Customer Reviews

Triomf

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Months after reading Triomf I can still close my eyes and like Dorothy clicking her heels, am quickly transported to heat, poverty, opressive depression and the sense of something really grimy nagging at the corners of my soul.

When someone chooses a book in order to visit another place I don't imagine this is the "where" many are after. The author - and translator - have managed a perfect journey, not very pretty, into the world of a South African version of poor white trash. The characters' lives are like the town they live in - built on destruction with God know what lying rotting under the surface. As I read I was almost desperate to find something, anything, to like about the characters. The few moments when that happened were rain in the desert. Sweet, relieving, and over very quickly.

This book is a slice of life written well enough to make it quite real. The question here is if you want to go where Marlene van Niekerk takes you.

There is value in reading this book. It is a peek into a different world, but it was not worth the bad feelings that lingered every time I put the book down.

Van Niekerk creatively takes us into the sad reality of apartheid through the eyes of a poor white trash family from Johannesburg. I appreciated the dark humor used while portraying this dysfunctional family- ultimately the end result of almost 50 years of a government that didn't work.

I am a great admirer of Nelson Mandela and read anything that I can get my hands on about South Africa. I bought this book in the Dutch version but it was one big struggle to finish. There is really nothing that I liked about this book. I found the language ugly, repetitive and more of the same all the way through. I could not recognize anything lovable about the 4 characters of this family nor feel any compassion with the way they live their life. Maybe I am too naive or too spoiled but I completely failed to recognize the essence and quality of this novel.