Verdict: carrot
Like J M Coetzee (who said he was “deeply impressed … this is an outstanding novel”), Venter lives mostly in Australia. However, he visits South Africa often, and clearly spends enough time in Cape Town to have captured, authentically, its changes and ironies – so much so that at the book launch there, he was able to converse wittily and make in-jokes on the local sensibility with one of the city’s most sophisticated journalistic commentators, Marianne Thamm.
Venter gave almost free rein to his translator, Heyns, who also lives in Cape Town, another sign of a shared sensibility still with his country. The Afrikaans version is described by a reviewer as coruscating, and this it is in English: brilliant, emitting flashes of light, but brutal and, dare I say it, loosely, in the lineage of the great Coetzee, with an all-seeing narrator so tough on himself and also in its lurch towards a day of reckoning.
Book Details
- Wolf, Wolf by Eben Venter
EAN: 9780624054993
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