When Cultures Intertwine – The African Way

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When Cultures Intertwine – The African Way

Name: When Cultures Intertwine – The African Way
Author: Francois Van Wyk
ISBN: 978-1483693361

by Francois Van Wyk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2013

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Politically engaged characters experience life after apartheid in Van Wyk’s debut novel.

Van Wyk, who grew up in South Africa, firmly grasps the country’s history. The novel seems to waver between fiction and nonfiction and follows two families: One is black and one white, and they have worked side by side for generations on the farm Vergenoeg. Not far into the novel, 65-year-old Andries Mokwebo, a black farmhand, takes legal action against his white employer, Fanie Botha, for rights to the farm. The legal action comes at a time when the country is readily redistributing white-owned farmland to blacks. Andries wants the land so he can secure his teenage son Sephiwe’s financial future, yet he suspects that his actions are unfair to his employer, a good man. Sephiwe, one of the novel’s most believable characters, can understand the moral complexities with which his father and Fanie are grappling, but he’s more interested in his own intellectual curiosities (he muses, “the mystery surrounding the motion of the heavenly bodies serene in its being”) than in his father’s problems. The second narrative arc is about a love affair between a young black, female farmhand, Nandi, and her employer’s son, Koos. Both stories hold interest—at least at first—but the novel stagnates due to long and too frequent exchanges about politics, which are forced and inauthentic. From the relatively uneducated Andries, readers see dialogue like this: “For us all to survive in South Africa and for that matter in Africa, the problems we are faced with must become our collective national challenge. That is the only route for us to take, to save Africa, our fatherland.” Does anybody really talk like this to other family members around the dinner table? The story also often lacks spontaneity because Van Wyk tells too much and shows too little. A well-thought-out narrative made richer by Van Wyk’s opinions and knowledge and poorer by one-dimensional characters and a predictable plot.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013

ISBN: 978-1483693361

Page Count: 308

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
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- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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ONE DAY IN DECEMBER

by Josie Silver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 2018

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...

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True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.

On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.