Dead Woman Talking
A review by Gaiutra Bahadur
Near the end of this debut novel, the daughter of a rape victim sits in a circle of gangsters smoking crystal meth in the Cape Flats, a place freighted with the injustices of South African history. In real life, its slums, sequestered between city and sea on the outskirts of Cape Town, rose up to house many of the 60,000 people kicked out of District Six when the apartheid regime claimed their central-city neighborhood exclusively for whites in 1966. The daughter, Imogen, received in the housing projects as a "white woman with a clipboard," is there for research, and sitting next to her on a folding chair, cleaning a gun, is her mother's rapist and murderer. She doesn't know this. The narrator, who does, says: "What if he drew that gun he was cleaning and put it to her head, holding it like some American gangsta rap star? Not even our gangs can be original." Her observation could serve as a commentary on the novel itself. The narrator is the dead woman Sarah, stuck in a...
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