When I studied the psychodynamics of organisations, I was encouraged to pay particular attention to how the system responds to a new arrival. Likewise in fiction, the introduction of an outsider is a useful strategy for delving under the skin of a community, especially one in crisis. In both these recent reads, the outsider is a teenage girl, bereft of family, who is smoothly absorbed into the existing structures and, to a small degree, starts to change them. In the first, a translated novella, set in Austria at the end of the Second World War, she is the main point-of-view character. In the second, a debut novel with a contemporary South African setting, she is one of several somewhat shadowy characters. But both books are more about historical and geographical place than person. See what you think.
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The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero by Paulus Hochgatterer translated by Jamie Bulloch
Nelli, a thirteen-year-old girl with little memory of her previous life and the family she lost in a bombing raid, has been taken in by a family in a farming community in Lower Austria. Amid flora and fauna burgeoning into spring, people seem numbed by a long drawn-out war. The family make room for another lost soul: an escaped Russian prisoner of war. Not long after, a trio of retreating Wehrmacht soldiers force themselves upon the household, demanding a roast dinner on Good Friday.
The story unfolds more from a series of impressions than plot and, although I found it an easy read, I probably had less idea than Nelli what was going on. There were dead sons and purloined paintings; I assumed the latter stolen from Jewish collections, but I might have been wrong. Okay, but not my kind of book. Thanks to publishers MacLehose Press for my review copy.
The story unfolds more from a series of impressions than plot and, although I found it an easy read, I probably had less idea than Nelli what was going on. There were dead sons and purloined paintings; I assumed the latter stolen from Jewish collections, but I might have been wrong. Okay, but not my kind of book. Thanks to publishers MacLehose Press for my review copy.
Finding Soutbek by Karen Jennings
Soutbek is a small coastal town in Namaqualand, divided by race and prosperity, or lack thereof. When a fire in the upper town renders most of the black population homeless, the mayor reluctantly lets them squat in the town hall. But without jobs, the fish factory having closed five years previously, and aid from central government unforthcoming, they can barely survive on the dole-outs from the soup kitchen. Meanwhile, the white community bemoans the lack of fresh fruit.
Pieter, the mayor, has grown up among these destitute people, but now keeps his distance. Like many who have overcome inherent disadvantage, he disdains them as much as the white people (among whom he now lives) do. His ambitions for the town are primarily to improve the prospects of his family; alas, he cannot see that his gentrified son looks down on him, while his wife (whom he rescued from extreme poverty while abandoning her parents and siblings) would rather have love and friendship than yet more rooms added to the house.
So when a girl arrives from elsewhere, Anna, hitherto a misfit, finds a soulmate. Together they begin to read a recently published book, co-authored by Pieter and a retired white historian who built an academic platform on justifying apartheid. Purportedly based on the diaries of a 17th-century Dutch explorer, its aim is not to educate, but to bring kudos – and tourists – to the town. As another character comes to understand, history was not about dates and people. It was about mastery: the mastery of others and the mastery of land (p139).
Pieter, the mayor, has grown up among these destitute people, but now keeps his distance. Like many who have overcome inherent disadvantage, he disdains them as much as the white people (among whom he now lives) do. His ambitions for the town are primarily to improve the prospects of his family; alas, he cannot see that his gentrified son looks down on him, while his wife (whom he rescued from extreme poverty while abandoning her parents and siblings) would rather have love and friendship than yet more rooms added to the house.
So when a girl arrives from elsewhere, Anna, hitherto a misfit, finds a soulmate. Together they begin to read a recently published book, co-authored by Pieter and a retired white historian who built an academic platform on justifying apartheid. Purportedly based on the diaries of a 17th-century Dutch explorer, its aim is not to educate, but to bring kudos – and tourists – to the town. As another character comes to understand, history was not about dates and people. It was about mastery: the mastery of others and the mastery of land (p139).
 | With the recent attention in the US and Europe to the whitewashing of history, this 2012 novel couldn’t be more topical. While I enjoyed the history, politics and social justice theme immensely, I found the psychological threads a little loose in places. But don’t let that put you off! |
Published by Holland Park Press, I bought my own copy of Karen Jennings’ debut after enjoying her latest novel, Upturned Earth, a story of putting profit before people in copper mining in South Africa in the 1850s with echoes of our current times.
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