Kafka's Curse

by Achmat Dangor

Book Overview

"Dangor writes lyrical...beautiful prose.Kafka's Curseis....full of cries that go on ringing in the head." --The New York Times Book Review From the award-winning South African poet Achmat Dangor, an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375704620
• ISBN13: 9780375704628
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Disturbing, memorable fiction about a changing South Africa

The title of this disturbing novel is a reference to both Kafka`s "Metamorphosis" and the alienated, lonely characters who haunt his fiction. Both themes crop up throughout Dangor's novel: the fable of the man who turns into a tree, a Muslim of Indian descent who reinvents himself as a "white" Jew, and the nation of South Africa itself, before and after apartheid.Nearly all of its characters, both white and "colored," live miserable, violent lives--symptomatic of the brutal apartheid realm. Yet Dangor convincingly adopts an astonishing range of voices: the conservative Muslim ashamed of his brother's "passing," his perceptive wife who unexpectedly leaves him, his rebellious and cynical teenage daughter, the married psychotherapist with whom he has an affair (and who may or may not be a psychopathic killer). And the novel's violent conclusion actually offers hope: that South Africa may be able to purge itself of its complicated history, just as some of the novel's women are able to leave behind the pasts that torment them.Readers who enjoy straightforward plots, explicit symbolism, and unambiguous endings will surely be perplexed by this novel; even the family trees and the glossary won't help much in untangling the book's many possible meanings. The story is often as blurry as the racial lines created during apartheid. Yet I cannot get this novel and its lyricism out of my mind; the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense of the nonsensical, schizophrenic society in which these people somehow managed to live.

Excellent insight into cross cultural relationships

This is a hard-to-put-down wickedly humorous and iconoclastic read. The lives of disparate and unusual people are woven into a tongue-in-cheek review of a society that errs in taking itself too seriously. A MUST!

A troubling and wonderful tale of longing in South Africa

Wonderfully written, its magic realism captures the madness of both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the incontrollable human urge to rebel against fate.