Il romanzo racconta la relazione complessa tra Ruben Olivier, bibliotecario ultrasessantenne ormai in pensione, e Tessa Butler, una giovane neanche trentenne, spigliata e vivace che Ruben prende a vivere con se. Tessa dichiara profondi sentimenti e movimenta le sue giornate, ma gioca con lui e gli fa intravedere possibilita che non si realizzano. E Ruben vede il suo mondo, un tempo ordinato e pacifico, vacillare a poco a poco.
The year is 1832 and the Cape is rife with rumours about the liberation of slaves. Philida is the mother of four children by Francois Brink, the son of her master. Francois has reneged on his promise to set her free and his father has ordered him to marry a white woman from a prominent family, selling Philida on to owners in the harsh country in the north. Unwilling to accept this fate, Philida tests the limits of her freedom by setting off on a journey. She travels across the great wilderness to the far north of Cape Town - determined to survive and be free. This title is longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2012.
"Sulla cartina geografica del Sudafrica la citta di Outeniqua coinciderebbe rozzamente con Oudtshoorn, la citta degli struzzi; ma Outeniqua non e Oudtshoorn, e gli abitanti dell'una non vanno confusi con quelli dell'altra." E' un posto immaginario e vero nello stesso tempo quello in cui Kristien ha trascorso la sua infanzia e dove, dopo molti anni di esilio a Londra, torna per vegliare la nonna, Ouma Kristina, in punto di morte. E' il 1994, pochi mesi prima delle elezioni che porteranno Nelson Mandela al potere. Kristien trova Ouma fisicamente distrutta ma mentalmente vivissima, ossessionata dalla paura di non poter trasmettere alla nipote la storia della famiglia, e con essa del Sudafrica, che per decenni ha custodito nella memoria.
Outeniqua 1994: una citta immaginaria nel Sudafrica di pochi mesi prima delle elezioni che porteranno Nelson Mandela al potere. Kristien, dopo molti anni di esilio a Londra, torna nella citta dove ha trascorso la sua infanzia per vegliare la nonna, Ouma Kristina, in punto di morte, dopo che la sua casa e stata oggetto di un attentato terroristico. Ouma, ancora mentalmente vivacissima, e ossessionata dall'idea di non riuscire a trasmettere alla nipote la storia della famiglia e del Sudafrica. E le racconta tante storie affascinanti, tratte dalla realta e dal mito.
André Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. André Brink creció en lo más profundo de Sudáfrica, mientras su padre juez viajaba de una polvorienta aldea a otra. Con cruda honestidad nos describe las conflictivas experiencias de su desarrollo creciendo en un mundo donde la inocencia siempre se halla rodeada de violencia.
THE BLUE DOOR is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if…? What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life. Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. What if, indeed…?
¿Qué cuenta la leyenda sobre el nacimiento de Cupido Cucaracha?
Que al nacer, murió. Y cuando iban a enterrarlo, una mantis religiosa se posó en su cabeza. Entonces se produjo un milagro: revivió.
In his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of a woman, the soap-boiler Anna, and the great Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, Cupido is then made the first Khoi or 'Hottentot' missionary ordained at the Cape of Good Hope. Received into the fold of the Church, Cupido passionately turns against all his early beliefs and is appointed as missionary in a remote and arid region in the North-western Cape. But this also marks the beginning of his decline, as the Society abandons him to his fate. One by one, the members of his congregation disappear into the desert, so that in the end, abandoned even by his wife and children, he is left to preach to the stones and thorn trees and tortoises, returning to the dream-world of his people.
In early 1749 a white woman and a black man are stranded in the wilderness of the South African interior. She is an educated woman, totally helpless in the wilds. He is a runaway slave. They know only each other. At first their relationship is guarded, poisoned by the black and white in them both. But hesitantly there emerges between them a fellowship that engulfs their most private selves, as they face the long trek back to civilisation.
