Store Up the Anger - Tapa dura

Store Up the Anger

hardcover. Condición: Very Good in Dustjacket. Estado de la sobrecubierta: Very Good. First Edition. London. 1980. Gollancz. 1st British Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0575028211. 240 pages. hardcover. keywords: Africa South Africa Literature World Literature. DESCRIPTION - Sam Bhengu, the hero and victim of this highly topical novel, is a black leader who devoted his life to the fight against South Africa's racist laws and who died a lonely death in the hands of the South African security police. He was not the first, and doubtless will not be the last, to live and die in this way, and his story, though it is offered as fiction, is one that challenges the conscience of the world. Wessel Ebersohn, who lives in South Africa himself and knows it at first hand, writes the story of how a boy became a man against the grim background of Sophiatown and Cato Manor. The novel opens, though, on the night when Sam Bhengu received the beating-up that fatally injured him. He survived, in a semi-paralysed condition and receiving only derisory medical attention, for some days; and we follow Sam's wandering mind through those last days, with the terrible present alternating with scenes from his past, from early childhood onward: Sam with his parents, whom he was soon to lose; Sam with the matriarchal Mama Mabaso, who was to become all that he had of family; Sam being bossed and loved by his sister Winifred; the forced removal of all Sophiatown's population, and the ensuing and bloody riot in which Winifred was killed; the beginnings of Sam's involvement in serious political action. And thus, gradually, the past catches up with the present, and we come to Sam's arrest (for the ninth time), the softening-up, the solitary confinement, the savage torture, some of it diabolical. The mood of the book is by no means wholly grim. There are delightful incursions into childhood, and amusing insights into the difficulties of political action. Then there's the great set-piece of the riot at Sophiatown. But the scenes at Security HQ and in the prison hospital are the heart of the novel. Even here, though, Mr Ebersohn does not write polemically: the most prejudiced of the Security men are still human beings, variously characterised, and the angry tension and uneasy boredom of life at HQ is rendered with fearful credibility. A brave and poignant novel, and - inevitably - highly controversial one. inventory #613. Nº de ref. del artículo: z613

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