Bitter Fruit

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'Bitter Fruit' is set in a changing South Africa at the end of the nineties as the Truth Commission is finishing its work. It prises open the remnants of a painful political history, and fearlessly explores the myths of sexual and racial identity.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Dangor (Kafka's Curse), an antiapartheid activist in South Africa and now a UN official, sets his latest novel in the South Africa of the Mandela government. Silas Ali was a member of the ANC underground and is now a ministerial liaison to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As the novel begins, Silas sees Du Boise, the policeman who raped Silas's wife, Lydia, 20 years earlier. When Silas tells Lydia about seeing Du Boise, it triggers a family crisis. Caught between the two worlds of pre- and postapartheid South Africa, the Alis are, like many of their friends, part of the establishment but with deep wounds from the apartheid system not likely to be healed by the TRC. For the Alis and for South Africa, reality has not lived up to the dream. While the dialog is a bit clich?d and the characters are not well developed, readers will learn some history and gain a glimpse into the transformation taking place in South Africa. Short-listed for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, this title is recommended for all collections.-Rebecca Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Early in Dangor's embittered second novel about his native South Africa, aloof, independent 19-year-old Mikey comes to the realization that "history has a remembering process of its own, one that gives life to its imaginary monsters." This understanding of the past informs the thoughts and actions of the characters, which the author of Kafka's Curse explores in meticulous detail. Mikey's parents, Silas and Lydia Ali, are members of the black middle class in postapartheid South Africa. But when Silas, a lawyer for the Justice Department, encounters the white police lieutenant who raped his wife two decades before, old wounds open in his and Lydia's already strained marriage. Mikey discovers that he may be the product of his mother's violation and sets out to explore his familial roots, taking a type of "apartheid heritage route" that leads him to Silas's father's mosque. Here, he learns of his grandfather's own struggle with colonialism in India a generation earlier. Dangor's novel, a Man Booker Prize finalist, interrogates the forgiving attitude of people like Archbishop Tutu, and, as Silas puts it, "the namby-pambying of God's ferocious legions." In this environment, where even incestuous transgressions can be rationalized away, Mikey finds vengeance as a way to order the decayed social structures around him. Dangor's work is a bleak look at modern South Africa in the vein of J.M. Coetzee's novels, but from the perspective of black South Africans. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Will the truth set you free? Not so, according to this deeply unsettling novel about the new South Africa. Longtime anti-apartheid activist Dangor blends the intimate secrets of one mixed-race family with the politics of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where perpetrators confess their crimes in public in return for amnesty. We want to forgive, but we don't want to forget. You can't have it both ways, discovers Silas Ali, once an anti-apartheid activist, now a bureaucrat with the TRC. When he glimpses the Afrikaans policeman Du Boise in a Johannesburg shopping mall and remembers how Du Boise arrested Ali 20 years ago and raped Ali's wife, Lydia, in front of him, the memory sets off reverberations with Ali, Lydia, and their son. Now Du Boise wants to confess to the TRC. Whom will that help? What truth? But keeping quiet offers no healing either, just seething guilt and fury. Dangor writes from the inside and yet with distance, challenging some sacred platitudes of the heroic struggle and the new elite but never settling for the easy ambiguity that dismisses all values as being the same. Told from many characters' viewpoints--anguished, angry, tender, ironic--the searing narratives reveal the wounds of betrayal and no reconciliation. The people and their stories are unforgettable. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2005 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

In post-apartheid South Africa, a family is bedeviled by an apartheid-era rape. Dangor's latest (after Kafka's Curse, 1999) was a finalist for this year's Man Booker. President Mandela is stepping down, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is issuing its report. This is a big deal, especially for Silas Ali, a lawyer and civil servant charged with fixing last-minute problems. Silas is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle and is also Colored (i.e., "of mixed-race"). Nineteen years earlier, his wife, Lydia, had been raped by a white cop, Du Boise, as Silas, chained, had been powerless to intervene. Lydia bore a son, Mikey, with Du Boise the father. Her marriage to Silas has endured, but the love has gone, and she cannot speak about her ordeal. As the story opens in suburban Johannesburg, Silas tells Lydia of his recent chance meeting with the rapist, and the old wound is made even more painful when she learns that Du Boise is seeking amnesty. Silas tries to comfort her, but she rejects him, turning instead to her beautiful, sensual son, and a wet kiss almost becomes something more. Mikey, who has started bedding older women, is in turmoil too. He has read his mother's old diary and knows about the rape and his paternity, and he is about to discover further that his grandfather, a Muslim in India, executed the British officer who had raped the old man's sister. What more motivation does a hot-blooded teenager need? Mikey steals a gun, offs the father of a girlfriend for sexually abusing her, then mows down Du Boise. His Muslim uncle will spirit him off to India. Dangor's ragged storyline embodies also a sober, measured account of former revolutionaries adjusting to their new roles as pragmatic administrators, but it's no match for the churning melodrama. Even more problematic than the melodrama is the sheer dullness of Silas and Lydia, a flaw that sinks what might have been a savvy insider's view of the new South Africa. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.