Central & South African Books

Cry, the Beloved Country (Oprah's Book Club)

Alan Paton

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Total reviews: 247 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

It's on my Top 10 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 20 people found this review helpful.

How much can a man love his country? How much can he love his son? His God? Can justice prevail when man cannot? What is forgiveness? Redemption? Grace? To consider all these elements in one novel is not possible. Or is it?

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is all these things and more. It is forgiveness writ large. It is agape love in the doing. It is the story of two fathers, each with a son. One son is the victim of apartheid and is lost. The other is also a victim of apartheid but of the other side. He seeks to find a way to make things better, to make things right. The lost one kills the seeking one. One is African, the other is Afrikaaner, and therein lies the difference and the ultimate. This difference, this ultimate, this absolute are what drove Alan Paton in the writing of South Africa's most famous, most searing novel of the separation of races in all ways.

Absalom Kumalo's life is limited in all ways because he is black South African. Arthur Jarvis is an engineer and has all the privileges of white South Africa, yet he is keen on social justice and works to bring it to pass. What irony then that the one without kills the one seeking to bring justice. However, it is this very irony that brings their fathers to friendship, to a bonding of black man and white man.

Umfundisi is the black priest (not Catholic) of a simple, poor church in a village located near the home of the rich landowner and farmer, James Jarvis, who really does not know his son until he is dead. It is the getting to know his son that he connects with the African, and the father becomes the son in the ways of love and forgiveness. The umfundisi is one of my favorite characters in all literature I have read because of his humility and reverence.

This novel, published in 1948, remains as one, even today, apropos to race relations, to their very real potentials and actualities. Mutual respect, sincerity, forgiveness, and grace all come to the fore in this most magnificent, lyrical novel.

It would be on my Top 10 list of books I would take if marooned on the proverbial deserted island.

Editorial Review:

Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.

Diamonds Are Forever (James Bond Novels)

Ian Fleming

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Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Definitely not the best Bond 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If you're new to Bond, start with Casino Royale or Moonraker, two gems. Diamonds are Forever had some high points, but way too much slow-paced action, description of what Bond is eating, pointless scenes that have you skimming pages to get to the point, etc. Nothing like the gripping tension of the aforementioned two volumes.

Bond does Vegas 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

One of the big movies of recent times was Blood Diamonds, a grim action movie dealing with conflict diamonds, those mined in certain African countries in states of civil war. A few years before that, the final Pierce-Brosnan-as-James-Bond movie, Die Another Day also dealt with these diamonds. Ian Fleming had first introduced Bond fans to the African diamond trade much earlier, however, in 1956 with Diamonds Are Forever (and a year later, he would come out with a non-Bond novel called The Diamond Smugglers which also dealt with the subject). Moviewise, this is most noted as being the last "official" Bond movie featuring Sean Connery (Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball, is not considered part of the official canon).

This fourth Bond novel has the British Secret Service agent contending with diamond smugglers who are sending the gems from Africa to England and then to the United States. When Bond first receives his assignment - to impersonate a smuggler and determine how the pipeline is organized - he treats it as something of a lark. After contending with SMERSH and other professional spies and assassins, dealing with simple American gangsters should be a breeze. Bond is to soon find out that he is underestimating the opposition.

In England, Bond meets the beautiful Tiffany Case who works for the smugglers. Like most women in Bond stories, Tiffany has had a rough past, but only needs the (physical) love of a good man (that is, Bond) to be healed. (Such damaged women are actually a staple in the so-called "men's fiction" of decades ago.) Tiffany gives the diamonds to Bond hidden in golf balls, and the smuggling goes fine; the "hot ice" arrives fine in New York. When complications arise regarding Bond's payment, he goes to Las Vegas where the pipeline also ends.

This is another fun Bond novel, albeit not the strongest in the set. Its big lack is a real good villain, although some of the bad guys are at least a bit interesting. As usual, the action is much more limited than the movies, but the trade-off is a bit more depth of character, though I'd be hard-pressed to call this a character-driven novel. It is, instead, pure entertainment, which is exactly what Fleming intended and succeeded in doing. This is another worthwhile read for literary Bond fans.

Editorial Review:

Tiffany Case, a cold, gorgeous, devil-may-care blonde, stands between James Bond and the leaders of a diamond-smuggling ring that stretches from Africa to London to the United States. Bond uses her to infiltrate this gang, but once in America the hunter becomes the hunted. Agent 007 is in real danger until help comes from an unlikely quarter, the ice maiden herself.

Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

J. M. Coetzee

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Total reviews: 76 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Timeless and Timely 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The Nobel Prize committee has a history of honoring writers with a strong political or social message. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS (1980), Coetzee's short, approachable, but devastating fable about the abuse of power, must have played a major part in their decision to award him the prize in 2003. While all his books deal with moral issues, and many (such as DISGRACE of 1999) reflect his experience as a South African growing up in a divided society, this comparatively early book tackles the underlying issues straight on, by divorcing the story from an explicit place or time. The narrator, known only as the Magistrate, is the civil administrator of a colonial outpost of some great Empire. At the beginning of the story, a state security officer called Colonel Joll (one of only two proper names in the book) arrives for an expedition against the Barbarians. When he captures a few hapless natives and submits them to torture, the Magistrate becomes morally involved. His attempt to counteract Joll's brutality leads to his own downfall, even as the Empire discovers that it is dealing with forces that it can no longer control.

One of the problems of allegorical fiction is that by being set in an unreal place and time, it can deprive the reader of the familiar landmarks necessary to hold his interest. But Coetzee preserves the sense of actuality with great skill. The layout of the small border town quickly becomes familiar; we have often seen its like in books and movies. The time is not today, but it might well be yesterday: South Africa in the last years of Apartheid, the Roman Empire before its collapse, or anything in between. And by being timeless, the novel is also perennially timely. No one could read the opening chapter now without thinking of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, things that could not have been predicted by the author -- other than through his certainty that something of this kind will always occur when once-great power is threatened.

The 1904 poem by Constantine Cavafy which gave the book its title ends with the discovery that the barbarians have gone, and the question: "And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? | They were, those people, a kind of solution." The need for a weakening society to define itself by setting up straw-man aliens as objects of fear is certainly one of the themes of this book, but not the only one. An equally apposite punch line might have been something like: "Look in the mirror; the barbarians are us." For a while, the Magistrate appears to be the One Just Man who will stand up against barbarity. But in fact, the novel ends with the bleaker image of "a man who lost his way long ago, but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere." For, humiliated and reaching a painful self-understanding, the Magistrate realizes a truth: "I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less." This is a brief, absorbing book, but one that will certainly make you think.

Editorial Review:

These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

"A real literary event."--The New York Times Book Review

"A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility."--Chicago Tribune Book World

Other Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
My Antonia by Willa Cather
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disgrace

J. M. Coetzee

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Total reviews: 338 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.

Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried

Master Harold . . . And The Boys (Penguin Plays)

Athol Fugard

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a gripping look at racism's multiple victims 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Athol Fugard, 'Master Harold' ... and the boys. New York: Penguin. 1984. Originally produced in 1982 by the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Hally does not know who he is. The single white character on stage in South African-born playright Athol Fugard's one-scene work is the friend of his mother's two black employees when they tend to St George's Park Tearoom in her absence. But he is also their 'Master Harold'-reluctantly but inevitably-when the stress of his crippled, alcoholic father's homecoming impels him into an emotional space that one simply does not share with black folks. Perhaps is it the burden of dealing with human beings on the multiple levels that racism forces upon those who resent but ultimately accede to their required roles that embitters Hally beyond redemption.

Hally doesn't know several things. He is ignorant of the nobility with which Sam and Willie have battled for his dignity over the years of service to his family. He doesn't understand that even this virtue has its limits, beyond which dignity weighs more than the possibility of continuing friendship.

Hally doesn't understand that a night of dancing at the Eastern Province Open Dancing Championships is a thing of beauty rather than of entertainment, nor the hope that is nurtured in a space where for one night people never bump into each other.

'Master Harold', the title upon which he insists at the cost of everything that matters, will never know because he cannot learn. He is a million times more the victim of the 1950's racism in the land of Fugard's birth than any black man whom, when pushed beyond his modest emotional means, he shoves around. They, at least, leave this dark, sad drama with something.

Editorial Review:

One of theatre's most acclaimed playrights finds humor and heartbreak in the friendship of Harold, a 17 - year old white boy in 1950's South Africa, and the two middle aged black servents who raised him. Racism unexpectedly shatters Harold's chilhood and friendships in this absorbing, affecting coming of age play. Readers: Leon Anddison Brown, Keith David, Bobby Steggart

July's People

Nadine Gordimer

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Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not an Easy Read 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I bought a copy of Nadine Gordimer's "July's People" shortly before my husband and I made our first trip to South Africa. I must confess I found the first chapter quite difficult to comprehend. I decided to put the book aside and read it after I had been in the country for a while, hoping I would find it easier to understand. And I did.
Though written during the apartheid period the book is valuable today not only as an historical document but also because sadly, in my opinion, things haven't changed much in South Africa since apartheid ended 12 years ago. Though the current government is black we found that descendants of Dutch and English settlers remain in the first world, while blacks are mainly living a third world life and working in subservient positions. True equality will take a few generations and education will play an important role in giving the majority population the skills they need for a comfortable life.
Now a bit about the book itself. July is a black servant until recently employed in a white household in Johannesburg. When rising conflict begins to threaten the lives of the family he serves, the Smales, July takes them to his home in the bush. The book concerns the adjustments that necessitates. It must be said that the elder Smales have always prided themselves in their treatment of July and their liberal politics. How to the Smales adapt to living in an insect infested hut? How do they relate to their former servant and their new neighbors, their subsistence diet and new levels of hygiene their relative status as male and female? The answers depend on which member of the Smales family you are talking about - male or female, parent or child? How does July react as the former servant, who is now above them in the social scale due to a mere change of location? What are the new relations between savior and saved?
Highly recommended to those who are more familiar with the history of South Africa than I intially was and to those with an abiding interest in the establishment of equal and harmonious conditions in the modern South Africa.

Editorial Review:

Not all whites in South Africa are outright racists. Some, like Bam and Maureen Smales in Nadine Gordimer's thrilling and powerful novel July's People, are sensitive to the plights of blacks during the apartheid state. So imagine their quandary when the blacks stage a full-scale revolution that sends the Smaleses scampering into isolation. The premise of the book is expertly crafted; it speaks much about the confusing state of affairs of South Africa and serves as the backbone for a terrific adventure.

The Conservationist

Nadine Gordimer

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

South Africa's "Sound and Fury" 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

"The Conservationist" resembles William Faulkner's masterpice "The Sound and the Fury" in several ways: It's subject matter is a dying culture based on racial stratification, the author uses a stream of consciousness style, the story is told from the perspective of three individuals, and it is a magnificent and defining novel.

The principal character is Mehring, a middle-aged white businessman who has purchased a farm outside Johannesburg as a weekend getaway and hobby. Mehring's marriage has failed, he can't relate to his son who is in college, and relations with his lover are intermittent. He is increasingly driven to seek casual sex with younger women. His only attachment is to the land. But it is a hollow love for something he no more understands than he does the people around him.

The other major characters through whose eyes we see South Africa are Josephus, Mehring's black overseer, and an Indian shopkeeper. In each case we see members of a patient older generation fearing change, willing to accommodate, successful in bending the system to their advantage, and fearful of losing what they have.

The story was written and set in the 1970s when South Africa was still very much under an apartheid social system. Gordimer's novel is a protest against that system, but a subtle and sensitive one. It would be a mistake, though, to categorize the novel as political or to assume it is dated. It is a richly symbolic novel about the futility of legislating values and the emptiness of a life based on lies. Its message is portable to any place and time.

The style of "The Conservationist" is difficult to characterize because it shifts from a traditional third person perspective, into an occasional first person, and then into a stream of consciousness mode. The major events occur in chronological order, but a fair proportion of the narrative is spent in flashback. This may make it sound more difficult to read than it is. In a few instance the shift of perspective or time is confusing, but on the whole it is not an especially challenging book to follow, and is definitely easier than "The Sound and the Fury." I would say it is about on a par with Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" as far as difficulty is concerned.

Finally, we can't overlook what will appeal to many readers - the setting, both physical and cultural, of South Africa. Mehring's farm has the universal appeal of rustic serenity with the added dimension of the exotic. No, there aren't any lions charging from the bush, but Gordimer, in very economical prose, evokes the harsh majesty, the sights sounds and smells, of the African veldt. And every bit as fascinating as the landscape is the cultural pastice of African, Indian, Boer and English cultures, each seeing the land - and each other - through the lens of its unique values and myths.

Editorial Review:

The winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature paints a fascinating portrait of a "conservationist" left only with the possibility of self-preservation, a subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethe in South Africa today. 6 cassettes.

The Lives of Animals (The University Center for Human Values Series)

J. M. Coetzee

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.

Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.

As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories

Nadine Gordimer

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"You’re not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that’s so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it."

In this collection of new stories Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather’s fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. “Dreaming of the Dead” conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in “History” is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped.“Alternative Endings” considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories—and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.

The Life and Times of Michael K

J.M. Coetzee

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Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A tale at once subsumed by race and yet never mentioning it 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Literary historians credit much of Ireland's rich literary tradition to its often tragic history. No surprise then that the nation of South Africa, likewise so rich in grief that it might as well diamonds, has produced so many extraordinary writers, two of whom, Coetzee included, who can boast a Nobel Prize. Which brings us to one of his many fine novels, the Life and Times of Michael K.

Telling the tale of a black man caught in the twisted and violent web of Apartheid might appear at first an obvious tale, but then again, so might the story of a child who turned to crime in London in the 19th century or one of a boy and his friend journeying down the Mississippi. It is in this vein which one must see The Life and Times of Michael K, one which captures a place and an age. Other reviewers have focused on the tale of the central character, Michael K, so I would instead look at another aspect of the novel. Despite writing about a place and a story where race surrounds every character and facet like smog, Coetzee never once tells us anyone's race. At first I found this strange, discerning it in its broad aspects but finding the absence the stated fact more than a little strange. It was then that a south African friend explained to me that while I could tell only the characters' races in the broadest sense, she could tell it easily, immediately, and down to which subgroup each belonged. Indeed, like an Englishman knowing the class of a countrymen by their accent, she knew this based on job, dress, and dialogue.

This then is to me part of the genius of Coetzee's novel, giving his reader a story that is at once subsumed by race and yet never mentioning it. True, as some complain, Michael K does not grow to a character larger than life, becoming some hero; no he is a simple man, living to the best of his common ability in a world where evil is so common that it deserves no mention.

I would be remiss not to mention Coetzee's gift for prose, his ability to distill a scene or a feeling down to a few words, like grain alcohol. Many Americans remain unfortunately ignorant of this writer and his country's other extraordinary authors, like Freed and Gordimer. This is a tragedy, which I urge every reader to correct.

Editorial Review:

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience -- the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision.