Agaat

By Marlene Van Niekerk; Michiel Heyns (Translator)
(Tin House Books, Paperback, 9780982503096, 630pp.)

Publication Date: April 2010

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook

Categories: Literary

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the May 2010 Indie Notables

“[Agaat] is absolutely the most extraordinary book I've read in a long time. You must read it.”—Toni Morrison

"I was immediately mesmerized...Its beauty matches its depth and her achievement is as brilliant as it is haunting."—Toni Morrison, author of A Mercy

"Books like 'Agaat'...are the reason people read novels, and the reason authors write them."—The New York Times Book Review

"Clearly an allegory for race relations in South Africa, the novel succeeds on numerous other grounds: a rich evocation of family dynamics; a chilling portrait of bodily and mental decay; and a successful experiment in combining diaries, the second-person, and stream of consciousness."
--Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Few books I’ve read carry the visceral impact of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. . . it is stunning. . . . each dichotomy—love, sorrow, purity, shame, betrayal, fidelity, goodness, and brute political will—is equally and tragically real."—Mary Gaitskill, Bookforum

"This is a frank novel about a white South African landowner and her lifelong servant in a radically changing country." —#1 in the "Ten Titles to Pick Up Now" in O, The Oprah Magazine, August 2010

"Lyrical, yet potent prose..." —Kirkus Reviews

“Agaat is a tangle of language and rhyme, of wordplay and digressions. . . Both absorbing in its minutiae and provocative in its allegorical approach to apartheid, Agaat explodes the domestic sphere to encompass the world.”—Portland Mercury

"In addition to its vivid emotional resonance, Agaat is notable for the wealth of detail it imparts about rural life in South Africa before industrialized farming..."—Hemispheres Magazine

"[Agaat] is a family saga of mothers and daughters; a deconstruction of the Little-House-on-the-Veldt romanticism in which noble white settlers tame a hostile land; a massive, wrenching catalog of illness (physical and metaphysical); and a poetic exploration of control and the loss of control. It's a stylishly inventive book..."—The Rumpus

“Van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency.” —Publishing Perspectives

‘An exceptional book…tough and brutal, lyrical and sensitive’
--Henk Propper, Vrij Nederland

‘Fascinating and moving, this is, above all, a love story.’
--Kate Saunders, The Times (London)

‘A wonderful read for dark January nights.’
--Good Housekeeping Book of the Month

"The most important South African novel since Coetzee's Disgrace."
—The Times Literary Supplement

"A masterpiece has arrived"—South African Sunday Times

"Voluminous, detailed, momentous . . . It is an allegory of colonial exploitation, apartheid, and the precarious steps toward reconciliation"—Independent