Boyd Tonkin writes:

Brant and his people keep their side of a firm pact to support the Crown in spite of their outsider status. Indian warriors, Irish and Highlander Catholics, “Papists and pagans” alike fight for King George as “two tribes of masked men”. But fight they do, in the face of British equivocations and compromises. Yet in one bloody and colourful skirmish after another, the Indian nations’ “Longhouse” begins to crack under the rebel onslaught. George Washington and his raggle-taggle bands of chancers, predators and bigots so far from the upstanding heroes of America’s deepest myth seek to drown an ancient culture in “lakes of tears and rivers of blood”.

What saves the Wu Ming crew from romantic sentimentalism is a trademark sophistication about political ideas and their impact on both words and deeds. Philip, a French captive who has literally gone native to become the Mohawk’s fiercest brave, reads Voltaire and Rousseau and reminds a patronising lady that “many European things are circulating in the American forests”. Exploring this already hybrid world, Manituana dismantles the delusion of the simple “noble savage” as shrewdly as it debunks the usual patriotic pageantry of 1776 and all that.

A virtuoso middle section (again rooted in real events) sends Brant, Philip and Johnson’s son-in-law to London, where they aim to reinforce the Indian alliance of equals with the Crown. Fawned over as a “ceremonial beast” in salons and palaces, Brant also brushes against the squalor and despair of the capital’s poor. With a firework display of thieves’ cant and gang jargon, an electrifying high point of Shaun Whiteside’s swift but subtle translation, the “Mohocks of Soho” who actually existed hint at the grim underclass destiny that lies in store for defeated traditional peoples all around the world. Wu Ming do sometimes graft the preoccupations of today onto the events of yesterday. Philip, for example, has a vision of “a London as big as the world”, where free-market individualism has gobbled up the planet and its once-proud communities. Mostly, however, Manituana shuns anachronism as it sets about delivering a fast-flowing, densely peopled, richly decorated story of a precious way of life, and thought, on the brink of the modern abyss. As for Wu Ming and their bewitching fictional fellowship, let’s hope that many moons will pass before we see the last of these mysterious Mohicans.

Read the full review here.

On 26 september 2009, Wu Ming 2 will be in GENEVA, Switzerland, at a literary festival called Fureur de lire [more or less: "Frenzy to read"]. The talk is entitled Fureur à l’italienne [more or less: "Fury the Italian Way"] and scheduled for 1 PM @ MC Plainpalais, Théâtre Pitoëff. WM1 and Serge Quadruppani (an excellent novelist and the French translator of our books) will present  Manituana (French edition, Editions Métailié) and discuss the latest wave of Italian literature, with particular references to the so-called  New Italian Epic. Here’s  Fureur de lire‘s official website.

On 15 October 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 will be in LONDON, UK. They will present Manituana (UK/US edition, Verso Books) at Borders bookstore, 122 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0JR.

On 16 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in TREMBLAY-EN-FRANCE, France, to present Manituana. Details to follow.

On 16 October 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 will still be in LONDON, UK. They will present Manituana (UK/US edition, Verso Books) at Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1, Brampton Park Road, Wood Green, London N22 6BG. 7 PM.

On 17 October 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 will still be in LONDON, UK. They will present Manituana (UK/US edition, Verso Books) at the  Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH. We’re pleased to announce that the British novelist  Stewart Home will read pages from our book. With the participation of Shaun Whiteside (the translator into English of all our books). 9 PM

On the very same day, 17 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in LIMOGES, France. They will present Manituana at the  Bibliothèque Francophone Multimédia (BFM), Centre-ville, 2 Place Aimé Cèsaire, Limoges Cedex. 3 PM.

On 18 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in TARNAC, France, to present Manituana at the Café-épicerie. Details to follow.

On 20 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in PARIS, France, to present Manituana at La Libreria (89 rue du Fbg Poissonnière, Paris 9e). More details to follow.

On 21 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in LILLE, France, to present Manituana at the Librairie internationale V.O. 36 rue de Tournai, 59000 Lille. More details to follow.

On 18 November 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 5 will be in NEW YORK CITY. They will present Manituana at the New School, Room 510, 66 West 12th Street, 8 PM.

On 20 November 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 5 will be in NEW YORK CITY. They will present Manituana at Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, (Lower East Side, between Stanton and Rivington). 7 PM.

On 23 November 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 5 will be in NEW YORK CITY. They will present Manituana (and read from the book in their thick Italian accent) at PS122, 150 First Avenue (corner of East 9th Street) Directions: L train to 1st Avenue,
 F/V train to 2nd Avenue, 
N/R to 8th Street, 
6 to Astor Place. $6.

Stewart Home

[That old fellow traveller of ours, the novelist and cultural terrorist Stewart Home, blogged a few interesting things about Manituana, which we duly reproduce. He also reviewed Q some time ago.]

Manituana by Wu Ming

Following on from Q (authored as Luther Blissett) and 54, comes a new novel Manituana by the Bologna fiction collective known as Wu Ming. Verso are publishing Shaun Whiteside’s English translation, the proof copies were circulated last month, and the book will be available in both the UK and the US shortly. Like the earlier tomes by the same authors, Manituana is a heavily researched historical novel that speaks as much about a future we have yet to make, as the past in which it is set. The main action takes place around the ‘American War of Independence’, with the focus on the alliance the Iroquois Indians made with the English.

The Iroquois way of life was destroyed by the development of capitalism, and this entailed the exploitation of both Africa and the Americas, as well as the European working class. The diseases that accompanied European traders and their goods decimated the indigenous American population and thereby opened the way for their conquest. The Iroquois were caught between a rock and a hard place and mostly chose to ally with ‘perfidious Albion’, rather than the equally barbarous French or – slightly later – the genocidal armies of George Washington. However, for me the real ‘heroes’ of this novel are not the characters who take up the bulk of its pages (some are  actual historical figures), but rather those shadowy proletarian figures who attempt to make an alliance with the Iroquois when some of their leaders visit London.  From page 199 of Marituana: (more…)

Thanks to Shaun Whiteside, who is translating the website into English, we just added new material. Much more to come.

Board game inspired by Manituana wins prize for most original concept
The Rome-based association Miles Gloriosus returns triumphant from the Convention Hellana 08

Manituana Haiku – Wu Ming interview the poet Rossano Astremo
About a rewriting of Manituana in the form of a poem, a haiku for each chapter

Yu Guerra! – True Hatred
I go home, I visit the band’s website: they give links to us. They name us. I download the song: it’s a re-evaluation of hatred…

The Fall of Sky Woman
Long before the world was created, there was an island in the sky where dwelt a heavenly race. One day a pregnant woman fell through the hole of an uprooted tree and…

Two years after it first hit the Italian bookshops, our novel Manituana is about to be published in the UK and the US (June 2009).
Our previous works (Q and 54) were published by Heinemann in the UK and Harcourt in the US, but now we’ve got one new publisher on both shores of the Atlantic, Verso Books. On the other hand, the translator remains the same: Shaun Whiteside.

Two years aren’t such a long time, we were used to waiting for much longer before our books appeared in Angloville:
- we wrote Q in the 1995-98 period; it was published in Italy in 1999; only after 4 long years it reached Britain, and 2003 had to give way to 2004 before the American readers could find it on the shelves.
- we wrote 54 in the 1999-2001 period; it was published in Italy in 2002; we had to wait, respectively, 2005 and 2006 to see it in print in the UK and the US. (more…)