Karoo Boy [Paperback]

Troy Blacklaws (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2009

'I hear my father's cry and the earth goes wavy under my feet. My father runs to Marsden. He lifts my brother up in his arms, the way he carries firewood. He walks down to the sea, past the women who have abandoned umbrellas to clasp gog-eyed children. My brother's head flops as my father's feet sink into the beach sand.'

Fourteen-year-old Douglas Thomas watches in horror as his twin brother Marsden is killed in a fluke accident. In an instant, the secure world of his childhood in seaside in Muizenberg is turned upside down. As a result of Marsden's death, the family falls apart. Douglas and his mother move upcountry to a small town in the Karoo. Here they have to adjust to an arid, unforgiving place. We watch as, against the backdrop of the bitter conflict of 1970s South Africa, Douglas develops a clearer insight into himself and his place in the world.

In a prose evocative of time and place, Troy Blacklaws traces the story of Douglas's journey to maturity, at the same time giving us a glimpse into the psyche of a divided country.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Death divides a Cape Town family in Blacklaws's evocative but frustrating debut. The story, set in 1976 but narrated in a terse, foreboding and sometimes baffling present tense, begins with 14-year old Douglas Thomas's father accidentally killing his other son, Marsden (Douglas's twin), with an errant cricket pitch. Family disintegration follows: Douglas's father announces that he is "going away," and his mother decides that they're moving to Karoo—a "foreign, far, flat and bleak" place. In Karoo, Douglas befriends Moses, an old black man who works at the gas station and who cannot leave the area because his papers have been stolen. Between italicized flashbacks to Marsden and Sundays with Moses retooling a broken-down Volvo (they both dream of driving back to the ocean), Douglas falls for a girl named Marika. The novel zigzags between vivid descriptive passages and sudden bursts of violence that recall the social and political nightmare that was 1970s South Africa. The historical realities feel out of focus, however, and the characters' motives are often unclear. Though this is a coming-of-age tale, readers will be startled to learn that Douglas, when he finally returns to the seaside alone, is 18; this, along with the other narrative hinges in the story, feels sloppily handled for the sake of a rather ersatz lyrical style. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

Readers familiar with South African idiom will feel right at home in this first-person, present-tense story of a white boy's coming-of-age at the height of apartheid in the 1970s. But even those who don't know the meaning of kaffirboetie, tackies, and hambawill recognize the aching personal truth and political horror. When Dad kills Douglas' twin in a freak accident with a cricket-ball on the beautiful Cape Town beach, Dad disappears, and Mom takes Douglas and her maid, Hope, into "exile" in a tiny town in Karoo, where the landscape is largely dust and thorn. Douglas finds love with a classmate and a father in Moses, a Xhosa ex-miner, also in exile without an official pass. The newspaper headlines are about the distant Soweto riots, but the vicious racism is part of daily life even in the hinterland. The story is in the details in this first novel: the exquisite sense of place, the tender intimacy, and the casual cruelty, from murder to being forced to use separate utensils. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Double Storey (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1919930256
• ISBN-13: 978-1919930251
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,712,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in 1965 in Natal, South Africa. I was uprooted at 9 when my father landed a job on a wine farm in the Cape. At 14 I discovered South Africa was a world pariah and that black men were shot in their call for freedom. Baited as a kaffirboetie (a niggerlover), I became an outsider at Paarl Boys' High. I studied at Rhodes University and then I was drafted into the army. I would not carry a gun to defend the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela was in jail during all this time.

My novels so far (novels: Karoo Boy 2004 and Blood Orange 2005) draw on memories of my boyhood in apartheid South Africa. Bafana Bafana: a story of soccer, magic and Mandela (a fable for young folk) is a bid to draw the eye to the hazardous fate of street boys in Cape Town and to teach young folk around the world something about Mandela.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even Angels..., August 18, 2005

By 

metaphortracker (Stellenbosch, South Africa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Karoo Boy (Paperback)

Karoo Boy is an ambitious novel, in the sense that it tackles the really big themes that even angels (and definitely first-time novelists) approach with cautious tread: living in apartheid South Africa, growing up to consciousness, love and the loss of it, guilt and death. And yet Troy Blacklaws manages to tame these wild things, and bring them to rest in a compact novel, with a handful of well-drawn characters, surrounded by the vast impersonal canvas of the Karoo.

He is sensitive to the minutiae that make up a life, and he describes these in spare prose that paradoxically becomes lyrical in the repetition of the rhymes: "I paddle out through the ice-tea surf. The rising sun glints in the empty windows of the weekend train to Cape Town. I stand on a borrowed board. No flicks or tricks. The wave barrels. For a moment, I glide. Then the wave tumbles me. I fight it instead of going with it. Have I forgotten everything? I even forgot to dogleash the board to my foot. As I surface I hear the crack of the board on the rock. I wade up out of the water, feeling ashamed."

Karoo Boy is not only a welcome addition to the body of fiction now written by thirty-something South Africans, relating their experiences as teenagers during the unholy hey-day of apartheid. It is also a bloody good story, and it is well told.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful language..., January 8, 2006

By 

K. Villard "kv" (southwestern desert) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Karoo Boy (Paperback)

the african setting is poignant, evocative, romantic -- but the author's vocabulary and use of language raises this book to high levels of literary enjoyment...sort of like dylan thomas in its lyricism and poetic achievements...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, January 2, 2006

By 

J. Crawford - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Karoo Boy (Paperback)

This beautifully-written book is full of rich characters and convincing settings, but what makes this book special is the story. The protagonist of this coming-of-age tale (set in the South Africa of 1976) must wrestle with deep and painful problems under adverse circumstances. The ending is a stunner. I reread it within weeks of first reading it. Best book I've read in a long time.