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Bezig met laden... Mine Boy: The First Modern Novel of Black South Africa (origineel 1946; editie 1989)door Peter Abrahams (Auteur), Ruth Yudelowitz (Illustrator)
Informatie over het werkMine Boy door Peter Abrahams (1946)
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Mine Boy is an unsung gem, amazing and much more potent than Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. In fact, the two do not necessarily warrant comparison except for the fact that Paton's book is one of the few classic South African novels taught in U.S. schools. Some readers have complained of the simplicity of Abraham's language or "cardboard" characters. For me, it's that very simplicity that makes the story such a dramatic tale; it's language that anyone can understand. It's primitive, if you will, or embryonic. As for the characters being underdeveloped, again, I think this adds to the effectiveness of this particular story. Caste systems, apartheid, and other types of sanctioned discrimination force people to come across as stereotypes. When we view our neighbors as "other," we're not seeing them as fully human. This is effectively dramatized in Mine Boy. It put me in a time and place that I would not have experienced otherwise, despite the universality of feeling that comes with the hardships of life. This is the knife's edge of thinking only in terms of black and white. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)African Writers (6) Onderscheidingen
One of the first ever African novels in English by a radical black South African writer: the 1946 classic of one boy's loves, friendships and political awakening as a mine worker in Johannesburg's slums. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |
And Abrahams wrote this whilst he was mixing with the future leaders of post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean in London: Paton's young man is doomed to his tragic fate, but we leave Xuma at a point where he has seen that black people cannot rely on white liberals and have to take leadership themselves to defend their rights. Maybe he will be crushed by the system all the same, but Abrahams doesn't see that as inevitable, and the ending of the book allows us to imagine that he will be able to do something to work towards change. Although perhaps not so much if we're reading it 75 years on and know how South Africa's history progressed...
The AWS edition comes with attractive, if slightly Sunday-schoolish, illustrations by Ruth Yudelowitz. All I could find out about her on the internet is that she was an artist working for the East Africa Literature Bureau in Nairobi in the 1950s, and illustrated a lot of African school-books. ( )