Customer Reviews

Kafka's Curse: A Novel

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The title of this disturbing novel is a reference to both Kafka`s "Metamorphosis" and the alienated, lonely characters who haunt his fiction. Both themes crop up throughout Dangor's novel: the fable of the man who turns into a tree, a Muslim of Indian descent who reinvents himself as a "white" Jew, and the nation of South Africa itself, before and after apartheid.

Nearly all of its characters, both white and "colored," live miserable, violent lives--symptomatic of the brutal apartheid realm. Yet Dangor convincingly adopts an astonishing range of voices: the conservative Muslim ashamed of his brother's "passing," his perceptive wife who unexpectedly leaves him, his rebellious and cynical teenage daughter, the married psychotherapist with whom he has an affair (and who may or may not be a psychopathic killer). And the novel's violent conclusion actually offers hope: that South Africa may be able to purge itself of its complicated history, just as some of the novel's women are able to leave behind the pasts that torment them.

Readers who enjoy straightforward plots, explicit symbolism, and unambiguous endings will surely be perplexed by this novel; even the family trees and the glossary won't help much in untangling the book's many possible meanings. The story is often as blurry as the racial lines created during apartheid. Yet I cannot get this novel and its lyricism out of my mind; the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense of the nonsensical, schizophrenic society in which these people somehow managed to live.

An Arabian fairy tale about the love of a gardener for a princess is the basis of this tale. The princess fails to meet her suitor in a forest, as arranged. He waits and waits, dies and turns into a tree. Oscar also turns into a dry tree-like item, when found dead long after he perished, his garden overgrown and the inside of his house covered in a luxuriant explosion of moulds and other microbiological growths...
This is a neglected 1997 masterpiece about post-apartheid South Africa about Muslims, Christians and Jews, a family history in a novella of 142 pages, preceded by 3 family trees [plus 3 unconnected, additional short stories]. It could/should have become the basis for a never-ending SA soap series because it contains all ingredients for success of the genre.
It is a warm, dense, raw and complicated story written by the main characters: two brothers who die within the same year, by their spouses, lovers, children and other family members.
Much of the tale is historical: how Indian Muslim immigrants' early fortunes were made and lost and how racial boundaries were overcome by bribes in efforts to outsmart the apartheid system with grand schemes. How a blond runaway Boer girl with strong genes whitewashed a weird but enterprising Muslim family so that one of her grandsons can become Oscar Kahn, a Jewish architect rather than Omar Khan. His estranged brother Malik is a successful politician, an Islamic role model, but privately detached, cold towards his wife and children, withdrawing into a small room to pray, read the Koran and muse about how to infuse energy into the next day of his life. But he transgresses many boundaries when he secretly forms a union with Amina Mandelstam.
This book is about messy, mixed identities, unknown fateful backgrounds and the known risks of being part of a mentally troubled family. It is not always easy to follow because the glossary is incomplete and some transitions are hard to follow. And there is mystery: a Caroline Wallace occurs in one of the family trees, is referred to once, but who is she? The novella also hosts a serial killer, perhaps two, a family ghost exacting vengance...
This book needs to be reread several times to fully appreciate its richness. Highly recommended.

Magical-realism is a very effective form of writing, but there is one caveat. It still ought to be understandable, otherwise it becomes totally abstract. I bought Achmat Dangor's novel in the UK a couple years ago with high hopes. It looked interesting. When I plunged into it recently, however, I found that I was going nowhere fast. It is an involved family saga, it is perhaps an allegory about South Africa before and after apartheid, and it is full of weird, largely-sexual images. In the USA, when segregation flourished, very light African-American descendants sometimes used to "pass", that is, claim to be white and live their lives by passing as white. This practice was no doubt widespread in South Africa too. In KAFKA'S CURSE, everything that is not black or white (an `absolute', that is) survives by passing. A Muslim of Indian descent passes as a Jew, marries a white woman. Crime passes as respectability. Dictatorship passes as democracy. Loneliness passes as marriage. And so on. Everyone is "ducking and diving", but what does it mean ? "Conventionally exotic", a phrase gleaned from the book, comes to my mind. Exoticism is used to wrap a very average product. I don't consider myself a literary idiot, but this one really had me puzzled. Like the art of Jasper Johns or Barnett Newman, if such work grabs you, you may like this novel a lot. If you remain sceptical, you may feel that it is a case of the Emperor's having no clothes. I suggest you try something else in that case and leave the muddled KAFKA'S CURSE for the aficionados of blank novels.

Wonderfully written, its magic realism captures the madness of both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the incontrollable human urge to rebel against fate.

I was expecting something completely different from the plot. I thought this book was going to be more about the day-to-day life of an Indian Muslim posing as white Jew in post Aparteid South Africa, which leds up to his death. Instead the book focuses its time on life after Omar's/Oscar's death, more particularly revolving around Malik's dilapidated marriage and somewhat difficult children.

I am not sure if Dangor was trying to play on the theme of how Aparteid has affected all the male figures. I think the book would have been much better had there been more discussion about Omar's/Oscar's life, his relationships, and what drew him to 'change'. Although most people do know what Aparteid in South Africa was, it may just seem like a 'distant' thing, considering most of us have never lived under such a ridiculous and absurd government. I thought the book was going to give more insight into the Indian perspective on Aparteid.

The book was also a bit confusing with so many different characters with similar names (Anne and Anna, Salma, Salleem and Sulman) and the ever changing scenes that the author gives no led-ins to. Even with the family trees at the beginning of the book, I was still just as bewildered. And what is with Dangor's obsession with sex. The book seems to exude sexuality left and right unnecessarily.

The bottom line is that I wanted to like this book, but my interest digressed as I perused through it; It came to the point where I didn't even want to read it anymore. I only finishd it so I could have a thorough and fair opinion about it.

This is a hard-to-put-down wickedly humorous and iconoclastic read. The lives of disparate and unusual people are woven into a tongue-in-cheek review of a society that errs in taking itself too seriously. A MUST!