You can go a long way in 97 years, and Elsa Joubert did. Born in Paarl in 1922, Joubert grew up in an orthodox Afrikaner family, and at first embraced their beliefs. In fact in her early years she felt her father was not sufficiently committed to the Afrikaner cause. In 1938, when Afrikaners celebrated […]
A platoon of State soldiers rides into the gap between two calcified dunes on the edge of Helsvlakte. Separatists have been spied in the area, and the military authorities in the Capital want them eradicated. The soldiers are led by Captain Leander Botha Malan, an experienced soldier not expecting a major confrontation, although he is […]
Octave Durham described how he felt when he first sold two paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the legendary Dutch artist. He said he initially offered the van Gogh paintings to two criminals, but both of them were murdered before the deal could go down. “I thought that these two paintings were cursed. I said, I […]
…I don’t understand men at all… The phrase materializes in different scenes across the entire novel, and each time, with different essence to its meaning (and use). Jean Louise (firmly in her mid-twenties) is returning to her little town of Maycomb from a long trip to New York to reconnect […]
American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins (Tinder Press) Reviewing the novel American Dirt has been made marginally more difficult by “the firestorm” – according to the US’s National Public Radio – that erupted when it was published in the United States in January. It’s the story of a middle-class, bookshop-owning Mexican woman named Lydia whose family […]
