| | I put the novel An Instant in the Wind by South African writer Andre Brink on the “to be read” list because it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the late Seventies. The Summer Vacation reading challenge, which is to read books set in different locales, moved me to pick it up and get into it.
South Africa in the 18th century was a slave society and the Dutch farmers were gradually encroaching into Bantu territories. In 1751, Elisabeth Larsson defies her parents’ advice and accompanies her naturalist husband to the interior, where, the conventional wisdom says, women must not go. Their white guide snuffs himself out of shame for getting the party lost. The Hottentots rustle their cattle. Her husband, absurdly indomitable in the face of these disasters, wanders off to classify a bird and doesn’t come back. Elizabeth meets a runaway slave Adam Mantoor. They overcome initial hostility and quickly fall in love as they face ordeals. By the end of the book, they find that it’s easier to love each other when they all alone in a state of nature, far away from the poison of social conventions and rigid attitudes of the Afrikaners.
On the positive side, stunning are the descriptions of the western Cape, the Karoo Desert, and the Swart Berg (Black Mountains). The scenes involving a storm and the trek of a massive herd of buck jump right off the page. I was ambivalent about the explicit language in the love scenes. On the down side, some romantic scenes seemed stilted and over-long and the introspective passages about being one’s own person seemed very Seventies. Not getting enough into the romantic spirit of things, perhaps, I was also doubtful as to why the two were so determined to return to white civilization, so foolish and credulous to think whites would think their relationship was okay.
I’m glad I read this novel because I’ve never read anything set in South Africa, except Prester John by John Buchan, which I can’t count as a genuine serious novel. This novel tells about how different Africa was for whites and blacks and about the roots of Jim Crow in South Africa. The description of landscape was good but love story was incredible.
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| | Posted 7/6/2009 8:04 AM - 1 View - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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