Overview
With the publication in South Africa of Kafka's Curse, the prize-winning poet Achmat Dangor joined the ranks of first-rate literary writers--Gordimer, Brink, Breytenbach, and Coetzee among them--to come out of South Africa.Brilliantly conceived and powerfully evoked, Kafka's Curse is a modern reinterpretation of the Arabic legend of the gardener who loves a princess and, for his transgression, is transformed into a tree. Reset in South Africa as apartheid was coming undone, this is the story of the Khan family, who are both "colored" and Muslim. When Oscar Khan, a budding architect, dares to pursue a woman outside his race and to change his religious identity, he commits a sin and must be punished. His unforgiving brother, a post-apartheid politician, tries to come to terms with Oscar's apostasy but will himself betray both his principles and his family when he falls in love with Amina, a beautiful and spirited psychotherapist.
Kafka's Curse is both part of the tradition of politically charged South African fiction and a bold departure that makes us see that nation as we never have before. Imbued with a timely resonance even as it is narrated with the lyric and imagistic intensity of magic realism, it announces the arrival of Achmat Dangor in the forefront of contemporary literary novelists.
Editorials
Christopher Hope
...[A] rarity, a post-apartheid work of fiction....[that asks:] What happens to memories of the way we were?....Dangor writes lyrical, often beautiful prose that switches suddenly into blazing anger....a strange, tormented book, full of cries that go on ringing in the head.— The New York Times Book Review
Boston Book Review
Opens like a music box to a shiny intricate machinery and a sweet precise music, and it closes on a note of hope.Christopher Hope
...[A] rarity, a post-apartheid work of fiction....[that asks:] What happens to memories of the way we were?....Dangor writes lyrical, often beautiful prose that switches suddenly into blazing anger....a strange, tormented book, full of cries that go on ringing in the head.— The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
South African poet Dangor's first US publication-an intricate blend of racial and sexual tensions, with a twist of Arabic legend thrown in-is set in the post-apartheid era, though the roots of its drama reach into the dismal South African past.In a bid to free himself of suicidal skeletons lurking in his ancestral closet, Omar Khan, as a young man, reinvented his persona. As the Jewish Oscar Kahn, the light-skinned Muslim found acceptance from the masters of apartheid, and so obtained a blond trophy wife, Anna, and a secure place in white society. But he paid a price for his deception: In time, a bizarre illness overtook him and, after Anna fled their house, turned him into a tree-as in the Arabic tale of a palace gardener suffering that fate for daring to love a princess. Anna's refuge with her brother Martin sours when his wife catches him molesting his youngest daughter, bringing back to Anna a flood of memories of him doing the same thing to her, so she takes her niece away to live with her. Meanwhile, Oscar's brother Malik, a severe, pious pillar of the Muslim community, finds his own life taking an unexpected turn. His wife moves out; and he begins a passionate affair with his brother's therapist, Amina, whose black skin he can't caress enough. Once he leaves her, his rejuvenated state doesn't last long: He deliberately puts himself in the way of a robber's gun. Anima works her charm for the last time by seducing Malik's son, coming between him and a girl whose light skin and hair, despite the dismantling of apartheid, still make her forbidden fruit of the kind Anna was a generation before.