Sheila FugardRecensioni
Autore di A Revolutionary Woman
Recensioni
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We're supposedly in an obscure dorp in the Karoo in 1920, where the narrator, Christina Ransome, is teaching the "coloured" children of the location. She's a Red Revolutionary, a disciple of Gandhi, and a feminist, attributes not calculated to make her popular with her Boer neighbours (and only the Hindu-mystical part of them is developed to any extent). She also has a love affair with an Indian man behind her, as well as a very sexual kind of obsession with her late lover's teenage wife, Lakshmi ("Her breasts undulated beneath the sari ... her face was an open lotus ... she was a woman ready for copulation. A tantric goddess."). The words lingam and yoni pop up every two or three pages.
The action of the book turns around Miss Ransome's star pupil, the seventeen-year-old coloured boy Ebrahim. He is caught in bed with a Boer girl and accused of rape. The girl is fourteen and has learning difficulties, so even the local version of Gregory Peck (fresh from studying Egyptian papyruses in Leiden, evidently a key part of every criminal lawyer's toolkit) is going to have a hard time helping him. And of course a Boer lynch-party turns up, and things start getting even odder than they were before.
Probably not a book it would be advisable to attempt to tackle without a good supply of seventies psychoactive substances and a sitar to hand. I'm not quite sure what Fugard was trying to achieve with this book, but I don't think she did so, whatever it was.