Readers looking for hard-driving adventure may be disappointed by these pages. Estebanico treats us to life between the lines of the official version of the trek through this territory previously unknown to people on the other side of the Atlantic. Almost everything in the New World looks different to Estebanico, from the man to whom he is indentured, to the nobles, the soldiers and the Indians, to the entire ordeal itself. And that's how we get his account, from what Ralph Ellison once was called the lower frequencies of experience. That's how he came to be indentured to one of the leaders of the 1527 Spanish expedition. His story stands apart from that of the Spaniards as he tells how he grew up in a country worn down by war and how he sold himself into slavery so his family might avoid dying of starvation. The novel is called "The Moor's Account," and Alan Cheuse has our review.ĪLAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: A slave called Estebanico, a dark skinned Moroccan man, a Muslim, emerges as the narrator. And now, novelist Laila Lalami has written a new version of this story from a perspective that we rarely hear - a slave. One of the members of the expedition wrote a famous account of the disasters that befell them. In the 16th century, a Spanish conquistador set sail for the New World in hopes of claiming part of it for the Spanish crown.
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