Mafeking Road
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In a series of tales, South Africa’s greatest short story writer reveals a little-described—and rarely romanticized—world of Afrikaner life in the late 19th century
Like our own Mark Twain, Herman Charles Bosman wields a laughing intolerance of foolishness and prejudice, a dazzling use of wit and clear-sighted judgment. Spun by the plainclothes local visionary and storyteller Oom Shalk Lourens, these moving and satirical glimpses of lethargic herdsmen, ambitious concertina players, legendary leopards and mambas, and love-struck dreamers lay bare immense emotions, contradictions, and mysteries within the smallest movements and unadorned talk of the Groot Marico District of the Transvaal province.
Leading oral tradition by the hand into a territory all his own, Bosman maps a world at once lucid and layered, distant yet powerfully familiar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Afrikaner Bosman (1905 1951) killed his stepbrother in 1926 and was sentenced to death, but was released in 1930 and soon began traveling. This, his first book of three published during his lifetime, was written in English and published in 1947, and it is now a classic of South African literature. The pacing and perspective of Bosman's tales framed "as told by" the perfectly named character Oom Schalk Laurens are unlike anything else in English. As these 21 fable-like stories of hard luck on the veld unfold, a captivating picture of an intimate, then vanishing (and now vanished) world unfolds. The closest comparison may be Robert Frost poems or Bob Dylan songs.