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The White Masai By Corinne Hofmann ( Amistad )
Release Date: 2006-10-01
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $24.95
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Product Description
The four-million-copy international bestseller of the incredible love story between a European woman and an African warrior The White Masai combines adventure and the pursuit of passion in a page-turning story of two star-crossed lovers from vastly different backgrounds. Corinne, a European entrepreneur, meets Lketinga, a Samburu warrior, while on vacation in Mombasa on Kenya's glamorous coast.Despite language and cultural barriers, they embark on an impossible love affair. Corinne uproots her life to move to Africa—not the romantic Africa of popular culture, but the Africa of the Masai, in the middle of the isolated bush, where five-foot-tall huts made from cow dung serve as homes. Undaunted by wild animals, hunger, and bouts with tropical diseases, she tries to forge a life with Lketinga. But slowly the dream starts to crumble when she can no longer ignore the chasm between their two vastly different cultures. A story that taps into our universal belief in the power of love, The White Masai is at once a hopelessly romantic love story, a gripping adventure yarn, and a compulsively good read.
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 Obsessive author ( khannula )
I could not relate to the author's fanatic obsession of insisting that she had to be with this Masai man. I was tempted to throw the book away in the first two chapters. I only continued to read because I have been to Kenya myself and it gave me more insight into the Masai's culture and traditions. Worth reading if you are interested in the Masai tribe and/or the difficulties in daily living in Africa-things that we take for granted in the Western world.
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 A Book Full of Conundrums ( everett014 )
If you enjoy adventure stories, this is a fast read. Corinne Hofmann does not write fluently, but her book is captivating. That being said, readers just can't help but dislike the author for many reasons (read the many other reviews). She does, however, capture the essence of Samburu life and effectively shows how similar/different world cultures really are. The non-western perspectives (clitorectomies, no mouth-kissing, crying only at deaths, etc.)are what make this an interesting story. Readers also realize some things are universal and never change--like jealousy, greed and corruption. One wonders how Corinne would have fit in had she not been a white female bearing gifts and money. One note--there is little, if any, detail in this book about Kenya's natural wonders.
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 Great book ( ctibbetts )
Despite being a successful businesswoman in Switzerland, 27-year-old Corinne Hofmann still didn't know the difference between lust and love. She did one stupid thing after another in chasing down a man based solely on his looks, pursuing him across Kenya, pushing for a marriage even though he was acting crazy soon after they met, and taking her European lifestyle to a remote Samburu village. Some surprise when "her darling" turned into someone she didn't expect. I still don't think she realizes what an idiot she was, but she meant well and placed her trust in the fantasy of a love that would cross all barriers.
Several things stick in my mind about the book. 1. How Samburu women are worth less than goats. 2. How "her Masai" Lketinga suggested that instead of marriage she just come visit him on holidays but oh no she doesn't listen... if some guy said that to me I'd get the message. 3. After living in the village she loses a lot of weight and realizes her problem is the same as everyone else's: a lack of food. Amazing she could be there so long before she noticed.
I was impressed by her loving terms toward Lketinga at the beginning of the book. She really pulled off how taken she was by him, even though when she wrote the book it was no longer the case. Despite her questionable choices at the beginning of her relationship, she did get out of it quickly when it was obvious it was never going to improve.
The White Masai is a great read with her cultural observations and experiences. I have the sequel but can't start reading it until I have a weekend where I have nothing else to do,- I know I won't be able to put it down.
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 That woman was NUTS
I received this book for Christmas and while it held my interest until the end, I was flabbergasted at how her obsession blinded her. Egads!
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 Couldn't put it down ( puckish3 )
Unfortnately, it was the schadenfreude that kept me reading, and not the "romantic" angle or the "gripping yarn" comprised largely of the author's tangles with bureaucracy or free trade in Kenya. I came to dislike the author early in the book, and it was knowing that I would have the satisfaction of seeing her capricious actions and her condescending post-colonial attitude come back and bite her that kept me glued to the book to the very last page.
I had trouble believing that a 27 year-old woman - old enough to know better - on vacation in Kenya WITH HER BOYFRIEND would, upon seeing the Samburu who became her husband, begin stalking him and proclaiming him "[her] Masai" with a frightening and single-minded obsession. Love at first sight? Really? And then you stalk him all over Kenya for the next several months?
The author continues on her flighty course, foisting herself on this young man she has fallen for, and then foisting herself on his family and village in northern Kenya. She seems to expect their culture to change to suit her, and when it doesn't, she acts as if she's a victim. In fact, she plays the martyr throughout the book, whenever things don't go her way, whether the problems are the result of cultural differences or because she insists on driving a dangerous jungle road (over and over and over and over again) despite numerous near-disastrous trips on the road. No matter how many stupid choices she makes, she always finds someone or something to blame when things blow up in her face.
She seems endlessly put off by almost everyone she encounters during the course of the narrative, whether it's her baby daughter for messing up diapers, or the Italian priest in the mission neighboring the Samburu village who inconveniences her by not being at her disposal to bail her out of yet another of her self-inflicted disasters (broken car - AGAIN, ran out of sugar, etc.). Shortly after her marriage to the Samburu, her tone toward him, as she tells the story, changes, and you can tell that she is almost immediately disenchanted pretty much the moment she makes a formal commitment to him. Unfortunately, by then, she's pregnant and more or less stuck in the situation. Again, it's a situation which she doggedly and tirelessly pursued, so it's hard to feel sorry for her reaping the rewards of her actions.
She recklessly disregards her health (I can't count the number of times she recounts how little she's eaten - but always with a figurative martyrish sigh); the most descriptive writing in the book deals with her two-and-a-half chapters retelling her miseries with malaria; and while I'm certain that malaria is no picnic, she brought it all on herself, every single woe that befalls her in the book, and it's hard to feel sorry for her, as she obviously wants the reader to do. She clearly wishes the reader to read her account and say, "Oh, poor Corinne! Look what she must put up with - all for love!" but by the time she starts complaining in earnest, you realize how flighty, immature, and manipulative she is, and it's hard to pity her for actively pursuing the situation that is currently making her miserable.
As well as complaining about the ways "[her] darling" - ugh - disappoints her, she does little but complain about... well, nearly everything else, too. How hard it is to get a permit to open a store or get married. How far away all the towns are. How hard it is to get stock for her store. How dangerous the jungle road - that she still insists on taking every trip, inexplicably - is. How lousy her car is. How little she eats. How hard she works. How hard it is to be the only white person for miles. The entire book is a litany of complaints.
Her writing - and maybe part of this is the translation from German to English - is workmanlike and strangely dispassionate. The tales of her frequent journeys to various towns and villages in Kenya have a hypnotic quality because they're all the same ("I must go to Nairobi. How I hate that place! It will take me days to get there." And then she recounts the various problems - tire puncture, broken clutch, broken transmission, leaky battery - that she has in getting there. And then discusses how unhelpful the bureaucrats are. And then describes the trip back home - tire puncture, broken clutch, broken transmission, leaky battery. And then the complaints about "home," in the Samburu village, despite the fact it appears the villagers bend over backward to make her comfortable both within and outside of their culture, which she so rudely crashed into without consulting anyone but her own fickle heart). For someone whose writing is so detached, though, she manages quite a bit of melodrama, but it rings empty, much in the same way that a heroine in a Gothic novel speaks hollowly of her great love and her vast troubles. And then she faints prettily and waits to be rescued by a gallant gentleman with smelling salts. This is what the entire book is like.
The author is enormously self-centered and selfish, and as she expects the Samburu culture to bend to her needs, she refuses to take up much of any of the culture to meet her new family and neighbors halfway. This, unsurprisingly, causes clashes, wherein, again, she seems to believe that she is the victim and the villagers and her husband and his family are the victimizers. She has an incredibly condescending, undeniably racist attitude toward them and winds up emasculating her husband terribly. This leads to poor behavior on his part, to the point that I ALMOST felt sorry for her the last couple of chapters, but the poor guy was stalked and outmatched by an insufferably selfish and manipulative woman, so his behavior - acceptable in his culture - gets a pass from me.
What kept me reading was, at first, the hope that the author would become less self-involved and more self-aware, and that the "part travel-writing" part touted on the back of the book would begin to evidence itself. Once it dawned on me that this wouldn't happen, I kept reading to see the author's downfall. Pure bonus were the letters at the very end of the book wherein she tries to explain herself to pretty much everyone she came into close contact with during her years in Kenya, in which she sounds indescribably self-serving and reveals that she learned absolutely nothing about herself or the culture into which she injected herself while she was there. I suppose her book is an explanation to the rest of us about what happened, and an attempt to make us believe that she is noble, brave, and tragic. I found her more to be stubborn, headstrong, and impetuous, and I'm glad the book is over so I can move on to more worthy projects.
If you are able to borrow this book, by all means, give it a read. It was entertaining, it its own way, to read about this woman's constant delusion and habitual victimhood, and, like I said, I couldn't put it down once I'd started. But I'm sorry I paid money for the book, and I wouldn't do it again.
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Addiction
