My Mother's Lovers

Publishers Weekly

The sprawling ninth novel from South African Hope (Kruger's Alp, etc.) pursues a son's adoring, adversarial relationship with his legendary mother and with South Africa as it changes over his lifetime. Alexander, born in 1944, returns to postapartheid Johannesburg to distribute the effects of his mother, Kathleen Healey, formerly a devil-may-care Karen Blixen-era big-game hunter. Alexander isn't sure who among the motley "uncles" who floated through his mother's life is his father, and readers see a lot of Kathleen's laissez-faire parenting as young Alexander, in retrospect, is subject to it. As the novel flashes back and forth in time, there's also Koosie, a mixed-race orphan boy taken under Kathleen's wing who later gets swept up in the black power movement. (Alexander becomes an itinerant air-conditioner salesman.) Kathleen, dying of cancer, makes a last-ditch attempt to marry a much younger Cuban refugee of Castro's regime and help spirit him to safety. Later, we meet Cindy, a "Coloured" woman now playing the rich "Jo'burg dolly-bird," who worked with Kathleen at a shelter for handicapped kids and is overwhelmed by Kathleen's personality. Hope allows Kathleen to come through clearly, and individual episodes are suffused with Alexander's lifelong ambivalence. His portraits are skillful, but the novel doesn't fully jell. (Aug.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

Set primarily in South Africa from the late 1800s to the present, this engrossing novel features an eclectic cast of characters. At its center is Kathleen Healey, a pipe-smoking aviator, hunter, knitter, and all-'round adventurer who leaves lovers in her wake. Kathleen travels the continent of Africa, going wherever and whenever she chooses, and she has unlimited tales to share of her incredible experiences. While tracing the Healey family history, the novel also explores the history of South Africa, especially its conquests and civil wars. Significantly, in a land where race is of prime importance, Kathleen is color blind. When Kathleen dies, her only son, Alexander, returns to Johannesburg after an absence of many years. As he reconciles conflicted feelings toward his mother and his mother country, Alexander renews old relationships, makes new friends, and grapples with love, belonging, identity, and race. Hope, whose numerous novels include Kruger's Alp, winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, offers vivid and powerful descriptions of modern-day South Africa. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
—Sarah Conrad Weisman

Kirkus Reviews

Another scathingly funny look at the bizarre social and psychological landscape of his native South Africa from Whitbread winner and Booker short-listee Hope (Darkest England, 1996, etc.). The central, towering figure is Kathleen Healey, a pilot and big-game hunter born shortly after World War I who swaggers across Africa with the panache of the colonizing generation that took the continent as its personal playground. She won't even tell her son Alex, the novel's narrator, who his father is. Maintaining idiosyncratic friendships with everyone from an Afrikaner secret policeman to the Rain Queen of the Lebalola people, Kathleen is equally out of place in the race-obsessed South Africa run by religious bigots and in the post-apartheid nation racked by crime and AIDS. She's magnificently clueless about everything except her own pleasures and the people she chooses to love, though her swashbuckling resume of her beloved Johannesburg's past ("We don't have a history, really . . . Just a police record.") nails the wide-open frontier town where her father made his fortune laying dynamite in gold mines. Quiet, uneasy Alex takes a less romantic view of their homeland, seeing it as a place of cruelty and malevolent fantasy, where white people once imagined themselves the lords of the universe and black politicians now play the same corrupt power games as those they displaced. He just wants to get away from it all, selling air-conditioning units all over the Far East, until his mother's death brings him home for a reckoning with her and the "lovers" (not all of them male sexual partners) to whom she's made a few pointed bequests for Alex to execute. Hope paints a broad canvas teeming with vigorouscharacters; his political commentary is fresh, biting and deeply cynical. The moving final pages show Alex still in thrall to the magic of Africa and his mother, decry their lies and failures though he may. Intelligent, tough-minded and surprisingly tender: a portrait of Africa that both convinces and provokes.