Word: velde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...business end of the economic nutcracker, has been dreaming of a freer, easier life in South Africa. Novelist Lessing, who was reared there, has bad news about their dreamland. Her story describes the spiritual defeat of a misfit couple in their war with the harsh realities of the veld. Few writers have succeeded so well in getting its thorny unkindness and its head-splitting heat down on paper, and few have written more devastatingly about the dream of living an easy European life against the harsh African grain...
Novelist Lessing's Turners were not destined to be happy in the first place. Dick Turner had married Mary because he was lonely. She married him because she was desperate to be married. Dick was a weak, impractical character slowly being licked by his farm on the veld, Mary an ingrained spinster with no conception of the give & take that marriage demands. Everything they owned had gone into the farm, and the farm had become their prison...
...story follows the fortunes of two English families living on the Zulu veld in South Africa. The Elliots had fled scandal in England; Mrs. Ashburn had brought her family in abortive search of a fortune in cotton. They eke out a poor existence from the wilderness, contending with drought, fever, and the whims of the Zulus, Mrs. Ashburn even resorts to hatching python eggs for spare cash...
Through this story wanders Mrs. Ashburn's younger son, Danny, the maniac narrator, who lives half the time with the Zulus, sings when he is happy, and lies on his back on the veld and howls when he is sad. Danny is a somewhat disruptive influence; he ruins his sister's marriage, attempts to strangle his own son, and murders his brother out of jealously over the love of the Elliot's daughter...
...novel is best when it is describing the everyday life of the two transplanted families as they strive to maintain an English civilization of tea and tennis against the veld. Major Elliot pulls up the fever trees to build a formal park and garden around his house; Mrs. Ashburn holds a "musical evening" for the two families every Wednesday. In the portrayal of the subtle tensions and affections of their family life, the author shows fine perception...