The fictional universe of Zakes Mda is no place for the cold rationalist. In six novels, the fifty-eight-yearold writer whom the New York Times recently hailed as “one of the most prominent black novelists in South African history” has demonstrated an abiding attachment to the seemingly ludicrous. In fact, his love of the improbable is so pervasive that some readers have mistaken it for an embrace of superstition. Novelist Norman Rush, perhaps his fiercest critic, castigated him in the New York Review of Books for leaving such realities as AIDS unaddressed, saying that The Heart of Redness (2002) is an