13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tale for all of us, June 14, 2006
This review is from: Skinner's Drift: A Novel (Hardcover)
I have spent much time in Africa, some of it on the banks of the Limpopo where much of this story takes place. Others have summarized the plot. I urge people to read this book for its insight into Africa, its poignant study of apartheid from both sides of skin color but also from the myriad sides of the emotions and feelings of those who were there. It is also a book about regret, mistakes, going home and not wanting to and about the way we all move towards dust. The treatment of love, physical, emotional, love of people, horses, dogs, animals and place are brilliantly rendered. I could smell the bush of Africa in these pages and feel the way in which the characters read each others emotions, not through the words spoken, but through faces, bodies and movement. A tour de force - well done Lisa.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An intriguing debut novel about the struggles of identity and finding a sense of home, March 8, 2006
This review is from: Skinner's Drift: A Novel (Hardcover)
In Lisa Fugard's debut novel, SKINNER'S DRIFT, a prodigal daughter returns to her father's farm in Africa for the first time in ten years. Eva van Rensburg fled not only the farm, but her country and her relationship with her father after her mother was accidentally shot and killed. For Eva, South Africa is a place of contradictions, and she must confront them and her relationship to her family and her history as her father's health fails and she is called home.
Skinner's Drift is Martin van Rensburg's farm along the Limpopo River, which forms the border with Botswana. The Afrikaner van Rensburg settles his English wife and their daughter there and begins to carve a life in the dusty hills. Eva feels isolated by her mother's Englishness and later by her father's intensity and violence. Martin is a man fiercely proud of his heritage and his land, humbled only by the stutter that slows his tongue. His wife Lorraine loves the farm at first but comes to resent its hold on her husband and the harsh conditions of life there. Eva and her father share a special bond until one night a hunt turns disastrous. She spends the rest of her time on Skinner's Drift trying to atone for her father's crime and eventually, when her mother dies, leaving her father, the farm, and South Africa for America.
When Eva returns, at her aunt's request, she believes she is coming home to bury her father. The political and social changes that had begun before she left have transformed South Africa into a place unfamiliar to her in some ways. It is 1997 and apartheid is over, but the damage on the culture and people remains. Still, the landscape and many of the faces welcome Eva home. When she finally visits Skinner's Drift she finds Lefu, an African farmhand employed by her father, still working the land and the bond she shares with him is still strong. However, he has learned of the secret she has been keeping all these years about what happened that night while hunting with her father, and he has shared it with his grandson Mpho.
Can Eva come to terms with her past, with her identity, and with the realities of her homeland? Can she forgive her father and herself? Will she begin to understand the depths of her mother's loneliness? Fugard's lovely novel centers on these questions. Although her literary devices are expected (flashbacks, diary entries, family secrets), they don't feel stale or contrived. Fugard's style is fresh and readable, and her characters are frustratingly real. The isolation and tension as well as the natural beauty of Skinner's Drift come alive with the author's descriptions.
Eva is not always an easy character to like. Her sadness and pain are obstacles, and she comes across as smug or uncaring at times. But this is in keeping with Fugard's realism, a realism not untouched by poetry and a romantic streak. By far the most notable characters are Lefu and his family, his daughter Nkele, and her son Mpho. They are an interesting parallel and contrast to the van Rensburgs.
SKINNER'S DRIFT is dramatic and immensely readable. While not wholly original in content, Fugard's style saves the book from being ordinary. Eva's shame and her confusion about home and identity are wonderfully set against the fraught background of South Africa in the 1980s. Fugard nicely captures the tensions of her very real setting as well as those inside her fictional characters.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"We do not live separate from these white people", January 9, 2006
This review is from: Skinner's Drift: A Novel (Hardcover)
Haunted by a terrible tragedy that decimated her family, Eva van Rensburg flees her home in South Africa, and spends the last ten years living in New York. Eva is bitterly ashamed of her South African heritage, even going so far as to tell her boyfriend that she's a New Zealander. When he discovers the truth, and wants actively confront her, to talk to her about her country, she tries as hard as she can to avoid discussing politics or her childhood.
But now it is 1997, and apartied has been relegated to the dustbin of history. A new South Africa is steadily being reborn amidst the backdrop of a tumultuous Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Eva's father, Martin van Rensburg is dying, and as she reluctantly returns the country of her birth, she must not only to make peace with Martin, but must also put to rest of the ghosts of her childhood living on Skinner's Drift, an isolated farm settled along the banks of the untamed Limpopo River.
It is only through reading the dairies of her mother, Lorraine van Rensburg that Eva is able to relive her early days on the farm, perhaps finally coming to terms with the terrible secret that protected her Boar father and ultimately diminished his stature in her eyes. For Martin is the archetype of the apartied Boer hero, a character who embodies vitality, violence, and a mad passion for the land, his exhilaration in fighting - claiming what he believes is his birthright - a piece of South Africa.
Whilst Martin is caught up in the struggle to maintain white superiority in a country on the brink of racial unrest and inevitable change, Eva sees her mother as struggling to define herself in the shadow of her husband's beliefs. Certain that Martin is having an affair, Lorraine cloaks herself in a netherworld of denial and falsehood, shuffling around the truth, almost like "a magician with her feelings," overwhelmed and confused.
Lorraine is an English-speaking woman married to an Afrikaaner, both outcasts, he with his stutter, and her with violent mood swings that often frightened her; she has an aching familiar loneliness, a cold-vaulted emptiness inside her that only Martin can fill. But Martin is preoccupied: the loyal Lefu, his kindly African ranch hand, always in Martin's employ, has discovered a dark secret: his boss is steadily killing animals, not hunting them with a rifle but shooting them many times with a machine gun, and Lefu's heart is "steadily becoming exhausted" from the weight of his secret.
When two white men are found brutally murdered on a neighboring farm, suspicion grows, tension mounts, and fear begins to lurk in the van Rensburg's bellies. Martin anxiously stockpiles guns, fences the house, and deploys local soldiers to safeguard the perimeter, whilst the young Eva looks on, desperately trying to control and protect her father, while also taking stock of the changing world around her.
The characters find themselves caught up in a convergence of political events beyond their control; the countryside invaded by disgruntled workers, who now believe that the land belongs to them, and high on liquor and dagga, are intent on killing white farmers. The tranquil farm of Skinners Drift is ultimately shattered by shocking acts of brutality against the prevalent cruelty of White rule.
Meanwhile, the farm hand Lefu, his daughter Nkele - maid to Lorraine - and Nkele's young son Mpho, are determined to hold onto their separateness, whilst also yearning for freedom. In this world, the Africans fear their white masters; it's a fear that is almost "like a membrane," fear, and even anger, enveloping all of their encounters with white people.
Author, Lisa Fugard writes beautifully of the lush, luxuriant countryside, her passion and love for the country shockingly apparent. Perhaps Eva, upon her return, can heal the wounds, and finally repair her fractured and splintered family, showing them once and for all how to live in this new South Africa.
The novel is a persuasive portrait, and a forceful microcosm of a country on the threshold of undeniable change. But it is also a thrilling account of one family and their struggle to survive amidst the winds of transformation. The van Rensburgs are a family in crisis, who must learn to recover, become accustomed to, and hopefully make peace with South Africa's irreversible past. Mike Leonard January 06.
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