Before the knife: Memories of an African childhood - Hardcover

Slaughter, Carolyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385603444 ISBN 13: 9780385603447

Publisher: Doubleday, 2002

Synopsis

Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, but for the last 12 years she has been completely silent. She had become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her traumatic childhood. Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert. Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of the Kalahari itself for solace. The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book. What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father and siblings.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

“Searing.... [Slaughter] captures the dark beautfy of her adopted homeland, and her passion for its is contagious.” –The Boston Globe

“Remarkable. . . . Written with such beauty, courage, and truthfulness that it will rank with other masterpieces about life in Africa.” –The Times (London)

“A haunting evocation of her fraught family life in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. . . . Slaughter summons both the terrible secrecy and the wonder of her childhood.” –O, The Oprah Magazine

“Slaughter conveys the dangerous unforgiving landscape of the Kalahari Desert with searing immediacy.” -Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Searing. . . . Slaughter balances moments of tranquility with those of devastation, making this brave memoir engrossing.” —Vogue

“Two lives merge here, one of incredible beauty and one of incredible pain. . . . Slaughter has succeeded in penning a chilling and compelling exorcism.” —Publishers Weekly

“Slaughter writes with grace and psychological insight about a bygone era and the tragic circumstances of her childhood.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Like the best memoirs—The Liars’ Club, Angela’s Ashes, Girl Interrupted—Before the Knife melds the power of a true story with literary techniques . . . Masterfully, she finally gives voice to the scream she describes as lodged in her throat.” —Camden Courier-Post

“Before the Knife is as sharp as a blade and its spare beautiful prose goes right through your heart. Rarely have I read such an honest memoir, as merciless as the blinding light of the African bush.” —Francesca Marciano, author of Rules of the Wild

“A book that will rank with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing as one of the great books about [the] subcontinent, and about the passing of a colonial era whose scares still linger.” —Cape Times

From the Inside Flap:

In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Carolyn Slaughter recalls her childhood in Africa and how the land itself released her from a rage that threatened to destroy her.
For Carolyn Slaughter, who grew up in Botswana in the 1950s, it was the Kalahari Desert that made life bearable. Her father was a cruel and violent district commissioner during the last days of British colonial rule, and their family's stiff English facade masked an unspeakable household secret. But out in the bush, the intensity of the air and the beauty of the landscape touched her with a kind of feverish grace. She would disappear for hours to watch the flat brown river with its water lilies and crocodiles; the thorn trees and the flocks of flamingos; the local women with their babies strapped to their backs. Filled with the majesty and splendor of the ever-changing desert, Before The Knife" is the deeply moving story of a girl who endured and transcended her family's violence to emerge an impassioned observer and explicator of her world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0385603444
• ISBN 13: 9780385603447
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254