karoo boy reviews

A sunburst of a novel, Blacklaws' coming-of-age story, set in 1970s South Africa, sparkles with a small boy's wonderment. Race, sex, Afrikaner slang, the hot Karoo desert, the surf of Cape Town: all are absorbed as if for the very first time in the book's exquisite, inventive language. Vanity Fair, New York.

[Karoo Boy]'s a riotous vision of 1976 Cape Town, South Africa – Blacklaws jumbles child's-eye impressions and invented language, mixing in Afrikaans and Xhosa to dazzling effect. /[His] bittersweet novel recalls Alexandra Fuller's memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, while also conjuring up the precocious visions of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. In this case, too, the small things have a magical glow: the orange coral seeds Douglas fingers in his pockets, the sun filtering through Marika's skirt, the frogs and lizards along the roadside — even while the larger world looms, ready to erupt in violence at any turn. Anderson Tepper, Village Voice, New York

South Africa's writers … have turned this stark [Karoo] world of stone and thorny silences into a backdrop for tales of abandonment, solitary anguish and racism's insistent cruelties. / To their Karoo lineage of inner exiles we can now add 14-year-old Douglas Thomas, narrator of Troy Blacklaws' sensual, cinematic first novel. / A backwater bildungsroman, Karoo Boy captures memorably the casual brutalities of small-town South African life: Blacklaws renders keenly the atmospherics of 1970's South Africa - the hereditary hostilities, the epidemic suspicions. Rob Nixon, New York Times Book Review

A coming-of-age novel, Karoo Boy is a long poem on mourning and exile, loss and love. … a book of powerful sensuality, a bit like a color photograph of South Africa …  A bit in the manner of Scott Fitzgerald, to whom he pays homage, Troy Blacklaws mixes the senses, such that one hears colors, and sees sounds. Emilie Grangeray, Le Monde

Troy Blacklaws manages to reconstitute as much the enchantment of moments of happiness, in pages of superb sensuality, as the violence of South African society.  Poetic, burning, his novel, written in exile, is a declaration of love for his country, highlighted by the hope to see it transform itself.  Paris Match

His first novel has just appeared in France, and it is a shock…  A story of mourning… bare bones writing, powerfully evocative… until the final liberation, Karoo Boy hits us with both barrels. / To have a twin is as if to be moored to another soul. We will long be moored to this book. Stéphane Guibourgé, Le Figaro magazine

The novel is written in a series of fragmentary interludes that carry a real intensity. There are scenes of terrible violence and injustice which never feel melodramatic or overplayed. /Blacklaws has said that he wrote Karoo Boy as an answer to the bleak vision of South Africa in JM Coetzee's Disgrace, and … the novel ends with a sense of hope for Douglas and his country. / In [Karoo Boy] real intimacy between blacks and whites occurs beneath the harsh surface of apartheid … Margaret Stead, Guardian, London

Karoo Boy - a master stroke - a book at once carnal and ravaged, between Camus and Coetzee …  two harmonies, two lost tragedies. / Flamboyant as a brush fire, melding sensuality and social chronicle - a remarkable broad view of a township - Karoo Boy is a coming-of-age novel in a world where hell and paradise, death and happiness connect savagely. Lire, France

[Troy Blacklaws'] Karoo town has the authentic feel of countless one-café settlements along the road from Cape Town to Johannesburg. … his may, in time, turn out to be the voice we have been expecting from his generation. Andrew van der Vlies, TLS, London

With his poetic style … that makes you smell Muizenberg's beach and feel the sun blasting down on the Karoo, Blacklaws colour[s] in Coetzee's bleak landscape and add[s] hope to the South African story.

Elizma Nolte, South Africa Times, London

The descriptions are as forceful as they are colorful. Douglas is more observant than introspective. He has frequent flashbacks, but he does not dwell on his misfortune. What sustains him is a friendship with a black petroljockey named Moses, and a crush on a schoolgirl named Marika. … his romances …are alternately innocent and erotic. "Marika kisses me on the cheek. My heart flies a boomerang loop around the windmill."  Later, "Marika tugs her dress over her head and hangs it in the thorny mimosa."

San Francisco Chronicle

Readers familiar with South African idiom will feel right at home in this first-person, present-tense story of a white boy's coming-of-age at the height of apartheid in the 1970s. But even those who don't know the meaning of kaffirboetie, tackies, and hamba will recognize the aching personal truth and political horror. / The story is in the details in this first novel: the exquisite sense of place, the tender intimacy, and the casual cruelty … Booklist, USA

His writing conveys a real longing and love for South Africa ... Sunday Times, South Africa

The friends Douglas discovers are books in themselves. Even the dog, Chaka, is a character in its own right. Troy Blacklaws is a fine writer, and a find. Jane Raphaely, O Magazine, South Africa

Karoo Boy is beautifully written and hauntingly evocative, A South African version of The Catcher in the Rye … Caroline Hurry, Sunday Independent, South Africa

It is not often that a book demands to be devoured with gusto as the plot ebbs and flows through effortless prose … Taralyn Bro, Daily Dispatch, East London, South Africa

His language is as rich as the sea smell which is lodged in Douglas' being, and his understanding of the universal loneliness often felt by teenagers is raw and tender. Mercury, Durban, South Africa

Karoo Boy is an ambitious novel, in the sense that it tackles the really big themes that even angels (and definitely first-time novelists) approach with cautious tread: living in apartheid South Africa, growing up to consciousness, love and the loss of it, guilt and death. And yet Troy Blacklaws manages to tame these wild things, and bring them to rest in a compact novel, with a handful of well-drawn characters, surrounded by the vast impersonal canvas of the Karoo.He is sensitive to the minutiae that make up a life, and he describes these in spare prose that paradoxically becomes lyrical in the repetition of the rhymes: "I paddle out through the ice-tea surf. The rising sun glints in the empty windows of the weekend train to Cape Town. I stand on a borrowed board. No flicks or tricks. The wave barrels. For a moment, I glide. Then the wave tumbles me. I fight it instead of going with it. Have I forgotten everything? I even forgot to dogleash the board to my foot. As I surface I hear the crack of the board on the rock. I wade up out of the water, feeling ashamed." metaphortracker

Karoo Boy leaves the reader with a vision of South Africa that glows with colour and images – hot, arid landscapes of nothingness, cruising sharks, yellow-toothed baboons, dead things in the desert, African ritual and language, how easily and often and painfully things die, the unbelievable inhuman cruelty of some whites against blacks. Carly Nugent

Karoo Boy is a book about growing up - a Bildungsroman that recalls Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye with its sinewy language and the imaginative force of its images. ... Blacklaws' book is austerely written, with never a wasted word or a jarring image. Blacklaws creates the wide dusty world of the Karoo in a few chosen words and takes us with him on the journey to manhood in the arid wastes of Sharpvilled South Africa. Geoffrey Roberts