An impressive tale, written in a sure-handed style, that vividly exposes the heavy personal and cultural costs of racism.
A debut novel details a betrayal in apartheid South Africa.
Anderson (Vanishing Ground: Poems, 2000) tells the tale of Adrian Erasmus, a man raised by his widower father, a drunken, racist Boer who eventually blows his brains out in front of his son due to an impossible debt. Adrian is shooting a video starring professor Digby Bamford. Although his reputation has faded, Bamford caused a sensation in the 1960s when he found a fossilized skull called Wonderboy, suggesting humans originated in South Africa. Also at the Wonderboy site are Bamford’s girlfriend, Vicky, once Adrian’s lover, and Adrian’s co-worker, a black South African known as Bucs. Complications develop as the foursome camps in the remote area. Adrian wants to rekindle his affair with Vicky, but she has her eye on Bucs; Adrian fantasizes about killing both men. When the booze-swilling Bamford proposes a porn shoot starring Vicky, Bucs, and Adrian, Bucs leaves and Adrian blows up the crew’s vehicle, creating a huge fire. Later Adrian finds Bamford dying from a gunshot wound that he claims is self-inflicted, but Adrian discovers that Vicky shot him. After witnessing South African soldiers tearing down a black family’s hut, he runs into a racist soldier who tells Adrian he and his comrades have captured and badly beaten the innocent Bucs while hunting for “terros”—terrorists. After Adrian lies, claiming Bucs killed Bamford and set the fire, the black man faces execution. This is a tautly written, finely crafted novel that plumbs the depths of racism, not only as it occurred in South Africa under apartheid, but by extension as it continues in much of the world today. Anderson has a golden ear for realistic dialogue, and his descriptive powers are strong (Bamford looks “like some flabby failure in a Mr. Universe contest”). Readers should not only see the characters, places, and situations the author describes, but smell, hear, and sometimes even feel them as well. Beyond painting a bleak portrait of the dissolute, decadent, and cruel nature of apartheid South Africa, “this bloody fascist country,” the book builds to a moral climax when Adrian has the chance to free his colleague. The only characters who come across as decent are the blacks, and they are relentlessly ground down by the whites.
An impressive tale, written in a sure-handed style, that vividly exposes the heavy personal and cultural costs of racism.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-936196-38-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: C & R Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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