|
The strikingly cross-cultural blurbs on the jacket cover of EMPIRE SETTINGS --- from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Publishers Weekly --- offer a good indication of the political scope of David Schmahmann's debut novel about a forbidden love affair between a privileged young white man and a young bi-racial woman in South Africa under apartheid. But be not wary. This Romeo-and-Juliet take on things is neither a soggy romance boasting an appallingly naive understanding of apartheid nor a puppet plotline, thinly veiling a tedious, politically correct didacticism. Rather, in EMPIRE SETTINGS, Schmahmann makes the political compellingly personal, and the personal powerfully, inextricably political.
The Divins are a well-off, liberal, Jewish family, opposed to the apartheid regime under which they live in Durban, South Africa --- Helga, the mother, even runs for Parliament on the anti-apartheid ticket, becoming a regular radical celebrity in the process. But when 17 year-old Danny falls in love with Santi, the "coloured" (mixed-race) daughter of a black servant, his parents are thrown into a crisis of philosophy vs. parental concern. Ultimately, Danny's father forces him to end the relationship with Santi. And despite having promised Santi that they would find a way to work things out, after a year of mandatory army services, Danny loses contact with her all together.
Sick of witnessing the hateful, divisive politics of South Africa destroy his relationship with Santi and his family --- his sister Bridget is jailed on a spurious charge of consorting with a black man; his father kills himself --- Danny decides he "simply [can't] take it anymore." He leaves Durban and moves to Boston. On his first day there he meets a free-spirited but caring young woman named Tesseba who offers to marry him so that he may secure American citizenship. He accepts, and twenty years later they are still married, happy, but not completely so, as not a day passes that Danny's thoughts do not turn to his long lost love.
In a poignant ironic twist, Helga --- whose once progressive politics were imitated by Danny, causing him to fall for and lose Santi, and then leave Durban --- persuades her son to return to South Africa, now post-apartheid, in order to illegally smuggle out the family money, a trip that ultimately leads Danny back to Santi. It is in this new, still struggling, still fragmented South Africa that Danny finally discovers where, and with whom, his home really is.
Opting against the omniscient or even a single first-person narrator in favor of multiple first-person accounts, Schmahmann has Danny, Helga, Bridget, Baptie (the Divin's long-time servant) and Santi each tell their own story in sequential chapters alternating between the present and 20 years back. There are, of course, several sides to the same stories and the occasional irony of one character knowing things the other(s) didn't --- the fact that Bridget and Baptie were the ones to tip off the father to Danny's affair with Santi, while Danny assumed it was another servant who had once seen them together, for example. These contradictions add a multilayered complexity to the Divins's difficulties living in and then out of South Africa and, perhaps more profoundly, to our entire notion of apartheid.
At the same time, Helga, Bridget, Baptie and Santi's stories sometimes impede Danny's --- and make no mistake, EMPIRE SETTINGS is Danny's story. Though their personal narratives intersect with his, they do so only tangentially, using Danny's tale of lost love as a platform from which to jump into their own stories of loss, love, regret, resentment, and sometimes even fond remembrances of South Africa --- Helga, for instance, talks much about her radical days, juxtaposing them to her now loveless second marriage to a money-hungry racist. But the suggestion here is not that the women's voices aren't sensitively rendered or don't ring true or that their stories don't profoundly illuminate the heinousness of apartheid. Their narratives are all these things, in fact each woman alone could have a book devoted to her life and times --- that's the criticism. The four other narratives often overpower Danny's. The central focus of EMPIRE SETTINGS is Danny Divin's battle with the poisonous past and his journey toward epiphany. It is his personal dramas --- Santi, the money smuggling scheme --- that lend the book tension and suspense. Yet, he exists only as a point of reference throughout the entire middle section of the book. By the time we return to Danny's story (he the first and the last chapters), our interest in the resolution to his dramas has waned and the climax winds up feeling a little anti-climactic.
Still, EMPIRE SETTINGS is a deftly told novel of great emotional depth and political sweep. By refracting one 20-year span through five different mediums, Schmahmann often perfectly captures the maddening, debilitating powerlessness of life under apartheid and the disenfranchised, guilt-ridden, loneliness of life post-apartheid. EMPIRE SETTINGS is an ambitious feat, at which Schmahmann admirably succeeds.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Brennan
--- Reviewed by Sarah Brennan
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
