Product Description

The last time Silas Ali encountered the Lieutenant, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Lydia, his wife. When Silas sees him again, by chance, twenty years later, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Ali's fragile family life. Bitter Fruit is the story of Silas and Lydia, their parents, friends and colleagues, as their lives take off in unexpected directions and relationships fracture under the weight of history. It is also the story of their son Mickey, a student and sexual adventurer, with an enquiring mind and a strong will. An unforgettably fine novel about a brittle family in a dysfunctional society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #266621 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Barbara Trapido, Independent
‘A haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic on its context, gender and generation, its progress like slow dancing’

Shomit Dutta, Daily Telegraph
‘Dangor’s vivid prose, narrative fluency and facility for literary experiment make Bitter Fruit a considerable achievement.’

Giles Newington, Irish Times
‘Meticulously written and perfectly paced.’

Customer Reviews

Has matured as a writer
Homegrown gem: Achmat Dangor
Born in 1948 into a strictly Muslim household in Johannesburg, Achmat Dangor spent a great deal of his childhood in Cape Town's colourful District Six where in addition to attending a conventional Western school, he also went to Islamic school (madrassa) on a daily basis. It was an upbringing that was to stand him in good stead for his later role of both political activist and storyteller.
In the 1970s Dangor, then a university student, joined the political movement founded by Steve Biko. What with the notorious forced removals of the residents from their homes in District Six, and his growing awareness of an unjust political system, Dangor turned to his passion, writing, as a means of expression. His first collection, Waitng for Leila openly and lyrically laments the systematic breaking down of the community he'd grown up in. While the writing was raw, and by no means his best work, this slim tome obvious struck a nerve, and before long, in 1973, Dangor was banned from writing by the Apartheid regime.
For 13 years he lived in exile in the US and wrote about the land of his birth from afar, trying wherever possible to generate awareness about what was really going on here. He went on to write The Z-town Trilogy in which he drew attention to the base reality of life within the struggle and how it affected personal relationships; and, more recently, Kafka's Curse, which shows a move away from the mythic cadence of his earlier work towards a more grounded, hard-hitting realism.
He has won numerous awards for his writing, but strangely remains relatively unrecognised as a novelist by the South African public. Ask the man on the street who Achmat Dangor is and he's most likely to respond 'CEO of the Nelson Mandela Childen's Fund', which indeed he was until recently when he gave up his post to pursue his literary career full-time. A move that seems to be paying off.
Dangor's powerful yet stark new book, Bitter Fruit (Kwela Books, R89,95) has just hit the shelves and, in true Dangor style, he's not pulling any punches. Set in 90s South Africa, post-TRC, it is the story of two people working out their demons and coming to understand their role and identity within the new order. Silas, who works for the Department of Justice, and Lydia, a nurse, seem trapped in an utterly loveless marriage, haunted by a past brutality, a critical moment in time that bound them together as much as it drove them apart. Through Silas and Lydia's brittle relationship Dangor draws attention to the fact that some wounds run far deeper than public forums like the TRC have the power to heal. The couple's relationship with each other and, quite pivotally, with their emotionally detached son Mikey, holds up a mirror to the greater social project of the TRC, raising a wealth of questions as yet unasked. A passionate, moving and often heart-wrenching look at how far we've come as a nation, and yet how very far we still have to go.

Skin Deep
The writing style of this punchy novel by Achmat Dangor is so
economic and subtly crafted that I read this terrifically compelling
book in a single sitting.

Charting the dismayingly inevitable breakdown in the relationships
between the three central characters - idealistically driven father
Silas, haunted and unstable wife Lydia and their confused son Mikey -
the central journey through their own personal truth and (partial)
reconciliation is set against the broader backdrop of the post-
Apartheid process of the same name.

The emotional and political landscape that Bangor depicts is one
full of complications, betrayals and the searchings for truth
through the half-darkness of mis-remembered pasts. This is not the
sunny rainbow nation: rather, it is a brutal and twisted aftermath to
hideous acts that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Racial, religious
and sexual confusions and distortions weave through the narrative
and create a sense of dark foreboding - a land where the centre
cannot hold. The "bitter fruit" of the title seems to refer to both
the consequences of apartheid as well as the double-edged sword of new found freedom - a freedom in which relative values seem to become disorientated, a freedom where conventional moralities lose their grip. At the most obvious level, of course, the bitter fruit is Mikey himself: the product of perhaps the ultimate desecration - rape - and a symbol of the unhappy congruence of old and new, white and black, oppressor and oppressed. The bitterness cannot be contained.

All very engaging, and the mapping of the pyschological journies of
these central characters takes a real hold. Where the novel, I feel,
lets us down slightly is in its conjuring of the sights, sounds and
smells of the new South Africa. The narrative is so focused on the
interior lives of these characters that they don't come alive in a
very real sense. I couldn't really imagine what they looked like and
scenery and context never really progresssed beyond a collage of
hints, some of these very powerfully expressed however. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, skin features heavily both in a very real, physical
sense (the prose really comes alive at these points) and as a
metaphor - a metaphor for self-protection and containment, for
fragility and vulnerability (shockingly so for Lydia in an early
pivotal episode). The climax of the novel is stunning, both in narrative terms - so deeply moving - and in terms of its descriptive power.

I recommend this novel whole-heartedly - its handling of the deep
emotional issues of love, passion and guilt is masterly and utterly
riveting and, once again, it is proved that nothing is simply black
and white.

Exceptionally fine novel
Dangor's novel of a family disintegrating in post-apartheid South Africa has garnered considerable critical acclaim, including the Booker short-list for 2004. I simply want to say that all the attention and honours it has received are richly deserved.

Very briefly, there are three great inter-related strengths to this work. Firstly, Dangor's prose is so well-crafted and vivid. Secondly, the reader is given perceptive insights into modern South Africa and the (often universal) issues facing it today. Thirdly, all of the characters - including the minor ones - are so real: it may be cliched, but the Silas, Lydia and Mikey do indeed linger in the mind long, long after finishing this exceptional work.