identical, unnuanced voices of the characters make it difficult for this well-intentioned novel to match up to such works of nonfiction as Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. (Aug.)