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@When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Muller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic elections. Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying because of the upheavals: a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of the day-to-day. Imaginings of Sand is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and of the women who pioneered that discovery.@@… (más)
Outeniqua 1994: una città 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 città dove ha trascorso la sua infanzia per vegliare la nonna, Ouma Kristina, in punto di morte, dopo che la sua casa è stata oggetto di un attentato terroristico. Ouma, ancora mentalmente vivacissima, è ossessionata dall'idea di non riuscire a trasmettere alla nipote la storia della famiglia e del Sudafrica. E le racconta tantissime storie affascinanti, tratte dalla realtà e dal mito, che finiscono per far emergere una sottile analogia tra le donne della famiglia e che arrivano fino a lei, Kristien, la ribelle e fuggitiva che ha lasciato il suo paese, e a sua sorella, Anna, che invece è rimasta e ha sposato un violento razzista e gli ha dato dei figli. Saranno proprio i rapporti tra le due sorelle a ricondurre il romanzo all'attualità per poi farlo sfociare nella tragedia finale
Kristien, in de dertig, komt na 11 jaar Londen terug naar Zuid-Afrika omdat haar oma van over de 100 op sterven ligt na een bomaanslag op haar huis. Kristien schrijft de verhalen op die oma haar vertelt over de voormoeders: de vrouw die uit het water kwam, de vrouw met de vuurvliegjes, de vrouw die geen schaduw had en altijd zwanger was, de vrouw Samuel, de vrouw die een ijzeren gesteld had en tenslotte een zodanige omvang had dat ze de deur niet meer uit kon, de vrouw die het vreemde bouwsel waarin oma nog steeds woonde, had laten bouwen, het meisje dat in de kelder was opgesloten en was verdwenen, Oma Kristina en de moeder van Kristien. Zo geeft Oma aan Kristien "haar geheugen terug". Kristiens zus Anna heeft haar eigen problemen. Ze groeien naar elkaar toe, maar uiteindelijk kan Kristien haar niet helpen. Op de laatste dag dat Oma leeft zijn de eerste verkiezingen na de Apartheid.
My theory is that Brink wrote this after reading a lot of Latin American fiction - this is the SA answer to House of Spirits. Although this is not as well known as his popular works, it still has a lot of merit. We see Brink's humorous and fantastical side (e.g. a woman with extremely long hair strangling her poor husband to death with her locks after an enthusiastic sexual encounter). I'm glad I read it. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A big girl now; the stupid phrase careering through my head from the moment the plane took off from Heathrow.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
I'm sick of being, if not all things to all people, at least many things to many people; it's time to return to older kinds of knowing, to withdraw again to that desert where Ouma and her spirits have roamed and where they are now in danger of extinction. It is my call to the wild. (p. 15)
Patterns of earth and sand. Minimal and bare, the clear lines stripped away whatever is mere ornament or fancy, challenging the imagination. (p. 20)
What they had, in that family, should not be jeopardised by anything as selfish and private as passion. (p. 155)
It is much more complicated and more fluid than mere linearity. It is recovering, briefly, the child I lost; experiencing myself, my many selves, seeing through the multiple eye of a fly the two of us involved, involuted, implacated in each other, the girl child eternally on the threshold of womanhood, surveyed by the older woman, innocence and experience, faith and knowledge; and in us, so briefly, in the series of small gestures and actions that connect us, in the covering and uncovering of her not-yet-breasts, there is a gathering of past and future. (p. 248)
"You have a father who exercises all the authority," she says, "and a mother who's expected to fulfill herself by living through the others, while the children are treated as their possession. So how do you expect to arrive at democratic values if your very point of departure is inequality?" (p. 255)
"Don't we have enough of a mess already in this place?" "Not the right kind. We still need the mess of forgiveness." "I always thought forgiveness was tidying up." "It depends True forgiveness opens you up to all the darkness in yourself. It must be something like this house. don't you think, when it suffered the forgiveness of fire." (p. 265)
Why demand the truth, whatever that may be, if you can have imagination? (p. 325)
In every crisis we were granted, by special dispensation, our brief moment in the light: then back to the familiar domestic obscurity of our predestined 'place'. To suffer, to cry, to die. Theirs the monuments for the ages; ours, at most, the imagenings of sand. (p. 332)
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
@When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Muller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic elections. Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying because of the upheavals: a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of the day-to-day. Imaginings of Sand is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and of the women who pioneered that discovery.@@
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