Agaat [Paperback]

Marlene Van Niekerk (Author), Michiel Heyns (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2010

Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique relationship between Milla, a 67-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. Through flashbacks and diary entries, the reader learns about Milla's past. Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise — young and newly married, Milla raised a son and created her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. Forty years later her family has fallen apart, the country she knew is on the brink of huge change, and all she has left are memories and her proud, contrary, yet affectionate guardian. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene Van Niekerk creates a story of love and family loyalty. Winner of the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2007, Agaat was translated as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns, who received the Sol Plaatje Award for his translation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Van Niekerk follows the widely lauded Triomf with a dark, innovative epic that trudges through the depths of a South African farmwife's soul. In 1947, Milla Redelinghuys is determined to turn her wealthy new husband, Jak, into the latest salt-of-the-earth farmer in her family's line. But her demands and manipulative personality cause an early marital rift that only worsens with time. As Van Niekerk follows young Milla through the decades, the author parallels it with the last days of an elderly Milla in 1996—miserable, afflicted with ALS, and reliant on her black maid, Agaat, for survival. Slowly, Milla's story—her abandonment and her masochistic relationship with Agaat—is revealed in all its ugliness. Clearly an allegory for race relations in South Africa, the novel succeeds on numerous other grounds: a rich evocation of family dynamics ; a chilling portrait of bodily and mental decay; and a successful experiment in combining diaries, the second-person, and stream of consciousness. Van Niekerk marshals it all to evoke the resigned mind of a dying woman who realizes, too late, the horrible mistakes that have made her life a waste. (May)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Seventy-year-old Milla de Wet is slowly dying of paralysis, unable to move or talk, helpless and in the care of Agaat. They are two women—white and black—living on a farm in South Africa at a time when the nation is undergoing huge racial and social change. But they have their own personal history between them. Van Niekerk shifts back and forth from the present to the past, and from first person to third person, including long, rambling diary passages, all from Milla’s perspective, to tell a tangled story that takes place during the years 1947–96. The sweep is as grand as the racial politics in South Africa and as intimate as the longings of one lonely woman for connectedness. Smart and assertive since she came to the farm with a crippled right hand, Agaat has been far more than a servant, to the eternal irritation of Milla’s husband, Jak de Wet. Jak is handsome but limited, for which he compensates by beating Milla. Agaat’s seething anger and sadness are barely concealed beneath the veneer of the loyal and dutiful servant even as Milla loses the ability to communicate and Agaat reads the diary entries. This novel stuns with its powerful sense of the rigors of farm life, desolation of a failing marriage, and comfort of a long and complex relationship. --Vanessa Bush

Product Details

• Paperback: 630 pages
• Publisher: Tin House Books; 1 edition (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0982503091
• ISBN-13: 978-0982503096
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #339,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A complex, multi-layered novel, extraordinary in its goals, May 24, 2010

By 

J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Agaat (Paperback)

A paralyzed Afrikaner woman, Milla, stricken with ALS that leaves her not only mute, but entirely dependent on her Black caretaker, Agaat. She reminisces about her life, her abusive marriage, and the son she loves. In the hands of a lesser writer Marlene van Niekerk's second novel, "Agaat." would surely have descended into saccharine melodrama. Instead, with poetic prose and a perfectly pitched narrative voice, Niekerk weaves a complex intimacy between these two women, whose lives have been inseparably bound by knots so intricate they cannot even be undone by death. Agaat's attention, at times loving and others sadistic, speaks volumes, and it is in these scenes where "Agaat" most sings, enveloped in an achingly beautiful claustrophobia so finely rendered, I found myself catching my breath.

In each chapter Milla's flashes back to her abusive marriage to her cover boy husband Jak. This second person narrative reveals much of the inner workings and history her and Agaat's relationship on the family farm and their competition for the affections of her only son. At first interesting, overtime these sections grew a bit tiresome, the style overly authorial and the political allegory of Apartheid South Africa and power dynamics a bit too heavy handed. Despite these shortcomings, the relationship at the core of this story is so profoundly powerful that it easily overcomes such hindrances, offering a pair of characters in a dynamic relationship of master and servant that readers will not soon forget.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredibly powerful book, August 16, 2010

By 

François - See all my reviews

This review is from: Agaat (Paperback)

It took me a couple of tries to truly embark on the reading of this hefty novel, which I'd bought on the occasion of my latest trip to South Africa three years ago, where local friends recommended it. But once I got past page 30 or so, I was hooked and couldn't put it down. Agaat is the coloured (not "Black", not "Hottentot", as some reviewers suggested) servant of Milla De Wet, née Redelinghuys, who suffers from a locked-in syndrome and prepares to die. As she does, she reminisces on her past, remembering events that took place (roughly) some 40, 30, 20 and 10 years earlier. All these recollections are organised around the complex, multi-faceted and ambiguous relationship that has developed between these two women. The two male characters in the book (Milla's husband and Milla's son) are part of the picture, but somehow mere background figures in the incredibly powerful stream of feelings, projections and manipulations that bind the two women to one another.

Indeed, "powerful" is the adjective that springs to mind when thinking about this novel, where the reader is trapped and strapped in the position of a mute spectator, as Milla De Wet is during her dying weeks. Marlene van Niekerk has achieved a genuine tour de force on many levels. In addition to the psychological complexity of the characters, the book's narrative structure is elaborate yet perfectly controlled, the style meets the highest literary standards, and van Niekerk also offers a sociological account of life on a farm in the Western Cape in the second half of the 20th century. The constant references to plants and animals gives an almost physical presence to Godmoedersdrift farm, which at times reminded me of other novels by South African authors (e.g. Nadine Gordimer's "Conservationist"). As a man myself, I was also impressed by the skill with which van Niekerk (a woman) invites the reader to look at the world through a woman's eyes, without ever letting herself drift into hackneyed commentary on sexual politics.

Finally, the translation (into English) by Michiel Heyns is simply remarkable. I'm unfortunately unable to read the original Afrikaans (and perhaps I should now re-read the novel translated into my native language, French), but there's no doubt that Heyns has not just transposed the text from Afrikaans to English, but achieved a "literary-ness" (if you'll pass me the expression) that few translations can offer.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Truth About Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa, August 28, 2010

By 

Anannya Dasgupta - See all my reviews

This review is from: Agaat (Paperback)

Agaat is a beautiful, lyrical novel of such depth and complexity as I haven't read in a story for a long time. As a farm novel that spans the period of apartheid in South Africa, its central metaphor is of farming: nurturing, raising and growing but equally slaughtering, controlling, designing and laboring. Early in the novel, Milla de Wet clashes with the farmers of her region, her husband among them, over the question of sustainable farming. What is unmistakable is Milla's deep emotional investment in the land that she tills and her surrounding natural environment-- its ruggedness, its rhythms, its capacities and mysteries. This becomes especially apparent when she begins raising Agaat and teaches her all she knows.

Between an abusive marriage, childlessness, and a non-nurturing relationship with her own mother, one day, Milla makes an impulsive decision to rescue a physically and sexually abused three year old girl from amongst the black laborers on her mother's farm. This girl, that she names Agaat, has a deformed arm. She is tight shut as a rock, refuses to eat, or talk and stays huddled in the corner of her room. Milla approaches this project as a farmer and a missionary colonialist but the only thing that actually works, as Milla finds in spite of herself, is affection. The first few years of Agaat's life with Milla is one of mutual sustenance where Agaat's love for her meme is unsuspecting , complete and Milla's love heartfelt but full of misgivings. Agaat is after all a black child in a white home and Milla is not politically radical. Just about the time that Agaat's presence begins to become noticeable to the white community, Milla finds that she is finally pregnant. It is then that she decides to do the thing that she had been preparing for but dreading: she shows Agaat her place. But what is Agaat's place?

She puts Agaat in a room outside the house, gives her aprons and uniforms to wear and hopes to make her the house help and nanny for when her child is born. Neither daughter, nor slave, Agaat works out her devastating betrayal by Milla in a way that Milla suffers but never fully comprehends. Agaat becomes, once again, completely inaccessible to Milla but not as a helpless child as she once was but quite its opposite. She becomes better than Milla or anyone else at everything that Milla taught her and more that she taught herself. Agaat establishes her authority on the farm after managing disaster after disaster in miraculous ways. Not only does she become a better farmer than Milla but she becomes a better mother to her son, Jakkie. Through all this Milla is pushed further and further into a helplessness that finally becomes the disease that renders her completely disabled for the last three years of her life.

Lying in her bed with a rapidly advancing A.L.S, Milla de Wet is completely paralyzed and totally dependent on Agaat as Agaat once was. She depends on Agaat to interpret her needs, questions and rage; and, to give voice to the story that hinges on the day that she had decided to bring Agaat home that, through the length of the novel, neither she nor Agaat are actually willing to confront. From the diary entries, from letters that Milla intercepted, from moments of Milla's stream of consciousness, and from an omniscient narrator who has no access to Agaat's mind we hear the story of the farm, about Milla's disastrous marriage, about Jakkie's boyhood, youth and disillusionment with the politics of white South Africa. But the story that is most compelling is Milla and Agaat's, as they recognize the violence of nurturing and the inadequacy of reconciliation based on truth telling. The beauty of the novel lies in how it achieves two completely contrary things with one move - it focuses on the utter dysfunction of language, despite the poetic intensity of its use, in enabling communication but makes the moment of the breakdown the point at which a different, intuitive communication emerges in response to a deeply felt but non-verbalized connection.

The post-apartheid racial politics of South Africa, if it were to be gauged solely based on the novel, has to negotiate much more than continued mistrust, wrongdoing and vengeance; it has to overcome self-hatred, inscribed and mirrored on the other. The novel also suggests that there is no other way but of reconciliation, not because politics demands that it be so but because with every generation the lives of the Black and White South Africans gets more and more entwined, written together in shared misery and history that cannot be picked apart, not even in song.