Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories

“The moon was reckless and gay and shouted ‘Happy New
Year’ to the stars. The stars twinkled back coyly ‘Same to
you’. The moon, a crazy whore, did a comic turn around
staid, spinsterly Table Mountain and then bounced dizzily
across the sky. District Six hopped, skipped and jumped.
The streetlamps laughed as a handful went streaming red,
white and blue down Tennant into Hanover Street.
Buy my teasers
See ‘em blow in the breezes”

Richard Rive, Moon over District Six

A spectacular, career-spanning collection, Richard Rive’s Advance,
Retreat, is a milestone in the development of the modern South
African short story. While these dozen selected short stories were
banned upon their publication in South Africa, they found high
praise abroad for their spare, yet beautiful prose, along with their
nuanced, personal depictions of the absurdities, frustrations and
contradictions of coloured life under apartheid.

From the sinister whimsy of Rive’s early work to the listless fury
of his final stories, Advance, Retreat exposes both the schizophrenic
absurdities of the apartheid state, as well as the everyday
tragedies and sadnesses it imposed upon those it oppressed. Laced
with irony and masterfully crafted, Advance, Retreat is a collection
to be savoured; a chronology of both a masterful career and an
evolving social consciousness, cut short at its prime.

RICHARD RIVE was born in 1931 in District Six, Cape Town. A winner of scholarships
from a young age, Rive carried his academic momentum from high school until he
had earned degrees from the Universities of Cape Town and Columbia, as well as a
doctorate from Oxford for his thesis on South African writer Olive Schreiner. He has
the rare distinction of having gained a Fulbright Scholarship at
both the post-graduate and the post-doctoral levels, and was
for three years Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College,
Oxford. He was a visiting professor at several universities,
including Harvard University in 1987; and delivered guest
lectures at more than fifty universities on four continents.
An excellent sportsman as well as one of the most influential
thinkers of his generation, Rive was a firm believer in antiracism
and a fervent supporter of development in South Africa.
He was murdered at his home in Cape Town in 1989.

Though banned in South Africa, Rive's stories about his homeland found an appreciative audience in Europe and America. He was murdered in his home near Cape Town this past June. The 12 stories collected here confirm that the silencing of his distinctive voice is a deplorable loss. Arranged chronologically, most of the narratives have benefited from the author's updating and rewriting specifically for this volume. Beginning with the award-winning "Daggersmoker's Dream" (1955) they reveal a spare, direct prose style, a deft ear for dialogue, and a bitter, cutting perception of the madness of existence under apartheid. If some of the situations seem contrived, they are nonetheless appropriate to the harsh realities they reflect. The title story, which is the finale of the collection, best captures the idiocy of the racial policy that leaves South Africans of all colors at odds with themselves. "Retreat" is the name of a secondary school where a black principal is obsessed with Shakespeare. The coupling of the school's name with "Advance," its inspirational motto, mirrors the racial schizophrenia that is the subject of many of these tales. In "Drive-In," an "ostentatiously progressive and liberal" white woman ("Everything about you people fascinates me") patronizes blacks with her half-baked ideas. Strong woodcuts by South African artist Cecil Skotnes augment Rive's bleak but honest vision.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.