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The
2003 Award
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Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: Kwela Books ISBN 0795700970 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Johannesburg, 1998. Silas Ali, a former political activist, now a middle-aged civil servant working on the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is shopping one Sunday morning when he bumps into a ghost from his past, Lieutenant de Boise, a retired security policeman. This chance encounter brings back a memory that Silas and his wife Lydia have been avoiding for twenty years. The past erupts into the present, cracking off the shell of normality that encloses their family life. This is the story of Silas and Lydia, and especially of their son Mikey, a university student with a curious mind and a calculating will, as their relationships fracture and their lives go off in new and surprising directions. Achmat Dangor deals with the difficult politics of race, with coloured identity, with the lifestyles of the new elite in ways that are refreshingly open and ironical. This novel is equally attuned to the brittle surface of urban life in post-apartheid South Africa and to the deeper, more disturbing historical currents that run beneath it. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Achmat Dangor is the author of, among others, Waiting for Leila (short stories, 1982), Bulldozer (poetry, 1983), Majiet (a play, 1986), The Z Town Trilogy (novel, 1990) and Kafka's Curse (novel, 1997). Kafka's Curse has appeared in seven foreign editions. Since laying down his duties as Director of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Dangor is giving his full attention to writing. He is temporarily based in New York. |
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Reader
Review
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This short-listed novel is strong stuff. The setting is the new post-apartheid South Africa just as Nelson Mandela is about to step down as President. We meet the new elite, upwardly mobile out of the former segregated townships and coming to terms with cataclysmic changes in their lives. The focus is on Silas Ali, former member of MK (the armed wing of the ANC) and now working for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his wife Lydia, a nurse, and their son Mickey, about to start at university. However, all is not well and the long shadows of the atrocities of the apartheid era haunt the family. Forgiveness and amnesty are all very well in principle but the poison and horror of those earlier dark days seem beyond eradication. There is a blight in their lives, an inability to forget the bitter memories and move on, which has disastrous consequences. A compelling and disturbing book. Member of Raheny Library Reading Group |
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Find out more about the author on the following websites: |
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