FW: Pynchon : A vengeance born of pain; The Other Side of Silence: A Novel, Andre Brink, Harcourt: 312 pp., $25

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

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A vengeance born of pain; The Other Side of Silence: A Novel, Andre Brink,
Harcourt: 312 pp., $25
Michael Harris

In 1904-07, the Hereros and other natives of German Southwest Africa
revolted against their colonial masters. The Germans brought in Gen. Lothar
von Trotha, who, as Thomas Pynchon dryly recounts in his novel "V.," had
demonstrated "a certain expertise in suppressing pigmented populations." Von
Trotha ordered the extermination of every Herero man, woman and child his
troops could find. He "is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000
people," Pynchon says. "This is only 1 percent of 6 million, but still
pretty good."

Such atrocities, which prefigure those of the Nazis and of the apartheid
regime South African writer Andre Brink spent much of his career protesting
against, are the background for Brink's latest novel, "The Other Side of
Silence." The heroine, Hanna X, arrives in the colony in 1902 aboard one of
the ships that supplied single German women to its sex-starved soldiers,
prospectors and farmers. An orphan, intelligent but plain, beaten down by a
childhood of abuse and by housemaid jobs that amounted to indentured
servitude, Hanna believes she has nothing to lose by emigrating.

.... continues at
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-harris8jun08,0,7109101.st
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