Karel Schoeman (1939–2017)

Two hundred and thirty-eight pages of the slowest, most introspective, most remarkable book I have read in a long time. Nothing happens. Or rather, an entire self-contained world “happens” because the book is an old woman’s review of her life: from her grandparents, her parents, and the next generation, people are born, live, and die. The book is nothing more or less than her uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness reconstruction of memories: of her life, her family, and her country show more (meaning the physical land around her—a remote part of South Africa in the late 19th century). In fact, geography is as much a character in this book as those who live there. The narrator struggles repeatedly to recall, to piece together, and to try to explain her life to herself. Indeed, she struggles as much with the act of remembering as she does with what she remembers. Not everything fits and not every question has an answer. I cannot recall being so impressed with a book, both its overall construction and its word-by-word choices, in years (the more remarkable since it is translated from the Afrikaans). This is an extraordinary work. show less

Schoeman het nie net elke teks in Afrikaans vertaal nie, maar voorsien dit ook van onontbeerlike voetnotas en insiggewende redakteursnotas waarin konteks, geskiedenis en betekenisverklarings gegee word. Schoeman het hom veral toegespits op tekste van plaaslike inwoners en boorlinge, eerder as die van besoekers of reisigers, en wys in sy voorwoord daarop dat hierdie bloemlesing dus die vroegste geskrewe letterkunde van Suid-Afrika bevat. Die tekste (telkens deur Schoeman in Afrikaans vertaal) show more gee 'n beeld van die Nederlandse koloniale tydperk in Suid-Afrika. show less

This novel imagines a future in which apartheid went “the other way,” so that Afrikaans people were dispossessed or forced into poverty. The book declares itself as an allegory early on by the way Schoeman sticks to generalities.
I found the first ten or twenty pages interesting; after that I found it implausible, unpleasant, and finally infuriating.
1. Interesting
The book is well translated and I can imagine the Afrikaans is equally simple and clear. The ultimate model here is Kafka, and show more there is an echo of this in Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.”
2. Implausible
The sun never shines in this novel, and toward the end one of the characters even comments on that. Everything is gray and dismal. Interiors are often described as dark, and Schoeman overuses a device in which it’s so dark people almost can’t be seen. All that serves his purpose of painting a dismal, undefined future. The people the narrator meets in the country are all reticent, and they don’t talk about what has happened to them. It’s meant to conjure a hopeless future in which some Afrikaans people stayed in their homelands, but most fled.
But at a certain point it all becomes implausible. I don’t know any dispossessed or repressed people who don’t talk continuously about the details of their repression and their repressors. It’s of course plausible that people wouldn’t want to talk to a stranger, especially when (as it turns out in the novel) they are plotting a rebellion, but that’s not what Schoeman describes. He paints a number of scenes in which characters simply refuse to think about the past; some seem to have no specific thoughts about it. One character wants to live in the present; another lives for an imaginary future; a third lives in the past, but it’s a static past, fixed in her dementia. The lack of specificity serves the allegory of an indefinite catastrophe but not any psychological or political truth I know. (At the end of the book there are isolated acts of violence, and some stories that obliquely describe rape and killing -- pp. 184, 191 -- but they are exceptions.)
It’s relevant that this book was recommended to me in South Africa, and I read part of it there and the rest in Uganda. I was traveling in the villages in Uganda, and hearing endlessly about corruption, illegal actions by politicians, and specific injustices. People were fixated on local and national government and they were very specific about the people they held responsible for their problems. Several times, for different reasons, people didn’t want to tell me certain things: I’d expect that. But the free-floating, supposedly timeless nature of the disaster that has befallen the people in “Promised Land” is more like the undefined nature of the nuclear apocalypse in mystical books like “The Road.” The uniform gray dialogue and listless, affectless characters begins to appear more as a failure of imagination than a device to sustain an allegory.
3. Unpleasant
I understand that a certain attachment to the land (as in the book’s title) is a central concern of the book, and that in certain contexts it is an identifiably Afrikaans quality. The most emotional moment in the middle of the book is the narrator’s discovery that nothing remains of his family farm, which he left as a young child. (The farm is named Reitvlei, which I have been told is made of two words that mean “high grass” and “cow dung”--which is the state of the farm when the narrator finally visits.)
There is a deep, tenacious attachment to land throughout the book, made even deeper by the fact that the land is painted as desolate and unattractive. One character says to the narrator that he should see it in the winter, when in effect it’s even more desolate, in order to appreciate its beauty. I felt the grip of that passion, on Schoeman’s part, throughout the book. But it’s a very unpleasant emotion, because it is bound up with tremendous hatred, anger, and fear. The relentless evenness and lack of emotion on the part of the characters is exactly what reveals the force and depth of that anger and the fear that the land itself might somehow be taken away.
4. Infuriating
All this is irritating, or perhaps I should say infuriating, because the vagueness of the allegory shows that the author has not, in fact, experienced any such thing as the catastrophe he describes. In fact apartheid “came out” differently. I wonder if this book has been read by anyone who continues to suffer in townships even after apartheid. I can imagine such a reader getting very angry at the privilege, the lack of experience of real suffering, that suffuse this book. I finished this book in Uganda, surrounded by real poverty and real injustice, and those things also involve bright sunlight (the sun does shine on people who suffer) and many hundreds of everyday events that break through any self-indulgent dream of imaginary suffering. show less

Very much liked this book (although the first one of his I read, This Land, remains one of the best books I've ever read). The cover boasts wonderful blurbs from Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene, and Alan Paton (who calls it a masterpiece). Like This Land, this book is a very quiet meditation about anguish, the power of memory, and coming to terms.