I have also finished but did not do so well. Not so sure about it as although the storyline was good I felt that it could have been written more fluidly so that the prose and the storyline flowed better. But I read it with a predominantly European mind and background.
The jumbling of long and short sentences in many places I found distracting. This didn't seem to me as being done for pace or other reasons, I felt (but know it was not so) that the author did not know what conjunctions were; many sentences seemed just cut in half into two. Some of the short sentences sounded as written by a student to me as they seemed overly perfunctory.
I have no knowledge of Ganda culture but the book flowed to me as from one where story telling has been predominantly orally based. The lack of pacing variation, looseness, etc. and the sentence structures mentioned above contributed to my feeling this. I felt for myself that wordiness was part of this as there seemed to be sentences that could be happily omitted without distracting from the storyline or its environment.
Because of those things, well I am assuming so, I got sidetracked a few times, rather like drifting off into my own thoughts when someone is telling a long story but rambling a bit and being loose with superfluous information. This may just be me though, because spending many hours in many organizations, especially public bodies and Government where the issue is worst, I have got into the habit of just tuning out when someone starts rambling on, stating irrelevant information, or not cutting to the chase.
It seems the book was the author's doctoral thesis; as far as I am aware I have only read one other book that I knew was written as a thesis and that was the NZ author Eleanor Catton's first novel
The Rehearsal which read to me as being quite immature, but I managed to get through it. However, it was quite short whereas
Kintu is quite long and that made me wonder if that length had caused a problem for me reading it. The book is obviously well researched and I think a lot of effort went into it so that the characters and their activities, and events through it are all knitted together, but I wonder if that effort has led to the author being distracted from writing it well in other respects (in my view). Perhaps "mechanical" is the appearance I am looking for, all the bits of the machine fit together but it doesn't look very pretty?
I think a positive to the book was its saving itself from the tired, overworked distractions of rabbiting on about Idi Amin, colonialism, laying blame, etc. (there was even what seemed to me to be an empathetic reference to John Hanning Speke by one of the characters). It did include random violence, tribal frictions, sexual behaviors, supernaturalism of the witch-doctorish kind, etc. which could be seen as fitting into their wider negative stereotyping of African cultures south of the Arab states by some in others. On the other hand I felt this was a book that an African writer could get away with it being written and read in the contemporary Western culture but if it had been written by a European author (especially if they were a male) they would likely need to hire security for protection from the easily triggered.
Perhaps if I spent as much time fitting the pieces of the storyline together as the author did (or as I have in figuring out why I was not that excited by it
) I may have enjoyed the book more? I think I would get more from it if I read it again but I am not up to that; maybe if it was shorter.
EDIT: Just as I finished writing this my son dropped by and left me a bottle of beer to try, I think I need it
.