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Achmat Dangor

Bitter Fruit Paperback – 24 Nov. 2003

by Achmat Dangor (Author)

3.6 61 ratings

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The last time Silas Ali encountered the Lieutenant, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Lydia, his wife.When Silas sees him again, by chance, twenty years later, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Ali's fragile family life.
Bitter Fruitis the story of Silas and Lydia, their parents, friends and colleagues, as their lives take off in unexpected directions and relationships fracture under the weight of history.It is also the story of their son Mickey, a student and sexual adventurer, with an enquiring mind and a strong will.An unforgettably fine novel about a brittle family in a dysfunctional society.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Atlantic Books
Publication date

24 Nov. 2003
ISBN-10

1843541998
ISBN-13

978-1843541998
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Product description

Review

A haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic on its context, gender and generation, its progress like slow dancing -- Barbara Trapido, Independent

A writer who gives texture and grace to the present lives and historical legacy of South Africa's 500-year old multi-ethnic society. -- Dr. Rachel Holmes, Literary Review

Dangors vivid prose, narrative fluency and facility for literary experiment make Bitter Fruit a considerable achievement. -- Shomit Dutta, Daily Telegraph

Meticulously written and perfectly paced. -- Giles Newington, Irish Times

The unremitting intensity of Dangors focus is just as notable as its depth. -- Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday

About the Author

Achmat Dangor was born in 1948 in Johannesburg. He has devoted much of his life to politics, including heading up the Kagiso Trust which, when created, was the largest black-led foundation in South Africa. Since laying down his duties as Director of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Dangor now writes full time. He is the author of Kafka's Curse which has appeared in six languages. Bitter Fruit (Atlantic Books 2004) was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and for the Man Booker Prize 2004.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atlantic Books; Main edition (24 Nov. 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1843541998
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1843541998

Customer reviews:
3.6 61 ratings

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Andrea Van Peteghem

sad, really bitter

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 30 March 2016

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Very dark book, sad, really bitter! intelligent, sensitive, I learned a lot about South Africa reading this book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 7 August 2018

Verified Purchase

Avery intriguing ok and very authenti c in its glimpses oftownship culture and ice post Mzdela,s return from prison. All the characters are well drawn and ring true and many are damaged and lost in the new apartheid world
I am giving it to my 30 year old grandson who has need to South Africa but knows nothing if the unerlying giult and trauma

One person found this helpful

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Wendy Borrill

A gift

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 6 May 2014

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I gave this to my sister on her birthday. It was sent direct and arrived on time. I had read it and knew it was a book she would appreciate. The chances are that I will read it again.

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robin friedman

A Novel of Post-Apartheid South Africa

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 23 July 2010

At a climactic moment of Achmat Dangor's novel, "Bitter Fruit", a secondary character relates a traumatic story which works to the following conclusion: "There are certain things people do not forget, or forgive. Rape is one of them. In ancient times, conquerors destroyed the will of those whom they conquered by impregnating the women. It is an ancient form of genocide." (p. 204)

In the novel, a rape which can neither be forgotten nor forgiven plays a central role. The violation of rape is important in itself, and it also serves as the defining metaphor for Dangor's picture of apartheid in South Africa and its consequence. The novel is set in the late 20th Century as South Africa struggles to emerge from its apartheid past. It is set against the background of the amnesty policy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in which the evils of the past would be memorialized and acknowledged but without bloodshed. The hope was for the country to move on while minimizing vengeance, vendettas, or grudges.

The primary characters are Silas Ali, a former activist and attorney for the TRC, his wife Lydia, and their late adolescent son Mikey who mid-way through the novel begins calling himself Michael. Silas and Lydia are both of mixed racial background but are otherwise quite different from each other. About 20 years before the story begins Lydia had been raped by a white policeman, Du Boise, in the presence of Silas who was unable to prevent the outrage. Then, 20 years later Silas runs into the aged Du Boise at a supermarket and a confrontation almost ensues. During the intervening 20 years, the couple had rarely discussed the incident which festered between them. The marriage was unhappy, sexually and otherwise. When Silas tells Lydia of his meeting with DuBois, something snaps inside both husband and wife. Lydia cuts her feet on broken glass, "dancing on glass" and is hospitalized. While visiting her, Silas has a stroke and is also hospitalized.

While his parents are hospitalized, Mikey, a brooding and introspective lad with an interest in literature finds his mother's diary and reads it. He has reason to think that he is the child of Du Boise's rape of his mother.

Besides the three primary characters, the novel offers glimpses of their family and colleagues. The latter part of the book includes a portrayal of the portion of South Africa's Islamic community which either sponsors or condones terrorism. Besides the pivotal rape incident, the book includes many scenes of other forms of sexuality, including child abuse, incest, bisexual and polyamorous relationships, closeted gay sexuality and more. Most of the sexual activity is of forms that are offensive as is most, but not all, of the sexual conduct itself.

The book was Booker Prize finalist. It offers a portrayal of the difficulties South Africa faces in moving forward and beyond its tarnished past. For the most part, I did not find "Bitter Fruit" convincing as a novel. Here are some of my reasons. Many of the individual scenes as well as the dialogue are sharp and crisp. But they contrast with the story line which drags. Other than the three primary characters, most of the other people in the book receive shadowy portrayals which distract from the story. In minute detail, the book describes the vileness and the long-term effects of rape and the book's analogy between rape and apartheid has some effect. The author is critical of the Truth and Reconciliation policy and he suggests that neither rape nor apartheid should be readily put aside without some attempt at what appears to be vengeance. The novel did not move me to share such a conclusion. Furthermore, the book's focus on the vile and debasing forms of human sexual practices, in addition to the rape on which the story turns, did not seem to me to add a great deal to the novel.

The novel's focus on the Ali family and on the various sexual issues of the family members and other characters also distracted from considering the book as a story of the difficulties of an emergent South Africa. The book was more the story of a sharply dysfunctional family. And the focus of the book wanders unconvincingly from Silas, to Michael, to Lydia. Lydia ultimately works to some degree of freedom from the rape and from her marriage in a brief sexual encounter with a young man after which she leaves Silas. The story line seems to shift from a metaphor about South Africa to a story of a woman in search of a difficult personal and sexual freedom. This is an inadequate denouement for the book. The story of apartheid and its aftermath encompasses people of many and diverse backgrounds as well as people of both genders. Overall, this novel does not succeed.

Robin Friedman

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Stephanie Jane (Literary Flits)

A difficult read, but worthwhile

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 14 October 2016

I am finding Bitter Fruit a difficult book to review mainly, I think, because despite striving to understand the Ali family, their actions were frequently too far removed from my own life experience to be able to empathise. Lydia's rape, while not graphically described, is a dark, brooding presence throughout the novel, one single vicious act which is symbolic of the many similar assaults inflicted during South Africa's apartheid years. The unravelling of its aftermath took a while to pull me in and it wasn't until the second half of Bitter Fruit that I found the book strongly maintained my interest. That said, this is a worthwhile book to read! It is a slow burn of a piece; gently paced prose in sharp contrast to the violence and anger it describes.

Dangor evokes South Africa at perhaps the second of its greatest recent turning points when the Truth and Reconciliation Committee is about to submit its report to the nation and another president will replace Mandela. On the face of it, the country is at peace with itself and set to progress into the future and the same applies to the Ali family who are also, on the face of it, a closely-tied unit. Silas' legal profession will remain in demand as his TRC work is coming to a close and son Mikey is set for college and a career of his own. But it just takes one chance encounter to release deeply-buried memories and the whole house of cards slowly collapses in on itself. The question of Bitter Fruit is whether what is true for one family within South Africa might also become truth for the country herself. Is the legacy of decades of brutal suppression and oppression too much to be overcome?

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jfp2006

Microcosm and macrocosm

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 1 June 2005

This is a novel for all those wondering why they restrict their reading to British and American fiction, or, in my case, mainly just British. I'd decided to read, and compare for myself, all last year's Booker shortlisted novels, and found this one impressively original.
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.

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