Shaun de Waal BEELTENIS VERBODE by Hennie Aucamp (Human &Rousseau, R79,95)
In this book, Hennie Aucamp, one of the leading prose-writers in Afrikaans, collects his reviews, done mostly for the magazine De Kat, of what he calls following the Dutch egodokumente. By that he means biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, collections of letters.
Almost all the subjects of these works are writers, and Aucamp moves with great sensitivity between the letters of Jean Rhys and the autobiography of Doris Lessing, between Ian Gibsons account of Federico Garca Lorca and Karel Schoemans accounts of Olive Schreiner.
Aucamp commends the novelistic touch in Schoemans historical and biographical work. His own criticism here bears the mark of a cosummate fiction-writer and diarist one who deals constantly with the guises of the self and its most delicate nuances.