Christopher Hope, My Mother's Lovers

Back to South Africa.

I've really enjoyed the books of Christopher Hope's that I've read. I haven't read a lot of them -- the most egregious gap being the seminal, A Separate Development -- but I've always been engaged and entertained. And they've compelled me to think. Less about the book (which I am too busy enjoying) than about the world around me, and the world he evokes.

My Mother's Lovers is no different. It is an acerbic, pointed portrayal not just of the "new" South Africa but of the role, place, and imagination of whites in Africa more generally. I was, for the most part, thinking as much as I was enjoying -- and loving both. Through a long stretch of the book, at least.

Somewhere about the middle of the book, though, it starts to teeter on a May-December romance which never quite breaks to the banal but threatens to. And the ending is almost Coetzeean in its easy acceptance (among the characters) of the reality of what, on the surface at least, is an almost absurd swapping out of identities.

I probably should, and have erased a number of sweeping characterizations about the book being "well worth the read" because such are trite and not really all that instructive. Tastes differ, after all; and I am sure -- to read the back cover blurbs is enough to confirm this -- that others will engage this book in a very different way than I did. But this is a book that I could fairly easily work up a conference paper around (or, at least with it and the issues raised at the paper's center), and be happy doing so: rereading and mulling it all over, that is.