From South Africa to Vietnam

One of the advantages of being near a fairly small local library and having to choose books in a hurry is that I just tend to snap all sorts of things up without a lot of thought and sometimes end up striking gold.  Here are two of the 'gold' books from my last library expedition that I might not have even picked up under normal circumstances.

Frankie and Stankie

Barbara Trapido

Frankie and Stankie is an account of a girl growing up in 1950s and 60s South Africa prior to her eventual self-imposed exile in the UK when things start getting too hot to handle.  While this novel deals with the politics of apartheid, it is more about the tensions within white society, ie, between the 'English' (a term that can be expanded to include other Europeans) and Afrikaaners and also in terms of attitudes towards apartheid (which range from active support to active opposition with different degrees of apathy and 'turning a blind eye' in between).  As someone wh has also grown up in a former British 'colony', there was quite a lot I could relate to in this novel including the sense of not quite belonging where you live and the awareness of a certain degree of 'cultural cringe' displayed by certain individuals and institutions.  This was quite evident in the different schools Dinah attended. I found the girls high school (with all its archaic rules about uniforms etc) quite reminiscent of my own high school in Melbourne.  One review I read said that the ending, in which Dinah and her husband migrate to England, was quite an anti-climax.  I actually thought it served a good purpose though, ie, highlighting that for all their 'Englishness', the England they arrived in really was a foreign country and didn't at all accord with Dinah's expectations (which had been largely gleaned from a childhood reading Enid Blyton novels).  Overall though, the novel is mainly a coming of age story and documents Dinah's various trials and tribulations and the characters around her with a great deal of quirky humour. 

The Tapestries

Kien Nguyen

I am not very far into The Tapestries but finding it really interesting so far.   This is also fiction based loosely on factual events.  In this case, it is the story of the author's grandfather, an embroiderer to the last king of Vietnam in the 1900s.  Part One (which is all I have got to so far) is told from the perspective of the 7 year old protagonist's 'wife', a peasant woman in her late 20s, who is married off to the young boy primarily to act as an unpaid servant to the family.  She is emerging as one of the heroes of the book though, ie, acts as the boy's main protector when things go wrong for the family.  Will write more when I have finished this book.