Jane Rosenthal
STAMLAND by Karel Schoeman (Human & Rousseau)
BULLER SE PLAN by Ingrid Winterbach (Human & Rousseau)
Interestingly, Karel Schoeman begins this travelogue by shedding some of his baggage,in more ways than one. His shoulder bag goes missing and he is obliged to sleep over in the airport and have his first view of Holland from a police car. Whereas some might regard this as an inauspicious start, perhaps this involuntary jettisoning of his security (passport, traveller’s cheques, the lot) helped Schoeman achieve that state of mind which he advocates in the opening chapter, a certain readiness to take life as it comes.
His quotes pertaining to this are many, including one from Virginia Woolf – “What a lark! What a plunge!” – referring to an afternoon shopping in the hurlyburly of London in Mrs Dalloway.
Not that Schoeman put himself in the way of what the modern traveller to Holland commonly seeks; predictably he was in search of the past, with a casual itinerary of the towns from which the Dutch East India Company recruited men (and the occasional orphan girl) for their ships and trading posts in Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope.
In his many encounters with buildings, landscapes and museums (paintings of past notables, seascapes and ships), he finds substantial traces of the past and evokes some sense of that time, some idea of the enormity of the colonial trading venture, and the peculiar flavour of that golden era in Holland’s history.
Although he is overcome by an unexpected sense of feeling at home, and enjoys hearing the language of his childhood years around him, he lets the reader know that South Africa is his final destination. This was a journey of reconnaissance (verkenning), “‘n terugstaan om vir oulaas nog om te kyk en uiteindelik los te laat [standing back to have a last look and finally to let go]”.
Unexpected moments of epiphany occur throughout, often associated with water and the quality of the light. The book is marked by Schoeman’s usual meditative tone and erudition, an intimate and friendly glimpse of this stage of his own inner journey, including a look at the origins of Afrikanerdom.
On a similar mission, Ingrid Winterbach (who has published previously as Lettie Viljoen), in her novel Buller Se Plan, also explores notions of Afrikanerdom. She creates a mythical dorp in the vicinity of Colenso, where British troops were foiled by Louis Botha.
Ester Zorgenfliess drives to this dorp for the funeral of a friend of a friend, but as she has other unfinished business there she stays a couple of weeks, accommodated in the plain but comfortable Gemoedsrus Kamers (a lot of fun is had with names). Winterbach creates a strangely surreal dreamlike world in this entirely familiar setting: the dorp with its two Reformed churches, its caf where she drinks tea, a bench under the trees opposite the church, a garage and workshop, the graveyard.
There is something painterly in the way Winterbach places these symbols where she wants them and returns to them frequently, reconnecting and strengthening the imagery, adding touches.
An extraordinary but entirely recognisable gallery of characters people this novel, many of them troubled young Afrikaners returned to the platteland from the city (in search of their roots?) and who can trace their antecedents at last as far back as the Anglo-Boer War. These include Franny the painter, now drawn into an ecstatic experience of Christ, and the “wonderkind” Bennie, who fixes cars and runs a nationwide alternative magazine from two rooms in the back yard. A young black beggar sometimes shares the bench with Ester, and she takes note of trolley-pushers with increasingly bizarre loads.
She combines a deceptively simple and natural narrative of dorp life with dry and perceptive, often funny insights delivered through the comments and conversations of the returned-to the-dorp Afrikaners, who are conversant not only with the tenets of church and volksnasionalisme, but also psychology, mythology, the arts, drugs and crime. They spend most evenings at a smart new restaurant waiting for the promised performance of a famous musician, Jan de Dood.
Buller Se Plan is a spellbinding read, if somewhat pessimistic; nevertheless one finishes the book elated by the sheer skill of the complex writing and with one’s view of dorps ineradicably altered. A deep and beautiful novel, but not comfortable reading.