- Paperback: 551 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Global (August 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 014302583X
- ISBN-13: 978-0143025832
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15 x 4.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 739 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #737,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
The narrative opens in the early days of the white settlement at the Cape, with the Dutch East India Company clinging precariously to a little piece of land in Table Bay, Robben Island. Pieternella is the daughter of Eva, one of the first interpreters and intermediaries between her Khoikhoi tribe and the Dutch, and Pieter van Meerhoff, the Company surgeon at the Cape. Pieternella and her siblings are amongst the first mixed-race children born at the Cape and their lives are a manifestation of a sentiment often expressed by Matthee in this novel, that life consists of heaven and hell rolled together in the same cloth. After her mother's sudden death, Pieternella and her brother Salomon are sent, reluctantly, as a orphan 'slaves' to foster parents in Mauritius, a penal colony at the time. The sea voyage is described in detail, wondrously imagined, with Pieternella making sense of the new experience in terms of her life at the Cape, so that to her the ship looks like a wooden goose floating on the water and she focuses on the animals on board to orientate herself on the deck, sheep-side and chicken-side.A premature marriage is Pieternella's salvation, but she remains attached to the memory of her mother and is full of turbulent emotions about how she is both brown and white in the same body. What will her children look like? Is she really a half-slave? Eventually Pieternella must learn to come to terms with her life in Mauritius, a realisation that will, with time, give her some peace and comfort.
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Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pieternella, Jan 21 2012
By Heather - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Pieternella, Daughter of Eva (Paperback)
Pieternella is my great, great, great etc grandmother and I have found her early life in the Cape very, very interesting. My only critisism of the book is in the translation from Afrikaans into English. I speak both languages. Unfortunately they have almost translated it word for word which means it doesn't always made sense in English.
I very enjoyable read. Thank you.
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