Fiction Friday: “Poison Karoo”, a Chapter from Etienne van Heerden’s Forthcoming Novel
Etienne van Heerden’s next novel, to be published in March 2013, imagines a Karoo in which commercial hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has already begun – with devastating effects.
Van Heerden grew up in the Karoo and this landscape has become a defining feature of his writing, in such books as Haai Karoo, 30 Nights in Amsterdam, The Long Silence of Mario Salviati and Ancestral Voices.
Read “Poison Karoo”, a chapter from Van Heerden’s forthcoming novel, which has been translated by Isobel Dixon, and published on LitNet, in protest against the proposed fracking:
He is an old man, grey now and with eyes that grow bluer the longer he stares at the sea, longing for the woman he has never seen again, not since those years long ago. He lives alone, and sits on his stoep gazing out over the bay, with the yo-yo spooling to and from his finger. His house is small and square, turned to face north-east, with its back to Paternoster’s harshest winds. In front of the stoep the ground slopes away, and a path leads down through low bietoubos and loose pebbles to the big, rounded rocks strewn over the beach, and further to the fish market where they gut the snoek so that even from where he sits he can see the red and white flesh, and further still, to the wide stretch of sand the locals call Voorstrand.
As a boy, his one blind eye kept him from sport and only the yo-yo gave him the chance to use his hands’ innate agility and skill. He was bored by athletics and never crazy about rugby; he was too slow to see a ball hurtling towards him, and other children avoided him because his eye made him different.
Book details
- Haai Karoo by Etienne van Heerden
Book homepage
EAN: 9780624056157
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- 30 Nights in Amsterdam by Etienne van Heerden
EAN: 9780143528739
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- The Tempest Prognosticator by Isobel Dixon
Book homepage
EAN: 9781415201619
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Image courtesy The Witness
Apr
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