Marlene van Niekerk: The Way Of The Women

[Mirabell]

How can you speak when speech has been taken away? When the only person listening refuses to understand? Milla, trapped in silence by a deadly paralysing illness, confined to her bed, struggles to make herself heard by her maidservant and now nurse, Agaat. Contrary, controlling, proud, secretly affectionate, the two women, servant and mistress, are more than matched. Life for white farmers like Milla in the South Africa of the 1950s was full of promise - newly married, her future held the thrilling challenges of creating her own farm and perhaps one day raising children. Forty years later, the world Milla knew is as if seen in a mirror, and all she has left are memories and diaries. As death draws near, she looks back on good intentions and soured dreams, on a brutal marriage and a longed-for only son scarred by his parents' battles, and on a lifetime's tug-of-war with Agaat. As Milla's old white world recedes, in the new South Africa her guardian's future is ever more filled with the prospect of freedom. Marlene van Niekerk's is a stunning new literary voice from South Africa, to compare to J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.

sayeth amazon

Haven't read this but it sounds either horrible or very good.

[Eric]

Mirabell says:

Life for white farmers like Milla in the South Africa of the 1950s was full of promise - newly married, her future held the thrilling challenges of creating her own farm and perhaps one day raising children.

Like Zimbabwe, anno 2008...?

I hope that van Niekerk does not stun by the sheer length of her books. I found her white trash fridge book heavy going. But she does a service to Afrikaners in that it is almost acceptable again to speak of Afrikaans literature in the same breath as that of civilised nations, now that apartheid is dead. Talk about collective punishment. The Afrikaners (aka the Boers, whom Baden-Powell scouted against, as Ian Hislop tells us) have been ostracised for half a century, so that their authors have been ignored unless they were writing anti-apartheid agit-prop.