Huilboek

The narrator, a writer who left South Africa with his family for New Zealand, struggles to feel at home there. He digs a new garden, plants trees and nurses a damaged knee, and to keep from falling back into old habits he turns to his past. In short leaps the autobiographical novella moves between a boyhood in Benoni in the 1960s, the chaotic 1990s of his drug addiction, and life abroad. As a tearful child, he was given a notebook by his mother in which to mark a cross each time he wanted to cry. He circles a harsh father who beat him and seemed not to like him, and Outa Toon, the family's gardener, always present in memory yet never quite within reach. Writing in Afrikaans from far away becomes its own kind of longing.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

160 pages in the original

Genres

Autofiction, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

New Zealand, South Africa, 1960s

First published

2016 by Human & Rousseau

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9780798172493 (original)