Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-152). / The action of The History predominantly occurs in a fictitious town on the West Coast of South Africa. The town, Soutbek, is distinctly divided into the upper and lower town and these divisions represent the division between wealth and poverty. The poor are relegated to the upper town, while the wealthy live in the lower town and have the benefit of a view of the bay. The main characters of The History are Pieter Fortuin, the mayor of Soutbek and former upper towner; his wife Anna Fortuin; and then to a lesser extent, Sara, a teenage runaway and Willem, a young man from the upper town. The relationships between these four characters form the bulk of the narrative. Mayor Fortuin's great hope and aim for Soutbek is to make it famous and 'put it on the map.' In order to achieve this goal, the mayor decides to compile a history of the area with the assistance of retired history professor, Terence Pearson. The subsequent account of the Soutbek region calls into question the standard history of the early colonisation of South Africa. Pages of The History of the Soutbek Region are interspersed throughout the novel proper, with the consequence that interesting parallels and relationships become evident to the reader. The result is a novel which explores notions of identity, history, myth and reality, as well as the way that human beings choose to treat each other. Much research has been put into both the pages of The History of the Soutbek Region and the novel proper.

In Sweisbril het ons te make met die middelklas en submiddelklas wereld van die voorstede onder andere Springs, Vereeniging en Kroonstad: die fisiek en geestelik gestroopte wereld van scrapyards, Seven Elevens, karavaanparke en plotte. Die karakters is onteiendes, sukkelaars en dromers; haarkappers, petroljoggies, bankklerke, ensovoorts. Algar produkte van hul omstandighede, gelyktydig slagoffers en slagters; in hierdie wereld is daar geen ware good guys of bad guys nie. Die optrede van die karakters is bloot simptomaties van iets wat veel dieper strek as wat hulle self besef, iets wat ontstellend en onherstelbaar is: 'n onhoudbare uitsigloosheid, waarteen blink planne, vol whisky-flesse en selfs 'n sweisbril maar min verweer bied.

Includes bibliography. / In the month before the outward fleet arrived there came into the bay a giant whale. There it lay, its dark bulk floating just off the shore, watching. The people watched it back. From the bastions of the castle the soldiers trained their guns upon it. All were struck silent by the presence of this great beast; all felt the eye of the devil upon them. So many sins were recalled then, the prayers rose like smoke above the Valley hamlet.

Although there are no apparent structural links between these nine stories, they were conceived of as belonging to a particular mood or being variations of a particular theme. This theme, I suppose, is South African Disappointment. The scope of this abstract does not allow a full explain what I mean by this term, but Stephen Watson's immortal essay A Version of Melancholy expresses it beautifully; as does some of Damon Galgut's writing, Don Maclennan's poetry, Johannes Kerkorrel's music, and David Goldblatt's photography. A serviceable definition might be that feeling of anxious exhaustion one feels when dealing with a world that refuses to live up to one's best expectations of it. My aim with this collection is to give this feeling its first sustained South African fictional rendition and to show how ordinary people may endure it with their dignity still intact.

In alternating first-person accounts, two primary and two secondary characters 'speak' the fictional narrative of If I Could Tell. As the title suggests, doubt is implicit in the narrative; there is no impediment, necessarily, to the story being told - 'I could tell it, if .. .' - but, rather, doubt about telling (from the characters' perspective) where the truth lies. An accumulation of first-person revelations forms, in four parts, an altogether more contestable version of the lives, thoughts and impulses of two 'siblings' Jessica (Jess) Morell and William (Willow) Morell/Osborne, a 'hitchhiker', Luna Fortune, and a nurse, Clare. In authoring themselves, each revealing a telling truth but misperceiving what is wholly true, they simultaneously create the narrative that, beyond their power, draws them together, then alienates them. As Luna says - essentially of the difficulty of deciding whether or not Willow is 'a nice guy' - 'My point being, you can't always tell how a story turns out for the person who's listening, because you can't tell what they're hearing, what the story means, because of stuff that's happened to them or stuff they know.' And the crisis of the novel lies at this nexus, the convergence of 'stuff that's happened' and 'stuff (the characters think) they know'. Plot and structure function together in exploring the limits and consequences of this intractability. Willow and Jess are the son and daughter of Frances and Alfred Morell, an airman reported missing in action in a distant conflict when they are infants, but a presence in their lives and their imaginations. After an obscure political upheaval compels them to move from the river settlement of their early years to the city to live with Alfred's unmarried brother, Geoffrey, the promise of a wholesome upbringing fades with a despairing Frances succumbing to drink. Through an accident of circumstance, her decline is associated with a serious injury Jess suffers in falling from a tree and, in the course of her recovery, the budding of an unnaturally intimate relationship with Willow. This intimacy comes to an incestuous climax on the night of their mother's burial, all but destroying their bond. They are estranged for some two decades. By the time they meet again as adults at Geoffrey's funeral, all the most important details of their relationship and their life story are found to be false or flawed - though neither of them knows the full extent. Only Jess knows that Willow is not in fact her brother, his own father having died at the time of her conception, and Willow is alone in knowing that Alfred Morell's fate is critically at odds with the lore they grew up with. As they begin their long journey home in Willow's car, each of them is privately transfixed by the risks and challenges of sorting truth from falsehood, and sealing the rapprochement they long for. Neither foresees the deranging impact of their glancing contact with Luna. The narrative is deliberately placed in an unnamed setting in the hope of freeing it from the burdens of a given history and the reflex associations that inevitably arise from assumptions of prior knowledge. The work is not entirely free, however, from a late-20th century backdrop of ideological contest and transition in which the tropes of personal and public accountability are discernible in the tension between the characters' private and social worlds. Their apparent willingness to discount the wider setting in favour of a more intimate order of interests seems often delusional, and is arguably akin to the author's evasive intentions. The three most prominent characters all have torments to reckon with, each of them in its way originating in the churn of History, though seeming capable of being weighed on a subjective scale. Yet it is probably the social context that is, if murkily, the agency of dissonance in the characters' relations. It falls to Willow to discover - or to show, without necessarily being conscious of the demonstration - that personal and public pasts converge ineluctably, with unpredictable consequences. If I Could Tell is the distillation of a long process of reading and thinking, and four years of writing and extensive revision. The fifth and final draft reveals significant departures from the structure and character development of the first. Influences vary widely, but in thinking through the themes of engaging or evading the historical process, of placing the individual in the muddle if not always the middle, certain texts stand out for their imaginative reach and technical achievements, among them W G Sebald's Austerlitz, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, J M Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Tolstoy's novella-length short story Haji Murat, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Alain Robbe-Grillers The Erasers, Philip Roth's American Pastoral and, more recently, Martin Amis's House of Meetings. Throughout, I found myself returning to the notion expressed by the writer in Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, who says of his book, emerging 'quite different from what I had been trying to invent', that 'I wish it now to run freely, according to its bent, sometimes swift, sometimes slow; I choose not to foresee its windings'. Its appeal as a writerly credo comes, eventually, with the necessarily humble acknowledgement that doubt stimulated by perceptive supervision is an indispensable accompaniment.

This novel is entirely the work of the author's imagination. Set in South Africa in the '70s, it is the story of an illicit relationship between skinny, misfit Tina and her teacher Nick, whose eyes have the tuck-shop moms wanting to come and hither, and not necessarily in that order. Their mutual attraction is discovered and they run away from Cape Town, hitching a ride aboard a yacht headed for Rio. Oliver, the irreverent, voluptuary captain, also becomes smitten with Tina. It emerges that she's only twelve, Nick is twenty-four, and Oliver is in his fifties. Once they are in international waters, Nick's mistrust of Oliver grows ever deeper, but Tina is convinced there's no threat, revelling in the attention and in the thrill of breaking boundaries. Oliver urges Tina to experiment, to defy convention, while Nick tries to protect her and to avoid being killed. It is Oliver who gets maimed and apparently dies; Nick is charged with abduction and murder, and Tina wrestles with demons that come close to destroying her. The case against Nick is ultimately dropped and he disappears so as to give Tina a chance at being a normal kid, promising to return when she turns eighteen, and not knowing that Oliver is still alive and is manipulating Tina. When Nick reappears five years later, he's hurt by her hostility. He tries to woo this new, pugnacious Tina whom he says has confused hard with strong.

Long Flight Home follows events in the life of James Van Gogh, who grapples with two fundamental tensions: his split from his adopted family and his dislocation from the society in which he finds himself. The novel begins in Johannesburg with James returning, for the first time since their ruction, to his family home, where his mother is dying of cancer. In many ways, he is still tormented by the issues surrounding his adoption. The visit ends badly, with James fleeing her funeral service. Nevertheless, he gains a deep friendship with his mother's caretaker, a woman named Mel. His intimacy with her is one of two important relationships the novel tracks. The other is between James and a pair of young beggars - a boy and a girl - who interest him initially on a professional plane: he is researching an investigative work on street children. Although Mel is a married woman, James influences her to take up work in Cape Town, where he lives - a decision made easier by the dubious state of her marriage. They begin a tentative affair. Mel is not sure of herself, aware at all times that she is betraying her principles. James has no such scruples, however, and he plays a wily game. Eventually, they consummate their relationship. But shortly thereafter Mel disappears. Her body is found in a patch of veld - she is dead. James uses his connections to the streets to find out the identity of the killer. The boy introduces him to an informer, who takes him into the Flats. There, James comes face to face with the man who murdered Mel, but finds himself impotent, unable to act. After that, to distract himself, he concentrates on his work. Determined to regain control of his surroundings, to reassert his will, he takes in one of the street children w the girl. But the boy, who has become involved in an underworld of drugs and crime, exerts a negative influence. James makes arrangements for the authorities to take him in, but, with the plans in place, the children disappear.

Includes bibliographical references. / Mapped, Quartered is а collection of poetry, which explores themes of home, movement and memory through the lens of the personal and socio-historical. Many of the poems were written to reflect upon the question, ""how will you craft your relationship with abundance?"" This is an odd question, because abundance is simply а wealth of something. However, it seemed an important question, since many people live their lives in search of abundance. Abundance may describe money and power, the earth, or the emotional abundance inherent to our relationships to time, people and places. Through persona and narrative voice, the first poems drafted for the thesis, including Halabja 1988, Ponce de Leon, Lady at Uptown Market, Wedlock, Strange Light, and others, examine the nuances of our varied relationships to economic and political abundance as, variably, 'perpetrator,' 'victim,' and 'bystander,' innocent or otherwise. Poems drafted during the second year of thesis work, such as Map of Му Heart, L'Enfant Soldat, The Mother, The Bedroom, Circle and others, sought to examine the question more introspectively in order tо investigate the inexorable relationship between self and memory and the simultaneous singularity and universality of experience. As such, the title poem is not Abundance, but rather Мар of Му Неаrt as the onus of the work was less to define all things abundant than to map the contours of our abundant hearts.

No description available.

Includes bibliography.