Customer Reviews

Agaat

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I often start a longish book reluctantly, sure it'll be heavy lifting in more than one sense. "AGAAT" is one such; I skimmed the first few pages and soon enough found myself going back to the start and giving it a lot more attention.

A dying, paralyzed woman; her relationships with her long-time servant/daughter-figure/care-giver, and her abusive husband, and her mother, and her farm.....

This is a book I'll certainly have to read again to glean all there is to be gained; even in translation the prose grabs you, the ingenious construction keeps you reading in two (maybe three?) time periods; the characters are three-dimensional; the South African (Cape) scenery, the garden, the farm, perfectly drawn. I have not understood completely everything that goes on, but I plan to.

I don't want to spoil the plot. It's the transition of pre and post apartheid Africa with a cast of characters and personalities that are rich, diverse and deep. The voice changes. I was not planning to sit down to a novel of this length but lost a weekend page turning. I think Toni Morrison's review and you tube interview with the author speaks volumes. I LOVED IT. I read Cry the Beloved Country a thousand years ago in college. This is the new classic.

I started reading this book on my Kindle and got 1/4th the way through it and went back to begin reading again, this is not a habit. The writing was so powerful that I wanted to read this book over and over again, the emotions so raw and the tale so amazing. I loved this book for all the sadness in the world it represented and it is an amazing read.

At the beginning of this epic novel, seventy-year-old Milla de Wet is confined to her bed. Once the strong and competent owner of a successful farm inherited from her mother, Milla suffers from A.L.S. and now is left with only the ability to blink her eyes and, after a while, not even that. Milla is entirely dependent on the ministrations of Agaat, her devoted house servant, who wordlessly promises Milla "the best-managed death in history." It is 1996 in South Africa, just two years after the demise of apartheid.

From this confined vantage point, Milla narrates her adult life story, beginning with her troubled marriage to the dashing, if agriculturally-challenged, Jak de Wet in 1947. Soon after she and Jak settle on her farm, Milla decides to take in and raise the abused young daughter of a farm laborer, renaming the girl Agaat. Long unable to have a child of her own, Milla eventually gives birth to a son named Jakkie, marginalizing Agaat's position in the family. Over time, Milla and Agaat develop a complex co-dependency, as do Jakkie and Agaat, while Jak becomes jealous of Agaat's hold over both his wife and his son. Agaat forms the center of a decades-long, multi-dimensional game of tug-o-war: "a pivot she was, a kingpin, you'd felt for a while now how the parts gyrated around her, faster and faster, even though she was the least."

Agaat is about many things, including marriage, parenting, friendship, sickness, and death. Politically-minded readers will find plenty of support for interpreting the novel as an allegory for apartheid, while those with more domestic interests will appreciate the details on embroidery, ecologically-sensitive farming practices, and home-based nursing procedures. Perhaps Agaat's most important lesson concerns the importance of communication to achieving lasting change. The best education and carefully constructed systems cannot bridge the gap between master and servant, between white and black. Rather, true understanding is possible only after years of empathetic communication. As Milla nears death, she and Agaat have finally approached this kind of understanding:

"[The doctor's] face looms above mine. He looks at my eyes as if they were the eyes of an octopus, as if he's not quite sure where an octopus's eyes are located, as if he doesn't know what an octopus sees. He shines a little light into my face, he swings it from side to side. I look at him hard, but seeing, he cannot see.

Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says.

[The doctor] stands aside. He shakes his head.

Agaat's face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don't stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you're a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out.

A small flicker ripples across Agtaat's face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable.

She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she's feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now.

I close my eyes. He must think she's crazy.

Again the fingers snapping in front of my face.

She's conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she's just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything's in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways."

Milla's disease has the potential to reduce this nearly 600-page novel into an exercise in claustrophobia, but, instead, Van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency. Milla's second-person narration is liberally broken up by her diary entries, which Agaat has decided to read to Milla during her last days, and by italicized paragraphs of Milla's stream-of-consciousness musings. Van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist, and her considerable poetic abilities are on display throughout the novel. Likewise, Michiel Heyns's masterful work yields an English translation with all the elegant power of the original language. These various elements come together in Agaat to create an unforgettable reading experience that transcends the lives of its four primary characters to implicate the broader world.

This tale of an Afrikaner and her Hottentot serving girl makes for slow but enchanted reading. It is suspenseful and filled with the details of farm life in Cape Town, South Africa before Apartheid was ended. It spans the time between 1953 when Milla came into contact with Agaat Lorier. It ends in 1996 with Milla's death. It is written in catchy style, leaving you in suspense as to how the wife of a white farmer in Cape Town adopted a young black child and raised her, eventually creating a rift between them that plays out as Milla is helplessly dying. If you are a lover of Africa, as I am, you will be consumed with this novel.

This novel was slow to start with and it took me a while to figure out that all the narrators were the same person at different times, but it got more interesting as I continued, and by the end I was gripped. The book as a whole shows you how the social constructs of race distort both people and their relationships in countries like South Africa and the United States where there is a history, and not so long ago, of racial oppression. It shows you through the realistic detail of two women's lives, not through statistics or speeches.

An interesting book that takes place in apartheid South Africa. Life in an apartheid world is not dwelled upon, but it lurks in the background, ever present. Kamilla and her abusive husband are wealthy white farmers. Kamilla marries Jak knowing that he is abusive, but she appears to want to get away from her judgmental mother. She is unable to conceive a child, and by a happenstance not mentioned until the end of the book, takes in a deformed Hotentot child. She raises her as her own until she does conceive. Circumstances then move her to demote the child to be a servant in their household. Much of the book is about the relationships between Agaat and husband, wife, and their son Jakkie. The biggest wrinkle is that Milla has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She is totally paralyzed and the story primarily takes place in her thoughts, eye expressions, and flashbacks. I found this book to be absorbing, to view the thoughts, emotions, excuses and viewpoint of Kamilla.