Crossways: A Novel [Hardcover]

Sheila Kohler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2004

In Sheila Kohler's riveting new novel, Kate returns from Paris to her home in South Africa for the funeral of her sister, Marion, who was killed in a car accident that left her husband Louis (the driver) in intensive care. Amid loving reminiscences about growing up with Marion on their parents' Johannesburg estate, Kate begins to reconsider the nature of her sister's death, as, from his hospital bed, Louis recalls his early fascination with the inseparable sisters, his eventual meeting with them, and his seduction of Marion. The more Kate learns about Louis, the more suspicious of him she becomes, until, finally, her suspicions are confirmed—as the novel moves to its shocking but inevitable conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kohler (Cracks) explores the dark secrets of a South African family in her elegantly written but lugubrious fifth novel. Translator Kate Kempden, these days a Parisian ex-pat, returns to Crossways, her stately childhood home in Johannesburg, following the death of her sister Marion in a car accident that also severely injured Marion's husband, Louis. An esteemed heart surgeon, Louis is also an Afrikaner, a point his elitist mother-in-law ("Over my dead body will you marry a Boer,") had trouble seeing past. Despite his gifts, Louis is scarred by paternal neglect and maternal sexual abuse; he craved the glittering, charmed perfection he imagined in sisters Kate and Marion and relentlessly pursued the latter. They married and had three children, but Louis often beat his wife, while also remorselessly pursuing homosexual dalliances with fellow doctor Serge and mentor Pottie; he even forced himself on a neighbor child. As Kate lingers in her childhood home, and Louis languishes in the hospital, the horrific truths about Louis and Marion's relationship surface as a detective reveals disturbing details about the car crash, resulting in a confrontation that drives Kate to drastic action. Kohler provides a clear-eyed portrait of the abuser's mind and its self-justifying turns, a sympathetic demi-heroine in Kate and a rousing climax, but the relentless violence and dysfunction make for stark reading.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Set in a wealthy Johannesburg suburb in the late 1960s, the story starts off as a family drama of love and grief. When her beloved older sister, Marion, is killed in a car accident, Kate returns home to the family mansion to help care for Marion's young children. As Kate remembers the sisters' passionate childhood attachment, the viewpoint switches to Marion's Afrikaans physician husband, Louis, who grew up dirt poor, and to John, the Zulu family manager-servant, who remembers everything. John is the usual reverential stereotype: always perfectly wise, he is in touch with his warrior ancestors, and he acts as savior. But it's the white family that is the drama here, and suspense builds inexorably as Kate is forced to confront what she has tried not to know about her sister's violent husband. Was the death an accident? What does Louis want with the children now? The combination of family intimacy and thriller brings close the harsh class conflicts among whites at the height of apartheid. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: Ontario Review Pr (October 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865381127
• ISBN-13: 978-0865381124
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,786,067 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A dark territory of the haunted mind, April 18, 2005

By 

Samia at the Cairo House (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossways: A Novel (Hardcover)

Crossways: A novel, by Sheila Kohler, Ontario Review Press, 242 pages, $23.

In her first novel, Cracks, and in much of her subsequent work, Kohler succeeds in carving out her own terrain, both literally, in the meticulously recreated South Africa of her childhood, and psychologically, in the dark haunts of her characters' minds. A versatile writer, she deviates from her geography of choice in Children of Pithiviers, the story of two little Jewish girls taking refuge with an untrustworthy French chatelaine during the Second World War.

But in Crossways, her fifth novel, Kohler returns to her ancestral Johannesburg as the setting for this story of a South African family caught in the dark secrets of the past. Lovely, sophisticated sisters Kate and Marion dazzle young Boer doctor Louis Marais; he manages to win Marion's hand over the objections of her snobbish English mother, who looks down on Afrikaners. But the brilliant young doctor is scarred by childhood abuse, paternal neglect and maternal perversion, and Marion's marriage soon turns to a nightmare. Her husband is violently abusive towards her when he is not neglecting her for a secret homosexual relationship with his partner. Even John, the Zulu manservant around whom the two sisters grew up and who adored them as children, feels impotent, as a black man, to protect Marion from her vicious husband.

When Marion dies in a mysterious car accident, expatriate sister Kate returns to their childhood home in Johannesburg and slowly begins to unravel the horrific spiral of events that led to her sister's death.

Fans of Sheila Kohler's writing will recognize all the notes in the familiar symphony: the meticulous choice of words, the spare writing, the unfailing sense of place, the torturous relationships across the race and cultural divide, the particularly twisted form of perversion that is maternal sexual seduction, the violence waiting to erupt just under the surface.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and disturbing, November 2, 2004

By 

KatPanama "katpanama" (Readerville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossways: A Novel (Hardcover)

Another disturbing, fascinating novel by Kohler. This one is set in apartheid South Africa with themes of loyalty, obsession, predatory sexuality and abuse as well as sister kinship. This is my second Kohler (the first one being Children of Pithiviers which also kept me in my reading chair) so it begins to emerge that the sister theme is important.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, May 8, 2007

By 

Critic "Serious Critic" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossways: A Novel (Hardcover)

A really good book, exciting, suspenseful and also thoughtful. The characters are extremely well-drawn. I recommend highly.