Bitter Fruit [Paperback]

Dangor Achmat (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 2003

Johannesburg, 1992. This is the story of Silas and Lydia, and especially of their son Mikey, a university student with a curious mind and a calculating will, as their relationships fracture and their lives go off in new and surprising directions.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Early in Dangor's embittered second novel about his native South Africa, aloof, independent 19-year-old Mikey comes to the realization that "history has a remembering process of its own, one that gives life to its imaginary monsters." This understanding of the past informs the thoughts and actions of the characters, which the author of Kafka's Curse explores in meticulous detail. Mikey's parents, Silas and Lydia Ali, are members of the black middle class in postapartheid South Africa. But when Silas, a lawyer for the Justice Department, encounters the white police lieutenant who raped his wife two decades before, old wounds open in his and Lydia's already strained marriage. Mikey discovers that he may be the product of his mother's violation and sets out to explore his familial roots, taking a type of "apartheid heritage route" that leads him to Silas's father's mosque. Here, he learns of his grandfather's own struggle with colonialism in India a generation earlier. Dangor's novel, a Man Booker Prize finalist, interrogates the forgiving attitude of people like Archbishop Tutu, and, as Silas puts it, "the namby-pambying of God's ferocious legions." In this environment, where even incestuous transgressions can be rationalized away, Mikey finds vengeance as a way to order the decayed social structures around him. Dangor's work is a bleak look at modern South Africa in the vein of J.M. Coetzee's novels, but from the perspective of black South Africans. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Will the truth set you free? Not so, according to this deeply unsettling novel about the new South Africa. Longtime anti-apartheid activist Dangor blends the intimate secrets of one mixed-race family with the politics of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where perpetrators confess their crimes in public in return for amnesty. "We want to forgive, but we don't want to forget. You can't have it both ways," discovers Silas Ali, once an anti-apartheid activist, now a bureaucrat with the TRC. When he glimpses the Afrikaans policeman Du Boise in a Johannesburg shopping mall and remembers how Du Boise arrested Ali 20 years ago and raped Ali's wife, Lydia, in front of him, the memory sets off reverberations with Ali, Lydia, and their son. Now Du Boise wants to confess to the TRC. Whom will that help? What truth? But keeping quiet offers no healing either, just seething guilt and fury. Dangor writes from the inside and yet with distance, challenging some sacred platitudes of the heroic struggle and the new elite but never settling for the easy ambiguity that dismisses all values as being the same. Told from many characters' viewpoints--anguished, angry, tender, ironic--the searing narratives reveal the wounds of betrayal and no reconciliation. The people and their stories are unforgettable. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Books (November 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1843541998
• ISBN-13: 978-1843541998
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,932,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Searing Account of Racially Driven Confects Within a Post-Apartheid Family, August 9, 2005

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bitter Fruit: A Novel (Paperback)

Author Achmat Dangor has given me a penetrating look at post-apartheid South Africa that I could not possibly get from a newscast. His superb novel resonates deeply with the legacy of racism that lingers well after official policies have supposedly liberated all of the country's residents. Dangor is intimate with the subject of apartheid as he worked to defeat it there and then participated in the slow process of rebuilding after the African National Congress came to power. He divides the book into three parts - Memory, Confession and Retribution - which suggests what direction the book will go, but it's a surprising and involving journey every step of the way.

The focal point of the novel is Silas Ali, a former political activist who has joined the new government as a lawyer working with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He lives with his wife, Lydia, a nurse, and their grown son, Mikey, in a township near Johannesburg. There is an inherent irony to their existence - Silas works with the government agency that grants amnesty to those who committed crimes under the old regime, but he and his family remain traumatized by the one hate crime that happened to them. It involves a twenty-year old rape and the sudden reappearance of the perpetrator, a white policeman named François du Boise. Much like Andre Dubus circles the dramatic wagons in his short story collection of revenge and retribution, "In the Bedroom", Dangor does a masterful job in building the tension within the family. Silas doesn't confront du Boise, so the much needed cathartic release is instead directed at the family, triggering a chain of events that leads to its disintegration.

The sharply observed narrative carefully interweaves the differing perspectives of Silas and Lydia. Whereas Silas is deadened by his own stoic resignation of what occurred so long ago in the past, Lydia's suffering is far more intense as she irrevocably retreats into herself. The irony is that there is no truth and reconciliation at home as Silas continues to fulfill the concept at a national level. The unfinished business between Silas and Lydia is palpable and ultimately shattering in bearing the "bitter fruit" of the title. Caught in the middle literally is their psychologically conflicted son Mikey, who has internalized his parents' pain. As he relives the past through his mother's diary, he finds out revelations which make him feel more emotionally detached than he is but subsequently lead him to take matters into his own hands. Dangor provides such vivid detail in his account that it's hard to put down.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fairly torturous read, October 8, 2007

By 

pleureur. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bitter Fruit: A Novel (Paperback)

The book has an interesting premise: what happens when a man who was witness to his wife's rape runs into the rapist in a grocery store? How does this chance encounter affect the amnesia of convenience that has been created in the intervening 20 years?

What we get instead is a smorgasbord, as there isn't much that doesn't find its way into "Bitter Fruit": rape, recovery from rape, memory, differing perceptions of the same even, incest (three different ways), police brutality, gun violence, marital tensions, biracial people, racial tensions, angst about identity, nature vs. nurture, religious confusion, unwanted children, and, to top it all off, mysterious Muslim men with an unclear agenda, until reading starts to become painful. The book is more indigestible than bitter. It's simply too much.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars searing novel, May 16, 2005

By 

bookluvver (Toronto,Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bitter Fruit: A Novel (Paperback)

This is a powerful novel set in post-apartheid South Africa. It focuses on the lives and feelings of three people in a family, and the impact of an act of violence during the days of apartheid on their lives in post-apartheid South Africa. It is well written and moving, about people and their personal foibles, their pain and isolation, and also evokes very believably the greater political scene - the political climate in South Africa just as Mandela is about to step down as president. I could not help comparing this book to The Kite Runner and feeling that it was the superior book - better written and tighter, and yet it has been The Kite Runner that became the best seller!