America Hurrah and Other Plays: American Hurrah, Eat Cake, The Hunter and the Bird, The Serpent, Bag Lady, The Traveler, The Tibetan and Book of the Dead (Paperback)

by Jean-Claude van Itallie (Author), Bill Coco (Introduction) "War was first performed at the Barr Albee Wilder Workshop in New York City on December 22, and 23, 1963..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Nobly Born, Fourteenth Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In a bleak morality tale about a fugitive from justice, Galgut (The Good Doctor) again demonstrates his flair for charting the vicissitudes of human despair in modern-day South Africa. After the unnamed, near-starving protagonist is picked up by a minister traveling to his next church post, he repays the holy man's generosity by murdering him. The desperado quietly slips into the minister's role and tries to assimilate into mainstream society, but his misdeeds continue to dog his every move. If Galgut's concise prose is nearly leached of emotion, it certainly sets the scene: "There was a film of dust on everything in the car as though it had been standing there for years. He stared ahead through the windscreen. There were the corpses of beetles shattered on the glass and their legs and feelers were composed in attitudes of violent expiry." With increasingly stomach-tightening intensity, Galgut chronicles his troubled protagonist's struggles to evade capture under the ever-watchful eye of the authorities in his new town. The suspenseful narrative never strays from the dreary force of its understated character development ("He reached out with his filthy, his bloody hands and began to eat without looking at them"). As the story builds to a climax, Galgut heightens the book's emotional power with tense one-page chapters until justice—cosmic justice, in this case—comes to call.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Booklist
The quarry is a place and a person, a pit and a fugitive, in this spare, intense story of rural South Africa. And the fugitive is murderer, victim, accused, minister, policeman, and judge. They all change roles, each one becomes the other, or seems to. In each stark vignette, it takes a few sentences to know whom he refers to, and it is easy to make a mistake. But that is the point. There is lots of action, including murders, a church fire, a court drama, a circus act, even an eclipse in the universe. But what holds the reader are the faint silhouettes on the road. As in Galgut's The Good Doctor (2003), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, his clear, elemental prose is never generic. First published in South Africa 10 years ago, this story is rooted in the veldt. But the fugitive who sits on the rocks "as if waiting for something" could be anywhere on the edge. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (February 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080213761X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802137616
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,332,252 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The hearts and minds of South Africans haven't changed, April 12, 2006

By	Philippe Horak (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Quarry (Paperback)

In this stunning novel, Mr Galgut tells the story of a fugitive from justice hitchhiking in the desolate backdrop of South Africa and who is picked up by a driver, a minister on his way to a remote parish. When the minister discovers that the hitchhiker is a fugitive and confronts him in a disused quarry, the response is lethal.
This novel is a masterpiece featuring a story and characters utterly compelling. The author shows that even the quietest spots on earth can seethe with repressed violence. A blunt and tense read about guilt and evasion of truth. Justly enough, Mr Galgut has been compared to the greatest South African writers like Andr? Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great stuff - Good Doctor with pace, December 2, 2006

By	wbjonesjr1 (São Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Quarry (Paperback)

I had read The Good Doctor and enjoyed it plenty for great characters, great writing and a slow-building, relentless tension. The Quarry has the same great characterization and prose, but nothing at all slow about it. The beginning of the story is enthralling, both the introduction to the main character and the first incident at the quarry (best not read liner notes etc more max effect). What continues seems a combination of Greene's "Power and Glory" (in terms of "feel") and Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" (in terms of suspense and pace). A fantastic aspect is the power of the not explicitly stated (e.g. main character's real name never revealed, ). And the construction and build-up to the denoument is something Tolstoy - like. The Quarry is clearly another example of the spectacular literature of South Africa.