In the shadows of the Cango Caves in rural South Africa lives Connie Lambrecht, dazed by alcohol and devastating memories. A "poor white," she is haunted by the disappearance of a young "colored" girl in a passage called the Devil's Chimney and obsessed with the story of an Englishwoman who arrived with her husband in 1910 to run an ostrich farm during the international craze for ostrich plumes. The story of Miss Beatrice--a lushly told tale of passion and transgression, violence and tragedy, retribution and redemption--entwines in surprising ways with Connie's own dark secrets. Set against a harsh, dazzling landscape and a social system in which the lives of women and black people are equally expendable--and compared by reviewers to the works of Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, and Flannery O'Connor--The Devil's Chimney is an artful, lyrical, and explosive debut.
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In Anne Landsman's complex debut novel , The Devil's Chimney, middle-aged Connie Lambrecht lives a life of quiet desperation in a rural South African outpost called Oudtshoorn, where she runs a dog kennel, quietly suffers the abuse of her weak-willed husband Jack, and drinks to excess. Faced with such unremitting misery, it's no wonder that Connie becomes obsessed with two stories from the past: first, the disappearance of a colored servant girl in the Cango Caves, and second, an upper-class Englishwoman's doomed attempt to run an ostrich farm nearby. As Connie attempts to reconstruct these narratives, they intertwine with her own in an increasingly feverish--and sometimes confusing--way. Landsman writes with dreamlike intensity, and her novel is strongly influenced by magical realism. Yet The Devil's Chimney is also a meditation on the very real dichotomies of race and gender in South Africa--as well as the tension between passion and terror.
Anne Landsman teaches screenwriting at The New School for Social Research.
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