Ancestral Voices

I am sending this book to Professor Gewirtz at the Yale Law School for his course on Law and Literature, for it beautifully captures the conflict of a scholar steeped in the law confronted with an ironclad (and justified) belief in the mystical. Bottom line: human law loses, Claude Levi-Strauss and Carl Jung win. Also a great book for gaining a multi-dimensional insight into the complex and often overly simplified Afrikaner history / mindset.

The description of this book lead me to believe it was about an aboriginal tribe in South Africa. Instead, it is a DNA-helix of living and dead members of the Moolman family. Their ancestor, FounderAbel Moolman, was intelligent, domineering, and full of raw energy, qualities he needed to forge an empire in an untamed land. He also imposed a strong code of ethics on his descendents, a code that is inescapable even in death. The story unfolds through the visit of a magistrate sent to investigate a tragedy in the family and the spiralling tale told by the living and the dead wraps around the reader and draws him along, spell-bound. Reading the end of most mysterious stories reveals the plot, but this tale can only be untangled with patience. Comprehension doesn't fully come until each page has been examined and unwound.