Before The Knife - Softcover

Slaughter, Carolyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552776866 ISBN 13: 9780552776868

Publisher: Black Swan

Synopsis

Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, but for the last twelve 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 powerful 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, siblings. Despite its sometimes harrowing contents, it is a work of great, dangerous beauty.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

What happened to me affected all of us?my mother, my father, my sisters, and me: we all fell apart under the horror of it, and we all tried to pretend that there was no horror.

Before the Knife is an unforgettable story?a transcendent memoir?of the beauty and brutality in a young girl?s African childhood and of the ways she found to survive it.

When Carolyn Slaughter was nearly four, she and her family moved from England to a remote outpost in the Kalahari Desert. There she was surrounded by a landscape of incomparable splendor and violence. Majestic rivers formed overnight; flocks of flamingos and herds of game gathered with equal speed to partake of the sudden waters. Termite mounds grew to the height of trees. A crocodile could drag a child from the riverbank in a second. And the author herself became the victim of an unspeakable crime.

Slaughter takes us deep into her experience of Africa and of herself at a time of anguish, but also of recovery. As she has said, ?I couldn?t take my eyes off Africa. And what I saw was so beautiful that it enabled me not merely to survive, but also to find a way to save my soul.? 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.

From the Back Cover:

"Carolyn Slaughter's astonishing memoir is seductive and exquisitely rendered. She draws us into a world full of beauty and terror, the corrosive power of family secrets, and her stubborn and inspiring will to survive. An extraordinary achievement."
--Esmeralda Santiago

"Two rivers of memory form the parallel universes of this beautiful memoir of childhood: growing up in Africa as the child of a minor colonial administrator during the unraveling of the British Empire; and growing up unmothered in a family of daughters governed by a savage father. It is eerily the world of Sylvia Plath’s disturbing poem “Daddy,” brought to life with an astounding lack of self-pity and a writerly gift for endowing the personal story with gripping social realism."
--Diane Middlebrook

"In Before the Knife,Carolyn Slaughter has beautifully -- and daringly -- conjured up her African childhood. Hers is a story of the familial secrets that can build around one horrendous act and the terribly misunderstandings, regrets and recriminations that result. The memoir is also a lyrical recreation of the land, which -- like those who dwell upon it -- cannot be tamed, suppressed or possessed. The utter brutality of the landscape is matched only by that of the Slaughter family."
--Lisa See 

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Swan
• ISBN 10: 0552776866
• ISBN 13: 9780552776868
• Binding: Paperback