David's Story
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa’s M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as “a tremendous achievement.”
South Africa, 1991: Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, the African National Congress is now legal, and a new day dawns in Cape Town. David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement, suddenly finds himself above ground. With “time to think” after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race “Coloured” people of South Africa and their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers.
But as David studies his roots, he soon learns that he’s on a hit list. Now caught in a web of surveillance and betrayal, he’s forced to rethink his role in the struggle for “nonracial democracy,” the loyalty of his “comrades,” and his own conceptions of freedom.
Mesmerizing and multilayered, Wicomb’s award-winning novel delivers a moving examination of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth.
“A delicate, powerful novel, guided by the paradoxes of witnessing the certainties of national liberation and the uncertainties of ground-level hybrid identity, the mysteries of sexual exchange, the austerity of political fiction. Wicomb’s book belongs on a shelf with books by Maryse Condé and Yvette Christiansë.” —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
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.
