Herman Charles Bosman (1905–1951)
Autor de Mafeking Road
Sobre El Autor
Créditos de la imagen: Herman Charles Bosman
Obras de Herman Charles Bosman
Idle Talk: Voorkamer - the Anniversary Edition: Part 1 (The anniversary edition of Herman Charles Bosman) (1920) 11 copias
"Seed-time and Harvest" and Other Stories (The anniversary edition of Herman Charles Bosman) (2001) 6 copias
The Complete Voorkammer Stories 1 copia
The Collected Works: volume 1 1 copia
The Prose Juvenilia 1 copia
Obras relacionadas
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1905-02-03
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 1951-10-14
- Lugar de sepultura
- West Park Cemetery, Johannesburg, South Africa
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- South Africa
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Kuilsrivier, South Africa
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Lugares de residencia
- Johannesburg, South Africa
London, England, UK - Educación
- Jeppe High School for Boys, Kensington, Johannesburg, South Africa
University of the Witwatersrand - Ocupaciones
- schoolmaster
convict
journalist
short story writer
Miembros
Reseñas
Listas
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 46
- También por
- 1
- Miembros
- 566
- Popularidad
- #44,192
- Valoración
- 3.9
- Reseñas
- 7
- ISBNs
- 84
- Idiomas
- 4
- Favorito
- 1
Cold stone jug, written nearly twenty years later, when he was a successful journalist and short-story writer, is his prison memoir. It's written with his characteristic dry humour, but it's often indirectly very moving when he talks about the psychological effects on himself and others of being locked up, and the damaging social effects of the "indefinite sentence" system that put offenders into a vicious circle of ever-increasing periods of imprisonment it was almost impossible to break out of. And there's lots of fascinating period detail about the way the prison is organised, the social hierarchy, the sometimes surprisingly subtle acts of resistance or protest, and some great thumbnail stories from the lives of his fellow prisoners, artfully chopped about and left incomplete to reflect the fragmented nature of opportunities to talk to other prisoners.
One thing that struck me is that this is a book set in an all-white fragment of South African society: black people only appear very peripherally — in an opening scene, Bosman is in a basement holding cell at the police station, and the prisoners can see the legs of passers-by, "mostly natives"; later on he mentions that the bodies of men who have died in the prison are collected by a pair of "kaffir prisoners", presumably from a different nearby prison. And that's it: the prisoners are white, the guards are white, and Bosman never sees anyone else.
Bosman doesn't draw a veil over the less palatable sides of prison life: the casual brutality, the culture of dagga smoking, and so on. He describes being disgusted when he realised that another prisoner had fallen in love with him and kept sending him sentimental notes (but points out that he was still very young: by the time of writing, he's overcome his prejudices and some of his best friends are gay or lesbian...). When another prisoner, a disgraced schoolteacher, tells him in graphic detail about the twelve-year-old girl he'd had sex with, Bosman admits that he started having fantasies about young girls himself. Again, he points out that he was very young and had had little chance for sexual experimentation before being locked up, but it's still rather creepy. I don't suppose a modern writer would get away with that kind of honesty.
So, definitely comes with some caveats, but still a fascinating book.… (más)