The Crying Bridge & Other Hallucinations
R340,00
By the winner of the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize, the Eugène Marais Prize, the Jan Rabie-Rapport Prize and the Ingrid Jonker Prize.
This collection of Dominique Botha’s shorter writing traverses the South African landscape and far beyond, her gaze wandering from the Highveld to Europe, from family archives to hotel bars, collecting all that is profound, excentric, humorous, mournful.
Blending fiction and autobiography, she presents origin stories, family histories and travels. She sits at the table of Breyten Breytenbach and VS Naipaul, and evokes the Free State farm where she grew up.
Poetic, rhythmic and ironic, these pieces – about time, identity and impermanence – is a search for meaning in the landscapes of memory by one of the country’s finest writers.
In her signature blend of fiction and autobiography, Dominique Botha’s essays form a vivid and ironic portrait of the South African landscape – geographically, psychologically and ethically. Her writing travels between the South African Highveld and Europe, between family archives and hotel bars, between humour and mourning. In ‘Que Sera, Sera’, she traces her ancestors through the Eastern Cape, looking at the country’s past and present – with a mixture of love and dismay – her family history a prism that refracts national memory and moral fatigue. In the self-mocking travel essay about language, desire and cultural inheritance, ‘Dancing in Other Words’, she wanders through European poetry festivals and pubs, traversing nostalgia and intellectual curiosity. In ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, history and myth fuse in the story of Uncle Boxer, the lost son of the Botha clan, whose life was marked equally by humour and tragedy. ‘To Live Is to Burn – Goodbye, Mr B’ is a personal requiem for Breyten Breytenbach – poet, dissident, a father to the lovechild Afrikaans. The piece moves between elegy, letter and essay, an intimate farewell to a great spirit and benchmark for Botha and for her language.
Botha’s style is dense, rhythmic and ironic: the tone shifts between elegy and satire, the sentences at once Biblical in their resonances and colloquial. Her descriptions are piercingly detailed, always with an undercurrent of theoretical introspection – about time, identity and impermanence. Whether it be a fine observation of a farmyard or a dry continental conversation about poetry and politics, each piece contains a voice infused with music and memory; a gaze simultaneously refined and compassionate, conscious of her heritage and the injustice from which it was forged. The Teary-eyed Bride and Other Hallucinations is a collection that offers an imagined journey through the landscapes of memory. At once intellectual, lyrical and often humorous, it searches for meaning in the shadows of decay – with language its only refuge. Her essays are written with a keen ear for sound and rhythm, and with a profound compassion for human fragility in the face of history.
