Ancestral Voices
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In the wild night hours, or during the heat of the day - whenever man's thoughts whirl feverishly - then truth and fantasy, the past and the future, life and death are indiscriminately mingled on Toorberg, home of the Moolman family. So the magistrate is to learn as he investigates the strange circumstances of the death of little Noah, child of grief, who was not entirely of this world. Every day the case becomes more complex, until it challenges the very foundations of the law. It seems as if the magistrate will have to judge an entire dynasty, both the living and the dead. Everyone's guilt has to be affirmed, or denied, and this means he will have to rip open the lives of all. The Moolmans are a tribe who have long since learned how to deal with their own. Parents cut children out of their lives, shunt them aside to live as stepchildren, scrag-ends of the clan, or as city-dwellers whose names are never uttered. The Moolmans cannot forgive; not when their tribal blood is betrayed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The hub of this powerful, spellbinding novel by prize-winning South African author van Heerden is the death of young Noah, bastard child of CrazyTillystet Moolman. The mystically gifted Noah, fathered by a wandering water-diviner, fell or was pushed into a drilling shaft. Three sets of narrators disclose subsequent events: the humane magistrate sent to probe the affair, and members of two Afrikaner families who live in paradisal Toorberg--the proud, grasping Moolmans and their humble neighbors, the brown-skinned, blue-eyed Riets. The latter descend from English missionary James Read; having bred with native Hottentots and a renegade Moolman, they are dubbed ``Skaamfamilie''--family of shame. The two families conspire to hide the manner of Noah's slow dying. The tale unfolds circuitously through time, as living and ancestral voices relate their individual histories, from FounderAbelOK Moolman--harsh, mad and rapacious--to policeman Abel, the motorcycle tough who arrests his mixed-blood cousin for preaching resistance in black townships. The procreative barrenness of the Moolmans becomes a theme as haunting as the land's growing aridity, while the residents' ceaseless quest for water parallels the magistrate's inquiry into collective guilt and the law's meaning. This is the first of van Heerden's works--two novels, short stories, poetry--to be published here. He will be hailed as an important voice in South African fiction.
