While
the subject matter may be uncomfortable, the company of this indomitable woman
makes the journey with her an uplifting one. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer,
courtesy of The Witness)
Published when the author was 95 years old,
Cul-de-Sac (translated by Michiel
Heyns) is an extraordinary memoir, a lovely book of great humanity. Elsa
Joubert is best known for her novel, The
Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, written at the height of apartheid in 1980.
It did a great deal to open people’s eyes to the sheer brutality of the system.
However, she began her writing career as a travel writer, and now, as she
explains on the first page of Cul-de-Sac,
“the only road that can be ventured upon with a minimum of anxiety is the road
to the past”.
The book covers the years following the
death of Joubert’s husband and her move to a retirement home in Cape Town. Old
age, with its diminishing abilities and horizons, is something that will face
everyone, unless death intervenes. As has often been said, it is not for
sissies, and Joubert is no sissy. She allows her present to stir memories of
her past, her childhood, her parents, her back-seat squabbles with her brother
on long car journeys and her energetic prime, now vanished.
Inevitably, some of what Joubert writes is
hard to read. There are deaths, of old friends and newer acquaintances as the
population of her retirement home shifts. But there is also humour which
leavens what could be a difficult subject. When Joubert is forced to use a
walker, she names it StomJapie, imbues it with a personality and has
conversations with it.
There is a searing honesty, unsurprising in
the author of Poppie Nongena, about
her identity as an Afrikaner. She still thinks of herself as an Afrikaans
language patriot, someone for whom the language of her childhood is incredibly
precious and which to a great extent defines her. But she comes to feel, as,
reluctantly at first, she makes connections with others who live in her
retirement home, that the time has come to let go of group thinking and
identity and, as she puts it “cultivate the little plot of ground you have been
granted, and all else will follow.”
While the subject matter may be
uncomfortable, the company of this indomitable woman makes the journey with her
an uplifting one.
Cul
de Sac is published by Tafelberg. ISBN
978-0-624-08779-3 - Margaret von Klemperer
Posts
