South African poet Ingrid Jonker's life was short, intense and turbulent. Intense is also the novel based on her life A stray summer's day By Janneke Siebelink.
‘Maybe then you will stop wandering,’ the young woman Camille says to herself, in exhortation to start reconstructing her mother's life. ‘Can you start living and stop dying.’ Camille is the daughter of Astrid Viljoen, a famous South African poet who walked into the sea and drowned on 19 July 1965. Camille was just a little girl, but now she herself is almost 31 and, like her mother, in the grip of addiction and mental suffering. To choose life, she will have to face the past.
Window Narrative
Janneke Siebelink has published her novel A stray summer's day Set up as a frame story about protagonist Astrid Viljoen, based on the poet Ingrid Jonker, who died young and became famous for her anti-Apartheid poems. After the beginning about Camille, the story moves back in time, to Astrid's grandmother Emily, mother Cecilia and then to Astrid.
Siebelink outlines the course of their lives against the backdrop of a South Africa that in 1899 and 1902 experienced the Boer Wars between the British and the Boers (the white Afrikaners, descendants of the mainly Dutch settlers), and then suffered an Apartheid regime, with white South Africans oppressing the black population.
Continually in conflict
Astrid loses her mother at a young age, who takes her own life after numerous psychoses, meltdowns and suicide attempts. She grows up with her grandmother and then with her father Samuel, a writer and apartheid advocate. In the home of his new wife and their two sons, Astrid is not loved. Her literary talent is noticed early on and encouraged by the vicar and a teacher, but Astrid mostly craves her father's approval. With him she is in constant conflict, both because she is against Apartheid and because of her excesses and mental instability. As the struggle in society flares ever higher, the fire that consumes Astrid inside also flares ever higher.
Aptly, Siebelink drives her characters' psychic quirkiness, as dark as what goes on in society, to an irrevocable climax. After which, with Camille, it all starts all over again. That makes A stray summer's day into an intense, grand and cleverly crafted story about mental and physical freedom, trauma and how history just keeps repeating itself - until someone decides to put a stop to that.
382 p.
Ambo Anthos, €24.99
