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.
From Library Journal
Published in 1987, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town won Wicomb international fame. Her new work, an epic retelling of the settlement of South Africa's Griqualand, will bring her into the spotlight again. The book opens in 1991, when the legalization of the African National Congress (ANC), the release of Nelson Mandela, and the end of apartheid are effecting huge changes in South Africa. Confused about his identity and status (he is categorized as "colored," placing him somewhere between black and white in apartheid society), ANC cadre David Dirkse leaves Cape Town for Kokstad to research his family tree. There, he discovers that he is distantly related to Andries Abraham Stockhausen La Fleur, who led the Griqua tribe into the desert in the 19th century. What results is an excellent retelling of the settlement of Griqualand. More than a history lesson, however, or even an exciting adventure story, this book is a huge step in the remaking of the South African novel. A tremendous achievement. Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., MD
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
