Synopses & Reviews
Unfolding in 1991 South Africa, at the moment of Nelson Mandela’s release, this novel explores the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement—a world seldom revealed to outsiders. It also journeys back in time to find the forgotten history of "coloured" people, whose mixed-race heritage is embedded in four centuries of wrenching South African history. The effect is a bold and revisionary work—a moving exploration of the meaning of history, memory, and truth.
Synopsis
The 1987 publication of
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town won Zoe Wicomb an international readership and wide critical acclaim. As richly imagined and stylistically innovative as Wicomb's debut work,
David's Story is a mesmerizing novel, multilayered and multivoiced, at times elegiac, wry, and expansive.
Unfolding in South Africa at the moment of Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1991, the novel explores the life and vision of David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement--a world seldom revealed to outsiders. With "time to think" after the unbanning of the movement, David is researching his roots in the history of the mixed-race "Coloured" people of South Africa and of their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers.
But David soon learns that he is on a hit list, and, caught in a web of betrayal and surveillance, he is forced to rethink his role in the struggle for "nonracial democracy," the loyalty of his "comrades," and his own conceptions of freedom. Through voices and stories of David and the women who surround him--responding to, illuminating, and sometimes contradicting one another--Wicomb offers a moving exploration of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth.
Synopsis
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 Cond and Yvette Christians ." --Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Synopsis
"A tremendous achievement and a huge step in the remaking of the South African novel."--J. M Coetzee