The Way Of The Women
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
The Way Of The Women
By (Author) Marlene van Niekerk
Little, Brown Book Group
Abacus
1st September 2009
United Kingdom
Classifications
General
Fiction
839.3636
Short-listed for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 (UK)
Physical Properties
Paperback
608
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 40mm
420g
Description
How can you speak when speech has been taken away When the only person listening refuses to understand Milla, trapped in silence by a deadly paralysing illness, confined to her bed, struggles to make herself heard by her maidservant and now nurse, Agaat. Contrary, controlling, proud, secretly affectionate, the two women, servant and mistress, are more than matched. Life for white farmers like Milla in the South Africa of the 1950s was full of promise - newly married, her future held the thrilling challenges of creating her own farm and perhaps one day raising children. Forty years later, the world Milla knew is as if seen in a mirror, and all she has left are memories and diaries. As death draws near, she looks back on good intentions and soured dreams, on a brutal marriage and a longed-for only son scarred by his parents battles, and on a lifetime s tug-of-war with Agaat. Marlene Van Niekerk's is a stunning new literary voice from South Africa, to compare to J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.
Reviews
THE WAY OF THE WOMEN combines the stark intensity of a remarkable death-bed chamber piece, which none the less contains humour, with a compendious sweep from 19th-century boomtime in the Cape to the Angolan war - GUARDIAN
Ambitious and loaded with a narrative energy you will not find - at the same pitch or in the same range - in the work of any of the big names in South African writing... A masterpiece has arrived - South African SUNDAY TIMESA polyphonic novel that sows many voices into its fertile soil... A narrative that focuses a wide sweep of events and emotions into the bond of mistress and maid - INDEPENDENTAuthor Bio
Marlene van Niekerk was born in 1954 and grew up on a farm in the Caledon district of South Africa's Cape. She studied philosophy, languages and literature at the universities of Stellenbosch, Amsterdam and Witwatersrand, where she now lectures in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch.
