Amazon.com Review
Flip Lochner--embittered boozer, self-described loser, burnt-out crime reporter, would-be historian, failed husband and father--finds himself on the farthest edge of civilization one day, descending on foot into a region that lies so deep within the walls of wild mountains it is all but impossible to reach. The Devil's Valley has been home for 160 years to a breakaway sect of inbred Boers shut off from the rest of the world, and Lochner has come to dig into their stories, to establish their history, to know their truth.
With Devil's Valley, South African writer André Brink, author of A Dry White Season, takes the reader on a wild ride into all the dark places of human nature that people most like to avoid. He makes a landscape and social history of these dark places as he brings his protagonist face to face with an agrarian community sternly committed to keeping outsiders out and inner secrets in. It's a place where dream worlds, death worlds, and this world blur and blend, where God and the Devil daily wrestle for the souls of the inhabitants, where simple human dignity is all but out of reach. What is history in such a place? What is truth? "The problem is that I have no bloody way of making sure what I have to show for my efforts," Lochner muses on his experience. "Statements, testimonies, accounts, or just a damn handful of ravings?"
Devil's Valley asks the reader to wonder about his or her own history, especially those parts we all like to leave out yet mutter silently to ourselves, the parts that skitter through our own moonlit night lives accompanied by owls and baboons. --Schuyler Ingle
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The South African author of A Dry White Season and Imaginings of Sand is fascinated by obscure corners of his country's history, and has a strongly developed sense of fantasy. These two elements come together in his latest novel, a rich, bawdy and fiercely imagined tale of an over-the-hill reporter, Flip Lochner, who discovers a remote mountain valley where a group of primitive Boer farmers and their families have been holed up, virtually out of touch with modern civilization, for the best part of a century. They are a rum crew: ferociously moralistic on the surface while sexually voracious on the sly (even miscegenation, the deadliest sin in their book, is not unknown); brutal in their punishments, but tolerant of frightful excesses committed within the family bosom. Above all, though a long drought is decimating their numbers, they wish to be left to themselves. Brink's account of Lochner's adventures among them reminds a reader somewhat of Gulliver's, and it is clear the author is reveling in the chance to satirize the beliefs and behaviors of the Boer culture in which he was raised. His conviction, expressed strongly in previous books, that women carry the burden of maintaining life while foolish, quarrelsome men do their best to ruin it, is set forth again in his portraits of several powerful women in Devil's Valley. It's difficult to build and maintain a convincing alternate world, but Brink succeeds with only a few signs of strain, and the book is vigorous, earthy entertainment that also sheds light on the darker reaches of South Africa's past.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
