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Archipelago Books

Mafeking Road

Mafeking Road

by Herman Charles Bosman

$15.00
$15.00
Available as E-Book International Literature
Format
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These slyly simple stories of the unforgiving South African Transvaal reveal a little-described (and rarely romanticized) world of Afrikaner life in the late 19th Century. Like our own Mark Twain, Herman Charles Bosman wields a laughing intolerance of foolishness and prejudice, a dazzling use of wit and clear- sighted judgment. Spun by the plainclothes local visionary and storyteller Oom Shalk Lourens, these moving and satirical glimpses of lethargic herdsmen, ambitious concertina players, legendary leopards and mambas, and love-struck dreamers lay bare immense emotions, contradictions, and mysteries within the smallest movements and unadorned talk of the Groot Marico District. Leading oral tradition by the hand into a territory all his own, Bosman maps a world at once lucid and layered, distant yet powerfully familiar.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780979333064
Pages: 201
Publication Date:

Praise

The pacing and perspective of Bosman’s tales . . . are unlike anything else in English. The closest comparison may be Robert Frost poems or Bob Dylan songs.
—Publishers Weekly

Herman Charles Bosman’s prose is easy as breathing and light as breath itself, perfectly suited for capturing those small, precious, otherwise fleeting moments in which gathered hope, colliding with given fact, defines, in a series of small steps, how we come to look upon life.
—Lee Stringer

A subtle and simple treatment of deep reflections . . . A classic set of stories, deserving of world attention to match the attention it already receives in Bosman’s home country.
—David Lahti

Read these stories for the O. Henry-style socko punchlines, for their atmosphere, for the history, read them simply because they’re wonderful, entertaining, and humane stories where to weep is to laugh, read them because they make a mostly forgotten world live, but read them. These stories are beautiful fruit from a difficult, problematic, worn and wise, humorous and tragic landscape.
—Catherine Bohne

The stories in Mafeking Road move between comedy and tragedy, often several times within the same story, and they detail loves lost, or lovers lost, or tragicomic encounters with the British, or family dramas, but each of the stories is masterfully executed and wonderfully written, and achieves its effects almost magically.
—E.J. Van Lanen

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