Mark Behr
Behr is another writer like my Bangladesh entry, Monica Ali, who is a bit hard to pin to one country. Behr was born on a farm family in Tanzania back when it was still known as Tanganyika. After the nationalisation of white-owned farms in 1964, his family emigrated to South Africa. He did most of his schooling there then served in the Angolan War, and lives now in the United States. His books deal largely with South Africa – his first was even written in Afrikaans – and since I don't have any other South African writers in my wheelhouse, I'll count this Tanzania-born, USA-residing author as my South Africa entry, for now at least.
I read this book quite some time ago and didn't really remember much about it, certainly not the title or the author or anything helpful like that. Initially I thought it might be by South Africa's literary star, J.M. Coetzee. I had to go through descriptions of all of his books before determining that, no, it wasn't him. I was a bit stumped and had to do quite a bit of Internet sleuthing with various combinations of the only things I remembered about the book: "South Africa", "boarding school", "LGBT theme", before eventually teasing the title out of the web.
The other thing that I do remember taking away from this book is how well white South Africans lived in the 1970s when the book was set: teachers driving Volvos, students listening to Bang & Olufsen stereos in the school's music room, that kind of stuff. I guess that's what you get when a small group oppresses and exploits everyone else. I'm looking forward to reading a book set in the period since then to see how much has changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment