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"This Life" by Karel Schoeman

Austin. is the first word that comes to mind to describe this novel. Austere as the South African veldt, windswept, with grazing sheep and glittering lakes, and Karel Schoeman never tires of describing throughout this life (1993), with often the same words, the same look: plateau on which only the unchangeable seasons have taken. Austere, too, like the lives of Afrikaners who inhabit the Roggeveld at the turn nineteenth century: taciturn ranch families who leave their farm in the winter, to go on transhumance in the plains of the Karoo. Austere, finally, as the life of one who tells the story, his own history: an old woman on her deathbed who recalls his "funny" of existence. By "funny" understand "senseless" rather than "fanciful".

She was the youngest of a family of sheep farmers, wealthy landowners from the rest of society who survived scattered on the plateau: daily shepherds, nomads crossing, domestic. On the evening of his life, which is now difficulty falling asleep in a bedroom of the house built by his ancestors, where she was born and spent almost his entire life. In the dark, memories, snatches of memories, assail, collide and sometimes miraculously fit together. She can then try to help bring the pieces by which, perhaps, its existence will reveal its hidden meaning.

From lightning sprung from a distant past, she tries to dispel the shadows of the mysteries which no inscriptions on the headstones of her relatives, nor the dates carefully reported in the family Bible, say nothing. Under what circumstances his brother Jakob, whose body was found in a crevice, he really died? What happened to his wife Sofie, who brought so much joy into the house and disappeared one day along with his second brother Pieter? And why he returned there years later, unrecognizable, haggard?

She is the one that is never explained anything that we did not see one that does not speak, one that was content to observe and listen, one that will die with no one to cry . So transparent that it almost has to remember any words addressed to it only whispers caught behind a curtain, the sneers of the servants, and images still blurred, fugitive, which she manages little by little, groping for meaning.

Karel Schoeman we are talking about a remote South Africa, isolated, misunderstood. At hundreds of miles of the lights of Cape Town, decades of apartheid issues. A kind of Wild West in South Africa where the passage of a trailer is the only event, the only apparent distraction. But behind the closed shutters of the houses, plots being hatched hidden power plays unacknowledged, dramas it is fashionable to be silent. It will

a lifetime to the narrator to understand all this. And over 250 pages long drive to take the time to question his own destiny. For the novel by Karel Schoeman at the age of 53 years shall not fail to arouse the anxiety in the form of a question mark, which assails every man in existence well under way: when there is no more of us that a name on a stele and a few souvenirs in the head, is the summary of a life?

This life

Original Title: Hierdie Lewe (1993) by Karel Schoeman

Translated from Afrikaans by Pierre-Marie Finkelstein
Phoebus, 2009
265 p., 21 euros

Read other reviews of this life blogs Passion books and Here Palaver .