Jane Rosenthal Die swye van Mario Salviati by Etienne van Heerden (Tafelberg) A landscape dominated by space and stone provides the setting for this novel – the Moordenaarskaroo and Weemoedvlakte (Melancholy Plains), where the “karoo wind cannot be distinguished from song”, and the past and the present coexist in a reality which is richer, and soon seems more real to the reader, than everyday life. Here Mount Improbable towers over Tallejare, a dorp to which Ingi Friedlander, a young assistant from the National Gallery, journeys to acquire a sculpture which is to stand in the portals of the new Parliament. Her escape from the city, which parallels the reader’s disengagement from normal reality, is subtly engendered by the slowing down of her yellow Peugeot and trailer on the gravel road, incomprehensibly vague conversations with the folk of the dorp, falling asleep on a bench outside the stone cottage she rents for her stay. The sculptor, a red-haired recluse, variously referred to as a “daggamalletjie” and a schizophrenic, and whose ancestry is deemed sufficiently indigenous to justify the purchase, is unwilling to part with the work. As Ingi lingers on in the dorp she realises he is the kingpin in a web of interconnected stories which concern water, gold and ostrich feathers, as well as avarice, murder and suffering. Etienne van Heerden weaves together the affairs of three generations of three different families, but it is the silence of the outsider, Mario Salviati, an Italian stonemason, brought to the dorp as a prisoner of war, that contributes to the irresolvable stalemate the townsfolk find themselves in, caught in a past which they cannot unlock until Ingi arrives. Van Heerden manages his cast of characters with exemplary skill, as he does the rich metaphors of water, gold and feathers. He offers some explication of gold, says it represents “something which is finally lost and will never return”. Specifically in this novel, it is the Kruger gold, Boer treasure, which reaches Tallejare in a black oxwagon, protected by an elite commando and followed by a pack of feral farm dogs, attracted by the smell of the contents of another casket which contains something far more macabre than old gold. Water is the central concern of the next generation of Tallejaners, when one of them conceives and executes, with the help of the stonemason, a plan to bring water across the Weemoedvlakte, and incidentally compounds the secrets surrounding the gold. Reminiscent of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Die Swye van Mario Salviati is far less confusing; the author makes a game of naming people and places in a way that not only serves to structure the text but is also variously sardonic, amusing and poignant. This wonderful novel somehow confirms, as the sculptor says, that we all have a dorp like Tallejare somewhere in our consciousness.