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Seventeen years old and faced with the most difficult situation of her young life. The only problem was that she had no idea what was actually wrong with her. Leukaemia? What is that? It’s cancer. ‘Am I going to die’, she asked.
This autobiographical account is a book about a young man’s journey from teen-hood to adulthood over a period of 2 years in the SANDF during the mid-70. The journey briefly traces the author’s initiation into the armed forces, the heartbreak of having the tenure in the army increased from one to two years, the hopes of a transfer closer to home and to the entertainment corps, cruelly dashed in a 24 hour change of mind, the hopelessness of a bleak National Service in a dead-end situation, and the sudden change of fortune for the better.
Many thousands of South African children are brought up by their grandmothers. This is one of the many manifestations of an unstable and distraught society, where the mother to child bond is too often broken, causing pain and a deep-seated sense of loss to both parties. Each Gogo-raised child’s story is different, but the general theme is the same: it deals with abandonment, with only qualified acceptance, but most of all with the simple absence of a real mother presence. The title of Vanessa Neo Mathope’s book – Orphaned, with Living Parents – tells it all. A monstrous imbalance has occurred, and the consequences run deep.
The famous story of Odysseus’s long journey home after the Trojan War, comprising some history and a whole lot of mythology, becomes the subject of this classical, yet essentially modern, novel.
The trials that King Odysseus must endure in strange lands and the lonely vigil of his Queen Penelope during his absence – all this will be familiar territory for many readers. What makes the novel so compelling are the psychological depths to which the author takes the reader in bringing his characters to life.
