The Devil's Chimney: A Novel - Hardcover

Landsman, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471010 ISBN 13: 9781569471012

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1997

Synopsis

In Oudtshoorn, South Africa, Connie Lambrecht lives in the shadow of the vast Cango Caves. In the depths of one of the eerie passages they call the Devil's Chimney, a young colored servant girl once vanished. Connie is haunted by this mystery, and by the story of an upper-class Englishwoman, Miss Beatrice, whose quixotic attempt to raise ostriches at the turn of the century on a farm near this dusty provicial town led to terrible misfortune.
In recounting the tales of these two women, Connie finally discovers the deepest secret of her own life and the truth about her ghost-filled past.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Landsman teaches screenwriting at The New School for Social Research.

Reviews

A colorful, moody but unwieldy debut set in the parched highlands of South Africa. Connie, an aged alcoholic, is obsessed with the past--not only her own, which ceased to advance beyond the delivery of what she believed to be a stillborn child many decades ago, but also that of an infamous ostrich farmer's wife, whose world came crashing down on the eve of WW I with the birth of her own child. Miss Beatrice and Mr. Henry were the oddest of odd couples, dotty English ‚migr‚s in a harsh landscape dotted with the occasional black-and-white plumage of a male ostrich. When Mr. Henry went mad and vanished over the horizon, Miss Beatrice's fair hair and blue eyes drew her neighbor, the married, successful Jewish farmer Jacobs, like a beacon; after frenzied pairings with him, she also couples with the farm's black foreman, September, and soon thereafter finds she's pregnant. Whereupon Mr. Henry returns, no less strange and a whole lot meaner. He decides to pluck every last ostrich on his ranch before going back to England. In doing so he kills September, then is himself kicked to death by a breeding pair of his flock whom he had the stupidity to disturb on their nest. Miss Beatrice, meanwhile, is in labor, and when the baby proves to be the foreman's she runs off to hide it from September's wife--but she's followed. Mulling over all of this in her muddled state brings Connie to a painful understanding, too late to do her any good, of what happened to her own child. Compelling images of farm life and the distortions of fevered (or pickled) imaginations are the real strengths here, but the plot in its interlocking layers of narrative is far too complex for this treatment to sustain. (Quality Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In Landsman's debut novel, a mysterious, alcoholic storyteller named, Connie recounts the drama of ostrich farmers Henry and Beatrice Chapman in her South African town of Oudtshoorn, circa 1910. As the odd English couple struggle to raise ostriches for their feathers, Connie focuses mostly on Miss Beatrice, a free spirit who breaks nearly all the social conventions of this isolated place when her husband, Henry, disappears into the nearby mountains. All is seemingly well, albeit a little surreal, until Miss Beatrice becomes pregnant and the now crazed Henry returns. The author makes clever use of Connie?not only because she sprinkles her stories liberally with Afrikaans and Xhosa words but because Connie admires Miss Beatrice so much that her admiration wonderfully embellishes an already engrossing tale. Recommended for all fiction collections.?Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Landsman's hold on the crux of her story ... is so steady and strong that her fey, haunted characters seem to act entirely out of their own compulsions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569471010
• ISBN 13: 9781569471012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292