In the decade since we first met her in Griet Skryf ‘n Sprokie, Griet Swart has apparently been alive and well. Her daughter, Eva, fathered by the feckless but angelically beautiful Adam, is now nine years old, and Griet herself has become an established writer and spends some time at a university in the United States as writer-in-residence.
As ever Van der Vyver grounds her narrative in the mundane and domestic. Griet first meets Luca, Italian puppeteer, in the schoolyard where their daughters have already made friends. But though Griet, steadier and more wary than she was, is immediately open to the encounter, he carries a past much more deeply troubled than even Griet’s ever was. Death, guilt, grief and anger hover around Luca and his daughter, Sophia, but this is only gradually revealed as the novel progresses.
This is a love story and a family saga, but also much more. Griet has moved on from folktales to mythology, Greek mythology in particular, and Van der Vyver enriches and sustains the Griet and Luca story on the warp and weft of these ancient tales. As Griet tells Eva, myths are the stories people tell each other to explain things, to make sense of existence. She begins the novel with an apple and her daughter, Eva, but it’s “Not that apple. Not that Eve”. More prosaic, it concerns an apple down the loo and the consequent plumbing crisis that drives Griet to her mother’s house for the weekend, where along with her meditations on various apple-centred myths she has to endure an “effens besope moederlike lesing [a somewhat drunken motherly lecture]” on the dangers of Italian men.
Griet takes Luca on a tour of the (pre-1994) Cape, then brings him home to meet her family at her sister’s wedding. Throughout she examines the question of cross-cultural relationships and the changing nature of South African society, in which she embraces the future with intelligence and good cheer, and shows how irrevocably South Africa has become part of the wider world.
Van der Vyver gives Griet a measure of humility and wisdom but also a sharp wit and that vitality and strength one often encounters in Afrikaner women (white and brown). Though it is written with a light and rapid touch, often irreverent and very funny, it is a profoundly satisfying read as she invokes hope while taking a firm grip on the fears and difficulties of normal life, ranging from unsightly eye infections to the aftermath of a suicide.
The only thing I did not enjoy was the rather stereotyped portrayal of crime in South Africa. Too many South African expats use this as a convenient peg on which to hang more complicated reasons for leaving home, and I thought it out of keeping with Van der Vyver’s usually nuanced take on things. This was, however, a minor quibble in an otherwise wonderful read,
arguably better than any of her previous novels.