Imatge de l'autor

Alex La Guma (1925–1985)

Autor/a de A Walk in the Night and Other Stories

13+ obres 336 Membres 3 Ressenyes 2 preferits

Sobre l'autor

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, La Guma was a short story writer and novelist. After receiving a high school education, he tried his hand at a wide range of odd jobs before becoming a journalist. The son of James La Guma, a one-time president of the South African Coloured People's Congress, he was mostra'n més imprisoned for his antiapartheid struggles and accused in the notorious treason trials involving Nelson Mandela. After another imprisonment, he was forced to migrate to England in 1966. La Guma often focuses on his personal experience as a black man and his deep opposition to the South African regime. A Walk in the Night (1962), which is set in the slums of Cape Town, pictures the losing struggle to retain fundamental humanity in the face of racial oppression. And a Threefold Cord (1964) is also based on life in the ghetto, while The Stone Country (1967) is inspired by La Guma's own imprisonment. La Guma's early political activism is reflected in the novel In the Fog of the Season's End (1972), which is based on organizing opposition to apartheid. In his fictional worlds, La Guma mirrors the realities of nonwhites in South Africa. Crime and brutality erupt as people keenly aware of their powerlessness confront intolerable situations. There is little sentimentality in his work, although it sometimes contains love and even comedic elements. His writing is concrete and vivid, whether depicting a prison, a shantytown, white suburbs, or a Bantu homeland, as in the novel Time of the Butcherbird (1979). Living in exile since 1966, La Guma was appointed Officer of the Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 1984. Less than a year later, in 1985, he died in London. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys

Inclou aquests noms: Alex La Guma, Alex La Guma, Alex La Guma

Obres de Alex La Guma

Obres associades

The Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011) — Col·laborador — 93 exemplars
An African Quilt: 24 Modern African Stories (2012) — Col·laborador — 17 exemplars

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Ressenyes

Ennek a könyvnek az is lehetett volna a címe, hogy A mozgalmár egy napja. La Guma az apartheid-rendszer felkeményedésének idején kíséri el hősét Johannesburg utcáin, miközben az a fehér kormány aláaknázásán dolgozik, mellesleg pedig rövid portrékat mellékel mindazokról, akik a rendszer áldozatai – akár tisztában vannak e ténnyel, akár nem. A szöveg hangulata folyamatosan ingadozik az összeesküvői munka tárgyszerű (helyenként naturalista) ábrázolása, valamint a fehér uralom bűneinek didaktikus taglalása között, a mozgalmárkodást olyan állapotként mutatva be, amiben sajátos módon elegyedik a lebukástól és a kínzásoktól való elemi félelem, valamit az olyan apró-cseprő hétköznapi gondok, hogy akkor most kinél aludjunk, és kit küldjünk el az illegális nyomtatványokért. Megrázó és tanulságos (akár jövendő mozgalmároknak is), de ezen jellemzőket korlátok közé szorítja a tény, hogy a benne szereplő fehérek sosem tudnak komplexebbek lenni, mint Hófehérke gonosz mostohája*. El tudom persze képzelni, hogy ez a koncepció része: olyan Dél-Afrika-kép megalkotása, ahol a fehérek kvázi idegenek, igazi űrlények, akik valamiért mégis azt hiszik, hogy övék a csehó – ám nem éreztem benne a tudatosságot. Aminél fogva folyton az járt a fejemben, hogy: „Te jó ég, Graham Greene mekkora sztorit tudott volna írni ebből az egészből!” Ami nyilván nem jó jel.

* Illetőleg akad e regényben egy szimpatizáns orvos, aki marha jó fej, de róla nem tudtam eldönteni, melyik etnikai csoporthoz tartozik. Külső jellemzői között a „kis sárga ember” nem igazított el e tekintetben. Valahogy nem tűnt kínainak.
… (més)
 
Marcat
Kuszma | Jul 2, 2022 |
This was La Guma's second major work of fiction, written while he was under house-arrest in South Africa, but published abroad (in East Germany) because any reproduction or distribution of his writings within South Africa was banned.

While A walk in the night was set in the urban jungle of District Six, this time we move to a shanty town on the outer fringes of Cape Town, where people with no legal right to be there but with no chance of getting work anywhere else are surviving on the absolute minimum in houses they have built themselves out of whatever materials they could scrounge or salvage. Hassled by the police, fighting a losing battle against poverty and the Cape Town rainy season, they are on the very limit of survival — seen by white motorists from the main road the settlement hardly seems to exist at all — but they still manage to have a sense of community and to help each other occasionally. It's immaterial whether that's because they know Ecclesiastes Chapter 4 better than we do (as the title implies), or because they've heard a trade union activist talking on a job they were on, or just because they are human beings in a tight spot. La Guma wants us to see that people do ultimately have great collective strength, even in weakness, and even when they aren't in a position to use that strength just now.

As Lola said in her review, this is exceptionally fine writing, but it's not fine writing that's jumping up and down shouting "look at me", it's there to do a serious job of work and make us look at all the details of the way the people in the shanty town live and show us what those details should be telling us about the world we live in. It's about South Africa in the 1960s, but it's just as much about poverty anywhere, in any time.

Why does hardly anyone seem to know about this book? It should be on every syllabus. Including Domestic Science and Metalwork.
… (més)
 
Marcat
thorold | May 19, 2020 |
This collection contains the novella "A walk in the night" from 1962, together with six short stories from the mid-1960s. It's full-on sixties modernist writing, with echoes of people like Joyce and Steinbeck, very urban and masculine, very direct in its descriptions of violence and squalor (but bizarrely prudish about swearwords). Everything is there to show us how racism perverts and destroys social relations in the Cape Town urban jungle: the white cop Raalte in "A walk in the night" who has been completely corrupted by the power his racial "superiority" gives him and has lost all moral compass; the coloured man Mikey who is so embittered by the hatred he's exposed to that he finds he has killed an inoffensive, weak elderly white man just because he happened to cross his path; the boxer Kenny in "The Gladiators" who "just miss being white" and whose fight with the unapologetically black boxer, The Panther, turns into an allegory of racial hatred — when they meet on equal terms in the ring, Kenny loses, because the force of his contempt just isn't as strong as the force of the black man's defence of his own integrity.

Forceful, stylish but very angry writing. Excellent.
… (més)
 
Marcat
thorold | May 11, 2020 |

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Obres
13
També de
2
Membres
336
Popularitat
#70,811
Valoració
½ 3.7
Ressenyes
3
ISBN
33
Llengües
5
Preferit
2

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