Restricted Vision Acute Subtlety and by Writing the Kinds of Books She Does Slips the Boundaries Which Have Frequently Confined South African Writing
lleke Boehmer has written two Fiction sharply focused novels: each E have heroines who are charac terised by passivity, their failure to see, and to act, beyond the confines of their white South African lives. Boehmer explores her characters with often Restricted Vision acute subtlety and by writing the kinds of books she does slips the boundaries which have frequently confined South African writing. They are richly lay ered texts, alert to the many resonances SARAH NUTTALL traces continuities between Elleke Boehmer's of Boehmer’s subject, and they con front some of the challenges of writing two novels which explore the limits of white women's lives in about ‘restricted vision’. I will talk about her new book, An Immaculate South Africa. Boehmer raises the question: is innocence simply F ig u r e , after looking at her first, Screens Against the Sky. a lack of knowledge or can it be implicated in guilt Annemarie, the narrator in Boehmer’s first novel, lives in her own little white South African world. mother and daughter, the way they the way for new writing more auda ties, Boehmer’s own story moves Growing up in a suburb of a segregated knock against each other, rather than cious and flamboyant, as Boehmer has beyond them. She offers her text as town in South Africa, she reads the warmly bond. Once they have moved said, in its concerns. only one reading, signalling the limits time away — and writes in her journal. to a flat in another town, they sit and Boehmer hints at literary ‘enclo of her own vision by refusing to name, She is bound up with, but also bound in read together in an a-historical vacuum.
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