conversationswithkara's Reviews (313)

reading this as a south african makes me feel the same way i always do whenever i consume south african art: how the hell does someone who’s not south african even begin to understand what’s going on? with all the afrikaans words, references to loadshedding & day zero, the TRC, the strained conversations between races, i would be so incredibly lost. sure, i guess you could look those things up, but south africa as a country feels like the opposite of a neutral background on which a story plays out. it’s a very loaded atmosphere that you’re sitting with throughout the novel and that the characters are interacting with and that’s what made me keep turning the pages. galgut is so deserving of every inch of praise this book has received. i don’t know how a person can sit down and write this