Embrace

Rating:
Summary: If You Like Ambiguity...
Review: ...then you will love this book. To say that this coming-of-age tome is nonlinear, would be a great understatement. There is no recognizable order to the events in the book at all. Each vignette, every chapter, requires the reader to discover, anew, where he is in the overall sequence.

There is reason to enjoy a book wherein the time sequence of every paragraph is a mystery: This volume (all 700+ pages of it) is about the nonlinear progression required, to turn a young gay child into a fully-sentient, understanding young adult. It's a process, and it doesn't happen all at once, or in a simple chain of events. In fact, Effect precedes Cause by several hundred pages here. Other ambiguous discoveries realized by the author: The fluidity of sexual expression in young people, the moral relativism of adults, the ease with which lovers turn to betrayal.

If you're not an avid fan of ambiguity, it might be best to stay away from this book. Some of the most important sentences in it are written in Afrikaans, and there is no context afterward to help the reader decode their meaning. This is problematic, since Afrikaans is not a world language (your friends will be unable to help you). Speaking fluent German is little help with Afrikaans. Perhaps the only people who will be able to understand these important sentences, other than South Africans, will be people who speak Dutch, which itself is not a world language. The author also uses Afrikaans words gratuitously throughout the book. Happily, where these words appear one-at-a-time in the narrative, there is sufficient context around them for the reader to guess their meaning.

I congratulate the author on his unflinching honesty in approximating the thoughts of a young boy, struggling with his parents, hormones, relationships, and the human body (his own--and others'). Sometimes this honesty is reflected in a nongrammatical stream-of-consciousness recorded by the protagonist. It's precisely the way humans think when upset, confused, humiliated, or elated. The relationship between the adult choir teacher and the young protagonist leads to all of these emotions, and more.

If homosexuality bothers you, if you require a yarn told from prologue to epilogue without interruption, if you cannot skip over words in an obscure language without becoming angry at their use (and you don't possess an Afrikaans dictionary) then this book is not for you. If you can embrace these idiosyncratic elements, then this book will open another world, beautiful and untidy, inside your mind.

Rating:
Summary: If You Like Ambiguity...
Review: ...then you will love this book. To say that this coming-of-age tome is nonlinear, would be a great understatement. There is no recognizable order to the events in the book at all. Each vignette, every chapter, requires the reader to discover, anew, where he is in the overall sequence.

There is reason to enjoy a book wherein the time sequence of every paragraph is a mystery: This volume (all 700+ pages of it) is about the nonlinear progression required, to turn a young gay child into a fully-sentient, understanding young adult. It's a process, and it doesn't happen all at once, or in a simple chain of events. In fact, Effect precedes Cause by several hundred pages here. Other ambiguous discoveries realized by the author: The fluidity of sexual expression in young people, the moral relativism of adults, the ease with which lovers turn to betrayal.

If you're not an avid fan of ambiguity, it might be best to stay away from this book. Some of the most important sentences in it are written in Afrikaans, and there is no context afterward to help the reader decode their meaning. This is problematic, since Afrikaans is not a world language (your friends will be unable to help you). Speaking fluent German is little help with Afrikaans. Perhaps the only people who will be able to understand these important sentences, other than South Africans, will be people who speak Dutch, which itself is not a world language. The author also uses Afrikaans words gratuitously throughout the book. Happily, where these words appear one-at-a-time in the narrative, there is sufficient context around them for the reader to guess their meaning.

I congratulate the author on his unflinching honesty in approximating the thoughts of a young boy, struggling with his parents, hormones, relationships, and the human body (his own--and others'). Sometimes this honesty is reflected in a nongrammatical stream-of-consciousness recorded by the protagonist. It's precisely the way humans think when upset, confused, humiliated, or elated. The relationship between the adult choir teacher and the young protagonist leads to all of these emotions, and more.

If homosexuality bothers you, if you require a yarn told from prologue to epilogue without interruption, if you cannot skip over words in an obscure language without becoming angry at their use (and you don't possess an Afrikaans dictionary) then this book is not for you. If you can embrace these idiosyncratic elements, then this book will open another world, beautiful and untidy, inside your mind.

Rating:
Summary: A boy's heart
Review: This is a book to disturb, inspire, sadden, provoke. Its massive scale - a daunting prospect for most readers - reflects the huge scope of its subject which reaches far beyond the central theme of young Karl De Man's emotional and sexual world. One might describe the structure as `symphonic', in its interaction of themes and counter-themes, though in a looser more fantastical way than implied by the many references to Beethoven. The South African setting enhances this effect: the landscape, the uncompromising contrasts and colours, the sharp, brutal delineation of character, mood and political extremism.

It is however eminently readable once one has a measure of the teasing complexities of the form: both the uneven chronology and the sectional back-and-forward treatment of narrative and descriptive passages require perseverance. The author's attempt to amalgamate the apparent incompatibilities of quasi-poetical impressionism and blatant school-boy adventurism is only partly successful, but the cracks in this method are to some extent papered over by sallies into more introspective fields, particularly the turmoil and conflicts of a sensitive boy being emotionally torn apart by what he feels and what an unfeeling world expects of him.

The book is a curious mixture of the real and unreal. The physical and cultural background of South Africa is all-present - Behr powerfully re-creates the realities and the language of his homeland - yet the characters seem curiously remote from the inner life of the novel, as though they are placed there as necessary props to the unfolding of an uncertain and complex drama. The boys - and their intense friendships - are real enough; the teacher-figures on the other hand are more often stereotypical than flesh-and-blood, with the possible exception of Ma'am Sanders, and the Karl's choirmaster-lover, Cilliers. Similarly, Bok and Bokkie appear more like guardians than parents in spite of fine delineation of character, behaviour and attitude, possibly a subtle device to suggest Karl's emotional isolation from his family.

The threads of betrayal and self-deception, coupled with anxiety and guilt, including sexual guilt, are woven within a texture of dream-like, sometimes nightmarish expression. The occasional adoption of free-flow (stream-of-consciousness) writing is intended as a window into the workings of the adolescent psyche by a writer for whom the story is clearly personal and to an extent autobiographical. The colours are stark and strong, the nuances of language and experience being from time to time weakened by overstatement, and indeed a kind of emotional extremism. (One must however allow literary licence in respect of an adult narrator recalling his boyhood in such depth and detail.) The willowy figure of Dominic, Karl's `best friend', is a caricature of the aesthetic and intellectual prodigy: the well-educated and liberal Webster family stand apart from the conventions and social norms which surround them. There is a kind of Forsterian symbolism at work here, yet in the mad, prophetic figure of Uncle Klasie, the imagery becomes distorted.

The story can be seen as a brilliant interpretation of the contradictory forces and values acting upon a young life to the point of an eventual rejection of spontaneity, friendship and love in favour of convention and conformity. The tragedy is in the inevitability of the transformation. There is a sense of `quest for fulfilment' in this work: the struggle of a creative artist to find reason and meaning in a dislocated world. Mark Behr attended the Drakensberg Boy's Choir Music School and studied at the University of Stellenbosch. After the success of his first book ('The Smell of Apples') he confessed to having spied for the government and later for the ANC while he was a student leader. Refusing to elaborate on his spying, he announced he was working on a second novel whose theme was 'betrayal'. "The truth," he said, "was so big it could be described better and interrogated better through fiction."
`Embrace' explores the relationship between language, politics, and sexuality, but may fall short of achieving the author's ambitious hopes, and its aspiration as `the great South African novel'.