Agaat Paperback – April 27, 2010

Be patient reading this book. It is a journey, that cannot be rushed.A beautiful treatise: to farming; the harms of appartheid; love in unloving circumstances; dying in profoundly good care. Beautifully written.

This novel was slow to start with and it took me a while to figure out that all the narrators were the same person at different times, but it got more interesting as I continued, and by the end I was gripped. The book as a whole shows you how the social constructs of race distort both people and their relationships in countries like South Africa and the United States where there is a history, and not so long ago, of racial oppression. It shows you through the realistic detail of two women's lives, not through statistics or speeches.

I started reading this book on my Kindle and got 1/4th the way through it and went back to begin reading again, this is not a habit. The writing was so powerful that I wanted to read this book over and over again, the emotions so raw and the tale so amazing. I loved this book for all the sadness in the world it represented and it is an amazing read.

Very affordable book, and very fast shipping!

At the beginning of this epic novel, seventy-year-old Milla de Wet is confined to her bed. Once the strong and competent owner of a successful farm inherited from her mother, Milla suffers from A.L.S. and now is left with only the ability to blink her eyes and, after a while, not even that. Milla is entirely dependent on the ministrations of Agaat, her devoted house servant, who wordlessly promises Milla "the best-managed death in history." It is 1996 in South Africa, just two years after the demise of apartheid.From this confined vantage point, Milla narrates her adult life story, beginning with her troubled marriage to the dashing, if agriculturally-challenged, Jak de Wet in 1947. Soon after she and Jak settle on her farm, Milla decides to take in and raise the abused young daughter of a farm laborer, renaming the girl Agaat. Long unable to have a child of her own, Milla eventually gives birth to a son named Jakkie, marginalizing Agaat's position in the family. Over time, Milla and Agaat develop a complex co-dependency, as do Jakkie and Agaat, while Jak becomes jealous of Agaat's hold over both his wife and his son. Agaat forms the center of a decades-long, multi-dimensional game of tug-o-war: "a pivot she was, a kingpin, you'd felt for a while now how the parts gyrated around her, faster and faster, even though she was the least."Agaat is about many things, including marriage, parenting, friendship, sickness, and death. Politically-minded readers will find plenty of support for interpreting the novel as an allegory for apartheid, while those with more domestic interests will appreciate the details on embroidery, ecologically-sensitive farming practices, and home-based nursing procedures. Perhaps Agaat's most important lesson concerns the importance of communication to achieving lasting change. The best education and carefully constructed systems cannot bridge the gap between master and servant, between white and black. Rather, true understanding is possible only after years of empathetic communication. As Milla nears death, she and Agaat have finally approached this kind of understanding: "[The doctor's] face looms above mine. He looks at my eyes as if they were the eyes of an octopus, as if he's not quite sure where an octopus's eyes are located, as if he doesn't know what an octopus sees. He shines a little light into my face, he swings it from side to side. I look at him hard, but seeing, he cannot see. Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says. [The doctor] stands aside. He shakes his head. Agaat's face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don't stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you're a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out. A small flicker ripples across Agtaat's face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable. She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she's feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now. I close my eyes. He must think she's crazy. Again the fingers snapping in front of my face. She's conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she's just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything's in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways."Milla's disease has the potential to reduce this nearly 600-page novel into an exercise in claustrophobia, but, instead, Van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency. Milla's second-person narration is liberally broken up by her diary entries, which Agaat has decided to read to Milla during her last days, and by italicized paragraphs of Milla's stream-of-consciousness musings. Van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist, and her considerable poetic abilities are on display throughout the novel. Likewise, Michiel Heyns's masterful work yields an English translation with all the elegant power of the original language. These various elements come together in Agaat to create an unforgettable reading experience that transcends the lives of its four primary characters to implicate the broader world.

A paralyzed Afrikaner woman, Milla, stricken with ALS that leaves her not only mute, but entirely dependent on her Black caretaker, Agaat. She reminisces about her life, her abusive marriage, and the son she loves. In the hands of a lesser writer Marlene van Niekerk's second novel, "Agaat." would surely have descended into saccharine melodrama. Instead, with poetic prose and a perfectly pitched narrative voice, Niekerk weaves a complex intimacy between these two women, whose lives have been inseparably bound by knots so intricate they cannot even be undone by death. Agaat's attention, at times loving and others sadistic, speaks volumes, and it is in these scenes where "Agaat" most sings, enveloped in an achingly beautiful claustrophobia so finely rendered, I found myself catching my breath.In each chapter Milla's flashes back to her abusive marriage to her cover boy husband Jak. This second person narrative reveals much of the inner workings and history her and Agaat's relationship on the family farm and their competition for the affections of her only son. At first interesting, overtime these sections grew a bit tiresome, the style overly authorial and the political allegory of Apartheid South Africa and power dynamics a bit too heavy handed. Despite these shortcomings, the relationship at the core of this story is so profoundly powerful that it easily overcomes such hindrances, offering a pair of characters in a dynamic relationship of master and servant that readers will not soon forget.

Loved it.

Dieses Buch kann ich jedem empfehlen, der sich fuer Entwicklungen in Afrika - ganz besonders Frauenprobleme - interessiert. Daneben ist der Schreibstil ein vergnuegen.