Secrets of the Four-Chambered Heart

Late 1994. A group of New Yorkers travels to Rwanda in the aftermath of its genocide. They think they’re leaving their problems behind them, but find their ambitions and rivalries, personal and professional, overshadow their trip.

In the USA, the Sexual Revolution has brought what feels like sexual conflict. Marriages are cracking, new attach-ments are tempting, and people who are otherwise free are tormented by what — or whom — they cannot have.

In Rwanda, sexual conflict has meant something vastly different. The genocide earlier in the year brought rape as well as murder, and on a massive scale. In its aftermath, a party of New Yorkers, journalists among them, arrives with guides to write about a country devastated by violence.

The journalists have come to build their reputations, competing over who will bring home the best story, but all the characters in the novel — American and Rwandan — have other concerns. Partners quarrel, desires shift, jealousies surface. 

As the party travels through Uganda’s gorilla forests to the volcanoes of Zaire, private preoccupations prove oddly resistant in the face of what has happened around them.

Why it’s important

Novels about journeys usually promise a revelation. Griffel’s is more unsettling. His privileged Americans encounter a theatre of suffering on an unimaginable scale, yet remain absorbed in their own troubles. It is left to the reader to make sense of what seems a heartless disparity.