Breathing Space - Softcover

Van Der Vyver, Marita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140255583 ISBN 13: 9780140255584

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

Ten friends, artists, writers and political activists, living and working under the oppressive South African regime, are leaving their youth, their hope and optimism behind them. Mila has a successful career as a journalist, but would sacrifice it all for a child, Liane and Paul, once the glittering couple, are on the brink of divorce, while Yvette and Adriaan's marriage is devastated by unimaginable tragedy. Set between 1985 and 1995, the friends' lives play out their dramas against the sweeping political and cultural backdrop of South Africa. As personal tensions rise and conflicts are brought into the open, so the political and personal can no longer be unravelled.

About this title

Review:

Breathing Space is a slightly soap-operaish account of a group of twenty-to-thirtysomething boho to yuppie Cape Afrikaners coming to terms with their gonads and the political turmoil of South Africa from 1985 to 1995.

The plot has a number of twists as the 10 protagonists group and regroup at a series of lush and usually perfectly styled beach houses near Cape Town. A child drowns, a marriage breaks up, a husband turns out gay, a lover is blown up presumably by a police letter bomb, an ex-husband commits suicide, a heroine has a mastectomy but life goes on as inexorably as South Africans march to democracy. State repression and political upheaval in South Africa serve mainly as a backdrop to the action and as the occasion for some spirited discussion about the possibilities of a normal life even for comfortably off white people under apartheid. The sense of politics in this novel is atmospheric, not actual.

The prose is sprinkled liberally with crisp linen skirts and perfectly painted red lips and while one of the characters is down on her job as an editor of a glossy woman's magazine (not relevant enough in those troubled times), Breathing Space has the airy style of serialisation. Many of its vignettes are vividly realised, and the dialogue is fast-paced and pointed. It may make you laugh. It may make you cry. If you know the fairest Cape at all, it may make you nostalgic. It captures something of the surreal paradise white South-Africans enjoyed under apartheid and while it makes repeated gestures to the ironies and anxieties this produced, it never really explores them.--Neville Hoad

About the Author:

Marita van der Vyver is an award-winning novelist and freelance journalist. She has published three acclaimed children's novels and a biography as well as two adult novels: ENTERTAINING ANGELS and CHILDISH THINGS, both published by Michael Joseph and Penguin.
Marita is from South Africa but she now lives in France.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140255583
• ISBN 13: 9780140255584
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480