5.0 out of 5 stars
Post-Apartheid fiction, Aug 12 2003
This review is from: Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Paperback)
Much of South African fiction deals with, by necessity, with the history of racialized oppression. This book takes a look at the post-apartheid South Africa where the old narratives no longer apply so neatly. The result is a wonderfully engaging book that deals sensitively with its characters, flaws and all.
The author writes beautifully and really delves into a number of extremely tough issues (aids, xenophobia, poverty) without being preachy. The story concerns the lives and loves of a couple of lovers and the people around them as they travel from the villages of the Limpopo province to the roughest inner-city neighborhood in Johannesburg. Love is betrayed with painful consequences to their relationship, their lives and those around them. Like any good novelist, Mpe is able to bring to life not only the characters who are struggling to move from poverty and apartheid to prosperity and education in a democratic South Africa, but the society around them.
My words are not doing justice to what a warm, sensitive and humanistic account of South Africans in their very troubled present.
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