My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian Malan
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(Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: March 2000
- 349pp
- Sales Rank: 74,030
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 2000
- Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
- Format: Paperback, 349pp
- Sales Rank: 74,030
- ISBN-13: 9780802136848
- ISBN: 0802136842
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor's Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of uneasy exile. Armed with new insight and clarity, Malan explores apartheid's legacy of hatred and suffering, bearing witness to the extensive physical and emotional damage it has caused to generations of South Africans on both sides of the color line. Plumbing the darkest recesses of the white and black South African psyches, Malan ultimately finds his way toward the light of redemption and healing. My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing book — beautiful, horrifying, profound, and impossible to put down.
Annotation
"The remorseless exercise of a reporter's anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing." -- John le Carre
Publishers Weekly
Written with smoldering moral outrage, this odyssey offers a firsthand glimpse of South African apartheid and its practitioners' rationalizations. The author grew up in a white Johannesburg suburb; his great-uncle Daniel Malan was the first Afrikaner nationalist prime minister and an architect of today's racist system. The author, a youthful leftist, then a crime reporter, left his homeland in 1977 to become a Los Angeles rock 'n' roll critic, returning to South Africa in 1985. His blistering book combines autobiography, reportage, coming to terms with his ancestral roots and loosely-stitched-together tales of murder and violence committed predominantly by whites. He claims that, for fear of being branded racists, white liberals avoid discussing certain topics, such as atrocities committed by blacks in the name of the anti-apartheid struggle and blacks' involvement in animistic religions. He sees no ready solutions in the fight to change an oppressive system. Author tour. (Jan.)
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Read an excerpt, any excerpt, then read the bookby Anonymous
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January 30, 2001: 6 Stars. When I read this I'd heard nothing of this book, or author, so maybe we're starting from the same place, hey? But reading this was the most startling, soul searching, eye-opening, profound, beautiful, completely shattering experience. I will never love a book like this one. I won't say more, just read it. The last pages of this book are the most beautiful I have ever read. There's something startling about this man's honesty and clarity of perception.
An eye-openerby Anonymous
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January 11, 2001: This book makes racial tensions in the American South seem quite mild. Malan's accounts of South Africa made my stomach turn, but this book was so interesting that I could barely put it down. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to broaden their view of the world.
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