Die Kremetartekspedisie

By Wilma Stockenström, Wilma Stockentröm, Wilma Stockenstrom

Book Overview

Learning to survive in the harsh interior of Southern Africa, a former slave seeks shelter in the hollow of a baobab tree. For the first time since she was a young girl her time is her own, her body is her own, her thoughts are her own. In solitude, she is finally able to reflect on her own existence and its meaning, bringing her a semblance of inner peace. Scenes from her former life shuttle through her mind: how owner after owner assaulted her, and how each of her babies were taken away as soon as they were weaned, their futures left to her imagination. We are the sole witnesses to her history: her capture as a child, her tortured days in a harbor city on the eastern coast as a servant, her journey with her last owner and protector, her flight, and the kaleidoscopic world of her baobab tree. Wilma Stockenstr m's profound work of narrative fiction, translated by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, is a rare, haunting exploration of enslavement and freedom.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1935744925
• ISBN13: 9781935744924
• Release Date: April 2014
• Publisher: Archipelago Books
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

Unforgettable. Could read it again and again.

The stark and vital images, the quiet insistence of the journey took my breath away.

As beautiful as fire-ants on a slice of chocolate cake

This is alternately heartbreaking and transformative... The story of a woman leaving a domestic South African hell for the sanctity of a hollow tree... Stockenstrom writes like no one else and I wish more of her stuff had been translated...