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Review
'With a loving, mystical awareness of the physical world, Colonel van der Post creates a compelling vision of small human creatures against a vast landscape...An infinitely subtle book' (Sunday Telegraph - Janice Elliot )
Product Description
The story of a long, perilous journey undertaken by four survivors of a massacre: a teenage boy of European descent, a young white girl, and two Bushmen. The basis for a major film release from Walt Disney Pictures.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
White boy and girl, dog, and Bushman couple flee death,
By
This review is from: A Far Off Place (Paperback)
The comments of Elizabeth Hayes are welcome. Van der Post has a poetic gift of description of sights, sounds and moods. This gift is especially salient in the predecessor of this work, A Story Like the Wind.
5.0 out of 5 stars
White boy and girl, dog, and Bushman couple flee death.,
By
This review is from: A Far Off Place (Paperback)
This book begins where A Story Like the Wind ends. The home deep in Africa, where young Francois Joubert had grown to near manhood, was overrun by a well equipped army of black Africans led by a Maoist Chinese officer with Africans and two Europeans as subalterns. The Maoist officer ordered that everyone be killed at Hunter's Drift, where Francois had grown up, and at nearby Silverton Hill, where a retired British Naval officer, along with his half Portuguese daughter, known to Francois as Nonnie, were having a home built by South African coloureds. With impeccable logic, the Chinese officer wanted no survivors, because 1)Hunter's Drift was to becme a staging point for an assault on a mining city, requiring secrecy, and 2)a survivor could tell the tale of what had been done. Francois was a special target. But Francois and Nonnie were not at the scene when the attack wiped out the settlements. They had been called from the immediate area by a Bushaman whom Francois had earlier freed from a steel animal trap. The Bushman, Xhobba, had now returned with his wife, Nuin-Tara, and the four, and Francois' hunting dog, Hintza, son of great hunting dogs, had now to set off upon a flight across Africa to the sea, a trip which would take more than a year, during which they bonded deeply and were beset by enemies and eventually by disease. When the five reached the sea, there is a celebratory, triumphalist, ending to the book, two such events, in fact, that seem out of place in light of the slow, patient, painful crossing. (Survival would have been celebration enough.) But between these celebrations the words of Mopani, the great hunter turned conservationist, bring to us the spiritual philosophy of Laurens van der Post, most clearly summarized in a short prayer once uttered by Mopani, "Our Father, which art in Heaven, Thy will be done. Our Mother, which art in earth, thy love be fulfilled, and love will be made one"(307). An underlying theme of the book is that the inner and outer worlds are united: "There is a profound interdependence of world without and world within, and experience in either one of them is also valid in the other. Whenever one succeeds in breaking the code wherein their meaning is transmitted from one dimension to the other, this validity is so marked that one wonders whether there are really two different dimensions and not just two aspects of one and the same whole. The visible world being merely the spirit seen from without; the spirit, just the world without seen from within"(153). What the travelers have seen and endured affects them, and what they have done and will do affects the world around them, on and on through time.
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A Far Off Place" is far out!,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Far Off Place (Paperback)
I saw the Disney movie when I was little, and now I have read the book. "A Far Off Place" in conjunction with "A Story Like The Wind" is amazing. Maybe I was so surprised because of the injustice done to the book by the movie. Read it! Not only is it fun, but it does have many themes and ideas that are not western in origion.
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