Breathing Space is a slightly soap-operaish account of a group of twenty-to-thirtysomething boho to yuppie Cape Afrikaners coming to terms with their gonads and the political turmoil of South Africa from 1985 to 1995.
The plot has a number of twists as the 10 protagonists group and regroup at a series of lush and usually perfectly styled beach houses near Cape Town. A child drowns, a marriage breaks up, a husband turns out gay, a lover is blown up presumably by a police letter bomb, an ex-husband commits suicide, a heroine has a mastectomy but life goes on as inexorably as South Africans march to democracy. State repression and political upheaval in South Africa serve mainly as a backdrop to the action and as the occasion for some spirited discussion about the possibilities of a normal life even for comfortably off white people under apartheid. The sense of politics in this novel is atmospheric, not actual.
The prose is sprinkled liberally with crisp linen skirts and perfectly painted red lips and while one of the characters is down on her job as an editor of a glossy woman's magazine (not relevant enough in those troubled times), Breathing Space has the airy style of serialisation. Many of its vignettes are vividly realised, and the dialogue is fast-paced and pointed. It may make you laugh. It may make you cry. If you know the fairest Cape at all, it may make you nostalgic. It captures something of the surreal paradise white South-Africans enjoyed under apartheid and while it makes repeated gestures to the ironies and anxieties this produced, it never really explores them.--Neville Hoad
Genre: General Fiction
The plot has a number of twists as the 10 protagonists group and regroup at a series of lush and usually perfectly styled beach houses near Cape Town. A child drowns, a marriage breaks up, a husband turns out gay, a lover is blown up presumably by a police letter bomb, an ex-husband commits suicide, a heroine has a mastectomy but life goes on as inexorably as South Africans march to democracy. State repression and political upheaval in South Africa serve mainly as a backdrop to the action and as the occasion for some spirited discussion about the possibilities of a normal life even for comfortably off white people under apartheid. The sense of politics in this novel is atmospheric, not actual.
The prose is sprinkled liberally with crisp linen skirts and perfectly painted red lips and while one of the characters is down on her job as an editor of a glossy woman's magazine (not relevant enough in those troubled times), Breathing Space has the airy style of serialisation. Many of its vignettes are vividly realised, and the dialogue is fast-paced and pointed. It may make you laugh. It may make you cry. If you know the fairest Cape at all, it may make you nostalgic. It captures something of the surreal paradise white South-Africans enjoyed under apartheid and while it makes repeated gestures to the ironies and anxieties this produced, it never really explores them.--Neville Hoad
Genre: General Fiction
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Used availability for Marita van der Vyver's Breathing Space