Customer Reviews

Cracks

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Compare this with Lord of the Flies, but with girls instead of boys. Set in South Africa and told in Sheila Kohler's inimitable elegant and dark style of writing, it's the story of a swim team in a remote boarding school, a story in which the girls' "coming of age" doesn't turn out as expected.
Cracks is full of memorable characters, including an Italian princess, but most memorable is the shadowy 1st person narrator who somehow manages to be within the story but without at the same time.

Wonderful writing.
Creepy story.

Remember when you were a pre-teen. Were you curious about sex? Were you curious about other people's bodies?

This disarming novel focuses on the innocence and sexual curiosity of a group of pre-teen girls who find themselves in a strange situation when the outsider of the group mysteriously disappears. They knew that their swimming coach had a strange obsession with her, but was she responsible for the girl's disappearance? The ending will shock you. It is a disturbing and sexually honest novel about the age of innocence and curiosity. The novel is utterly original. I highly recommend it.

I couldn't put this book down. I thought the character of the swim coach was right on--the way she abuses her power over the girls, the hurt when she takes favorites. As for the sexual harrassment--unfortunately such things are still going on today. Very realistic and beautifully written.

"There is grease around our mouths, down to our chins; our lips are stained with red wine, our lipstick, smudged, our camouflage, undone."

Everything is indeed undone during a rather somber reunion of middle age women who once attended a small girls' school in an uninhabited corner of South Africa. Brought together by a persuasive letter from their elderly headmistress, an accordion-faced wisp of a woman who desperately needs money in order to save the school from destruction, the women have traveled from all corners of the world; one --- Sheila Kohler, both the author's and character's name --- from as far as America. It turns out the returning women have one thing in common --- they were all members of the school's elite swim team, hand picked by the bronze goddess, Miss G. Why they are the only ones chosen for this reunion is a mystery that is unraveled by the end of the novel, which swings back and forth from present to past until the harrowing conclusion.

The swim team, as well as the rest of the students, all live in near isolation at this school in the middle of the parched desert sands of South Africa. Without mothers to sing them to sleep, stroke their feverish faces, soothe their tremulous tears, these girls turn to the only woman they can find --- not the withered headmistress or the embittered biology teacher --- but the most female, the most headstrong, courageous, outrageous, beautiful woman, the one in charge of selecting the girls for the swim team, the almighty Miss G. But just as fast as she selects them, she throws them away and picks new ones when the old disappoint her. The final 12 girls she selects are the same ones invited to the reunion 40 years later. All attend except two, but there is still someone missing. The luminous and distant Fiamma, whose mysterious disappearance years ago haunts the school and continues to eat away at the swim team members.

Fiamma was the golden girl, literally --- her long flaxen strands stretched out and curled like a Princess's. Indeed that's what she supposedly was, born from a common mother and a regal Italian father. From the beginning, the girls were in awe of this seemingly perfect specimen, her delicate milky white skin, large almost clear blue eyes, willowy limbs, and long plaited golden hair. Maybe the other girls would have embraced her if she even pretended to care what they thought --- but she didn't. Always aloof, reserved, and mysterious, Fiamma didn't indulge in their games or secrets, and the girls despised this. It's not until later that they wonder if she was only waiting to be asked. All the adults, however, were enamored by Fiamma's luminosity and heritage, including the headmistress and especially Miss G, who after seeing her streamlined body gliding through the water like a sleek vessel, bribed her with sweets to join the swim team. Fiamma reluctantly consented and became the fastest girl on the team --- and Miss G's object of desire.

The book most often hovers in the past, but returns sporadically to the present, always through the collective voice of the girls in what writer's refer to as first person plural narration, a deceptively familiar voice, which always keeps the reader an arm's length distance away from the true inner thoughts of the characters. Because of this somewhat vague narration, when the reader finally pieces together the puzzle at the end and the truth crashes over like a wave, there is a moment of "How could I have not seen this coming?"

There are secrets hidden in every sentence of this haunting and at times horrifying book --- secrets that you aren't aware of until you reach the final pages. It's an ending that makes you pause, and then flip back through to see what you missed the first time around. The tautly told story with its tropical backdrop of sterile humidity is in great contrast to the young women's budding fecundity. Fiamma's fate is sealed from the first page, but to find out what happened, you have to make the journey with her and the rest of the girls who have returned to their school, not entirely of their own free will, to confront the past and to ensure the school a future.


--- Reviewed by Dana Schwartz

I read this book in one gulp. It is extremely suspenseful. The use of the first person plural to tell the story was original, and I loved the character Sheila Kohler!

CRACKS is an exquisitely written novel by one of literary fiction's most sophisticated practitioners. The South African details are fascinating, the sensuous, elegant prose flawless. A haunting tale, with a particularly powerful ending.

Interestingly, nearly all the Amazon reviewers of this 1999 novel (including me), whether they liked it or hated it, agree that it's highly original and disturbing to the point of creepiness. Whether you will like it or not depends a great deal on your interest in anomie and an insistent eroticism (surely no book has ever contained as many mentions of "new breasts"!) that eventually turns dark and violent.

The story deals mostly with the collective memories of a dozen middle-aged women who are re-united at the South African boarding school they attended 40 years earlier. (Sheila Kohler, who grew up in South Africa, is at the top of her game in descriptions of the exotic flora and intensely oppressive heat of her native land.) All were members of the swim team, and were variously affected by the charismatic but emotionally careless coach, Miss G, and the ephemeral, highly attractive Fiamma, an Italian student who chooses not to fit in. This is not a spoiler, since it's revealed in the first few pages: Fiamma mysteriously disappears on a hot summer afternoon when the girls are about 13, and has never been heard from again. You will not find out what happened to her until the last few pages--and it isn't pretty.

I think this very odd novel must be viewed more as a dream or a poem than a standard narrative, which would explain why the people in it are presented almost as glimpses of the girls they were and the women they become, rather than full-fledged charachters with motivations and responses the reader can identify with. While I admired the ambition of this literary experiment, I can't say it made for a satisfying read. (Kohler is far more the master of her craft in her most recent novel, "Becoming Jane Eyre," a highly engaging truth-based but fictional imagining of Charlotte Bronte's life.)

As another reviewer has observed, it's difficult to believe that boarding-school girls in the 1950s would have had so little supervision, so much opportunity to wreak more than girlish mischief. But of course if you view this novel as a kind of dream, the rules of reality don't have to apply.

CRACKS by Sheila Kohler (Jonathan Ball, R109.95) This novel by former South African Sheila Kohler is hard to classify: it's part thriller, part sexual awakening ... and it has an extremely disturbing ending. There's a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere in "Cracks": ominous, oppressive and subliminally erotic. I'm not sure if this is a book that you "enjoy" but it certainly is gripping. You simply have to keep turning the pages to find out what happened to the lovely swimmer Fiamma, whose mysterious disappearance as a teenager still has the power to bring together a very disparate group of former schoolmates at a school reunion. Only the swimming team has been summoned to the event, nearly 40 years after Fiamma's disappearance, and the novel delves back into the women's schooldays while also giving a picture of the (mostly unhappy) women they have become. It's fascinating stuff, with the writer showing a keen psychological insight into the psyche of rampantly hormonal teenagers, left mostly unsupervised, and their relationship with their gay swimming teacher, Miss G. What awful secret are they hiding? Will the reader ever find out? Do all of them even know? Kohler's fluid and yet precise manner compelled me to read on until the shocking denouement.

I thought this was a remarkable book--very suspenseful and yet true to life. The characters were all very vivid. It made me think of Virginia Woolf in its precision of detail. I loved it

What evil lurks in the hearts of adolescent girls? Not exactly what you'd expect when you first open the covers of this book. On the surface it seems to be about some rich older women coming back to the boarding school of their youth for a reunion. It quickly turns into a reminiscience of some truly diabolical deeds committed by twelve young girls, their sexually depraved swimming coach, and their seemingly senile and doddering old headmistress. The ending was totally not what I expected; it kept me guessing right up until the last chapter. I won't spoil the story by telling you the rest of the plot, but I still had one question about where Fiamma (one of the main characters) had disappeared to when I finished reading the book. I went back to the very first couple of chapters and reread them immediately. In a very subtle way the answer is revealed on the first few pages! Oh, My, God! It makes you realize how truly evil these girls and their teachers were. The depth of what's really going on is astounding. This is a quick read, very suspenseful, and well worth your time.