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...one could only conclude that humanity, rather than being a ballast against the arbitrary, was, through paperwork and foms and stamps and considered judgments and all that was officialdom, its very agent. There was something amusing in the time it took the universe to make its point to this white kid who lived in a very nice suburb and who had to work really hard to add things to his list of traumas, which still consisted of lost toys and, lower down, dead grannies.
Jack Viljee, 11-year-old narrator of Jacques Strauss' The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. (my reading material in yesterday's family album post), spends the 250 pages of Strauss' first novel coming of age. Or perhaps not -- the narrator is an older Jack Viljee looking back on his childhood -- he is still a child at the end of the novel. As a reader you get the sense that the events of the story are what set in motion the process of his coming of age, which will then happen outside of the pages of the book. I reckon this is a good thing as it allows Strauss to get away with some vagueness about what growing up actually consists in, and concentrate on the immature character of his subject and his responses to those events, and to the circumstances of his childhood. Jack grows up in a northern suburb of Johannesburg, the son of a Boer father and an English mother and cared for by a black maid, unsure about where he fits in to the spectrum of South African life in the waning days of Apartheid. His discoveries and his intuitions about his family, about his friends and neighbors and schoolmates, about the society he is living in, make for great, thought-provoking reading.
posted morning of Sunday, March 4th, 2012
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