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Product Description
内容説明
Unfolding in South Africa, at the moment of Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1991, this novel explores the life and vision of a male activist through the pen of a female narrator. David Dirkse is part of the underground world of activists, spies and saboteurs in the liberation movement -- a world seldom revealed to outsiders. With 'time to think' after the unbanning of the movement, David is researching his roots in history of the mixed-race 'Coloured' people of South Africa and of their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers. Provides compelling history that is vividly personal, through the powerful filter of storytelling. Through voices that weave together -- responding to, illuminating, and sometimes contradicting one another -- Wicomb depicts a world where 'truth upon conflicting truth wriggles into shape'. The dramatic and violent turns at the close of the novel further testify to the complexity of truth -- and of telling.
From Publishers Weekly
A fabulous family tree branches backward into South African history and myth in Wicomb's second novel (after You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town). David Dirkse, somewhat shamefacedly, has left his wife and kids in Cape Town to search for his roots in Kokstad. The date is 1991; David, a cadre of the ANC, Mandela's party, should be feeling elated by the approaching collapse of apartheid. Instead, he is vaguely melancholy, perhaps because he is suppressing his feeling for a fellow cadre, Dulcie Olifant. David, like his wife, Sally, is "colored," which means he belongs to that curious South African racial category, defined in the social hierarchy as some degree above black and some degree below white. In researching his ancestors, he studies the history of a tribe called Griqua, who are considered in Kokstad to be of low social status they are perhaps synonymous with the Hottentots. His inquiries focus on their 19th-century leader, Andrew La Fleur, for whom the Griqua were to be a model of "separate development" a fatal phrase, the root of the apartheid ideal. David's relationship to La Fleur comes from the "telegonic" birth of his great-grandmother, Ouma Ragel; Antjie, Ragel's mother, supposedly conceived from looking at La Fleur. At the top of the whole tree, as far as David is concerned, is the steatopygous Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, whose large buttocks amazed 19th-century European scientists. Complex, sympathetic, but desultory in its plotting and slow in pace, Wicomb's novel unravels a long, fascinating family history. Her tale is a sometimes happy, sometimes ironic unmasking of denials and a revelation of an imperfect, unlikely reality.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the ハードカバー edition.
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