David Lytton

The Grass Won't Grow Till Spring (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Few novelists have probed so honestly and deeply into the uneasy confusion of the South African scene as David Lytton. The central character of his powerful new book is Grevil Marais, who works in a Cape Town office and lives in a bungalow a few miles outside, a sophisticated but typically bewildered and angry white liberal. When we meet him he is on his own because his wife Ginny, the spoilt daughter of a rich family, has taken their daughter Jill to England for an operation. It is a relief: Grevil and Ginny, with their widely differing viewpoints, have long been drifting apart. These new circumstances have a profoundly disturbing effect on Grevil. He at once develops a sexual obsession, almost comic in its solemnity, for his Malay servant Tina. He is made painfully aware of the pressures that lie outside the bungalow by a series of mysterious 'patriotic' messages and threats, culminating in attentions from the Special Branch. Lust and insecurity combine to fill the vacuum of his isolation and he plunges into a debauch of the flesh and spirit, during which he feels an increasing alienation from his own family and kind. Gradually, however, he begins to hear a still, small voice, in whose existence he had not previously believed, which leads him out of the desert represented by a corrupt society and his own incomplete self. The account of this dark night of the soul is in the form of Grevil Marais' journal, a black comedy about white men and women unnaturally excited by the depravity of their environment.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 220
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. September 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448205462
• Artikelnr.: 38456555

Autorenporträt

David Lytton was born, and spent his first twenty one years, in South Africa.He chose to leave at the fall of the Smuts government, but periodically returned to report on condition there for the BBC. His novels concern different aspects of the South African condition, covering all levels of social life in the country.
This book is complementary to the author's The Paradise People, which presented aspects of the Afrikaner way of life, and completes his design of six works each dealing with a different strata in the strange geology of South African society. The style of each is adapted to the idiom and rhythms of the strata it is set in.