| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Barbara Trapido, Independent
Shomit Dutta, Daily Telegraph
Browse and search another edition of this book.
IT WAS INEVITABLE. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Born in 1948 into a strictly Muslim household in Johannesburg, Achmat Dangor spent a great deal of his childhood in Cape Town's colourful District Six where in addition to attending a conventional Western school, he also went to Islamic school (madrassa) on a daily basis. It was an upbringing that was to stand him in good stead for his later role of both political activist and storyteller.
In the 1970s Dangor, then a university student, joined the political movement founded by Steve Biko. What with the notorious forced removals of the residents from their homes in District Six, and his growing awareness of an unjust political system, Dangor turned to his passion, writing, as a means of expression. His first collection, Waitng for Leila openly and lyrically laments the systematic breaking down of the community he'd grown up in. While the writing was raw, and by no means his best work, this slim tome obvious struck a nerve, and before long, in 1973, Dangor was banned from writing by the Apartheid regime.
For 13 years he lived in exile in the US and wrote about the land of his birth from afar, trying wherever possible to generate awareness about what was really going on here. He went on to write The Z-town Trilogy in which he drew attention to the base reality of life within the struggle and how it affected personal relationships; and, more recently, Kafka's Curse, which shows a move away from the mythic cadence of his earlier work towards a more grounded, hard-hitting realism.
He has won numerous awards for his writing, but strangely remains relatively unrecognised as a novelist by the South African public. Ask the man on the street who Achmat Dangor is and he's most likely to respond 'CEO of the Nelson Mandela Childen's Fund', which indeed he was until recently when he gave up his post to pursue his literary career full-time. A move that seems to be paying off.
Dangor's powerful yet stark new book, Bitter Fruit (Kwela Books, R89,95) has just hit the shelves and, in true Dangor style, he's not pulling any punches. Set in 90s South Africa, post-TRC, it is the story of two people working out their demons and coming to understand their role and identity within the new order. Silas, who works for the Department of Justice, and Lydia, a nurse, seem trapped in an utterly loveless marriage, haunted by a past brutality, a critical moment in time that bound them together as much as it drove them apart. Through Silas and Lydia's brittle relationship Dangor draws attention to the fact that some wounds run far deeper than public forums like the TRC have the power to heal. The couple's relationship with each other and, quite pivotally, with their emotionally detached son Mikey, holds up a mirror to the greater social project of the TRC, raising a wealth of questions as yet unasked. A passionate, moving and often heart-wrenching look at how far we've come as a nation, and yet how very far we still have to go.
economic and subtly crafted that I read this terrifically compelling
book in a single sitting.
Charting the dismayingly inevitable breakdown in the relationships
between the three central characters - idealistically driven father
Silas, haunted and unstable wife Lydia and their confused son Mikey -
the central journey through their own personal truth and (partial)
reconciliation is set against the broader backdrop of the post-
Apartheid process of the same name.
The emotional and political landscape that Bangor depicts is one
full of complications, betrayals and the searchings for truth
through the half-darkness of mis-remembered pasts. This is not the
sunny rainbow nation: rather, it is a brutal and twisted aftermath to
hideous acts that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Racial, religious
and sexual confusions and distortions weave through the narrative
and create a sense of dark foreboding - a land where the centre
cannot hold. The "bitter fruit" of the title seems to refer to both
the consequences of apartheid as well as the double-edged sword of new found freedom - a freedom in which relative values seem to become disorientated, a freedom where conventional moralities lose their grip. At the most obvious level, of course, the bitter fruit is Mikey himself: the product of perhaps the ultimate desecration - rape - and a symbol of the unhappy congruence of old and new, white and black, oppressor and oppressed. The bitterness cannot be contained.
All very engaging, and the mapping of the pyschological journies of
these central characters takes a real hold. Where the novel, I feel,
lets us down slightly is in its conjuring of the sights, sounds and
smells of the new South Africa. The narrative is so focused on the
interior lives of these characters that they don't come alive in a
very real sense. I couldn't really imagine what they looked like and
scenery and context never really progresssed beyond a collage of
hints, some of these very powerfully expressed however. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, skin features heavily both in a very real, physical
sense (the prose really comes alive at these points) and as a
metaphor - a metaphor for self-protection and containment, for
fragility and vulnerability (shockingly so for Lydia in an early
pivotal episode). The climax of the novel is stunning, both in narrative terms - so deeply moving - and in terms of its descriptive power.
I recommend this novel whole-heartedly - its handling of the deep
emotional issues of love, passion and guilt is masterly and utterly
riveting and, once again, it is proved that nothing is simply black
and white.
The story is of the torments of an ordinary South African family, set against the macrocosmic torments of a country in seismic political upheaval with the apartheid era moving into its death-throes. The Alis' fragile family life [and NOT, as the back-cover itself states, "the Ali's fragile family life"...; perhaps time somebody at Atlantic Books had a look at Lynne Truss?] is thus an illustration of a country and a civilisation in transition as the present struggles to accommodate itself to the past, represented on the political level by the injustice of racial segregation and discrimination and on the personal level by the rape of a black woman by a white man.
"When Mikey thinks of his mother, the word 'Mama' no longer comes to mind." The novel also deals with the difficulties of growing up and the generation gap. Nearly everyone in the book has secrets of some kind, and characters attempt, and unwittingly fail, to know what is going on in each other's minds. Inevitably, things fall apart, differences become irreconcilable; "Bitter Fruit" is a meticulously observed study of the difficulties of coming to terms with the past and with change. It fully deserved its place on the Booker shortlist.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
