Prize-winning author Achmat Dangor's remarkable "novella and three other stories" deal with the complexity of the personal histories that make up South African society. The novella, Kafka’s Curse, is "a dense surrealist fable," according to Mike Nicol. And Nadine Gordimer says: "This is a South Africa you haven’t encountered in fiction before. Immensely enjoyable." (Times Literary Supplement)

The main novella in Kafka's Curse explores the fate of Omar Khan - also known as Oscar Kahn - as he moves from township to suburb; the story ‘The Devil’ follows the diabolical career of an ordinary man; while ‘Lost’ portrays a writer losing and finding himself in a foreign city. And `Mama & Kid Freedom' takes a satirical look at power.

Kafka’s Curse was awarded the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction, and has been translated into French, German and Dutch.

More praise from the critics:

"Dangor writes lyrical, often beautiful prose that switches suddenly into blazing anger. He shows brilliantly the violent mixture of race, rage and gunfire that gives South Africa its crazy speed."

Christopher Hope, New York Times Book Review

"Its sensitive depiction of the ordinariness of our sorrows, of the banality of our hopes and sufferings, places it among the very finest novels produced in this century."

Sunday Times

"A formidable talent, a fierce, free voice." Cape Times

Achmat Dangor was born in Johannesburg in 1948. A member of the black cultural group Black Thoughts, he was banned for six years from 1973. He has taught South African literature and creative weriting at the City University of New York, and now works as a rural development specialist. Dangor is the author of collections of poetry, including Bulldozer (1983) and Private Voices(1992), a play Majiet (1986), the prizewinning novella and short-story collection Waiting for Leila (1982) and the novel The Z Town Trilogy (1990). He is based in Johannesburg but, as director of the Independent Development Trust, a South African Non-Governmental Organisation which works for upliftment and social transformation, he regularly commutes between Cape Town and Gauteng.

Imprint:

Kwela

Publisher:

NB Uitgewers / Publishers

ISBN:

9780795700545

Publication date:

January 1997

Length:

212mm

Width:

131mm

Thickness:

14mm

Weight:

220g

Edition:

1

Pages:

194

Readership:

General

First published:

8/27/1997

Audience:

General

Pages:

194

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. Lives and generations complexly interwoven, and language spiked densely with local dialect: a challenging, often exquisite tale of South Africa in transition. (Kirkus Reviews)