South Africa from 1968 – 2000 is revealed with all its cultural variety and internal stresses through the life story of Paul Sweetbread, an overweight Jewish boy who is an outsider to everyone. Neither a Boer nor an Englishman, he is also not really a Jew, either, since his family has never been observant, leaving him without any common roots that connect him to his Caucasian countrymen. A person with a photographic memory, he is, from the outset, a victim of his memory. The action intensifies when Paul, having finished school in 1987, joins the South African Defense Force, instead of going to college. In bordering Namibia, formerly a German colony, revolutionaries are taking advantage of the confusion over who is in control–South Africa, the United Nations, or whoever can grab power for himself–and Paul is sent there to fight.
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Published by Random House of South Africa, The Hero of Currie Road presents two kinds of stories. About half of them are about individual boys under Alan Paton’s care at the reformatory–sensitive and insightful tales about young teenagers at crossroads, often inspired to lead honorable lives but without the ability, always, to make the right choices. The second group of stories is about the white world, mostly adults, who reflect the ingrained attitudes of apartheid which have permanently limited the attitudes, aspirations, and achievements of the native majority population–and which Paton sometimes despairs of ever changing. All the stories from his first collection, Debbie Go Home (known as Tales from a Trouble Land in the US), from 1961, are included here, as are the stories from his 1975 collection, Knocking on the Door. Together they show Alan Paton in his most personal, most revealing moments, in which he frankly states opinions that he cannot make in his novels, a form for which “the inexorable rule is that you must put your story first, not your politics or religion or your anger about the Group Areas Act.” (To read the entire review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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