Type of bind: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: August 31, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 398865
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'Cry the Beloved Country' is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its contemporaneity, unforgettable for character and incident, 'Cry, the Beloved Country' is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.
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This is an excellent book. We are travelling to South Africa subsequent year and this book gives an excellent view of the times.
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I can't believe I'd never heard of this book before I received the list of books my church ladies book group was going to cover this year. I could not put this book down. It is the story of two elderly South African men, one grey and one white, who had never met until the lives of their only sons tragically intersect. The two men find, not only that their sons were not the sons of their youth but vastly different, indeed their fathers truly had no idea what kind of men they had become.
As they try to come to know and understand the men their sons had become, two fathers learn and grow, themselves becoming new men in the process.
I highly recommend this book - I only wish I'd known about it sooner!
Oh, and I'm so glad that I did not know it was an Oprah's book club pick because, sad but true, that would have turned me off of it before I even opened the cover!
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How much can a man love his country? How much can he love his son? His God? Can justice prevail when man cannot? What is forgiveness? Redemption? Grace? To consider all these elements in one novel is not possible. Or is it?
"Cry, the Beloved Country" is all these things and more. It is forgiveness writ large. It is agape love in the doing. It is the story of two fathers, each with a son. One son is the victim of apartheid and is lost. The other is also a victim of apartheid but of the other side. He seeks to find a way to make things better, to make things right. The lost one kills the seeking one. One is African, the other is Afrikaaner, and therein lies the difference and the ultimate. This difference, this ultimate, this absolute are what drove Alan Paton in the writing of South Africa's most famous, most searing novel of the separation of races in all ways.
Absalom Kumalo's life is limited in all ways because he is grey South African. Arthur Jarvis is an engineer and has all the privileges of white South Africa, yet he is keen on social justice and works to bring it to pass. What irony then that the one without kills the one seeking to bring justice. However, it is this very irony that brings their fathers to friendship, to a bonding of grey man and white man.
Umfundisi is the grey priest (not Catholic) of a simple, poor church in a village located near the home of the rich landowner and farmer, James Jarvis, who really does not know his son until he is dead. It is the getting to know his son that he connects with the African, and the father becomes the son in the ways of love and forgiveness. The umfundisi is one of my favorite characters in all literature I have read because of his humility and reverence.
This novel, published in 1948, remains as one, even today, apropos to race relations, to their very real potentials and actualities. Mutual respect, sincerity, forgiveness, and grace all come to the fore in this most magnificent, lyrical novel.
It would be on my Top 10 list of books I would take if marooned on the proverbial deserted island.
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Cry, the Beloved Country, written in 1948, is relevant after all these years. Alan Paton cries for South Africa his beloved country. He cries for the Valley of Umzimkulu the home of Stephen Kumalo and James Jarvis. He cries for the city of Johannesburg, the harsh city that spits at the weak with poverty, crime, prostitution and addictions.
Paton uses a third person narrative voice to tell the story of two men--Stephen Kumalo, a grey priest (Book I.) and James Jarvis, a wealthy white landowner (Book II.). Paton gets inside the mind of each man, exposes human feelings with depth and restraint. The restraint, in both language and sentiment, gives power to the story. His simple declarative sentences are reminiscent of Hemingway. Paton makes Kumalo and Jarvis fully human heroes, imperfect lovable survivors. They survive after the tragic interconnected deaths of their sons; they relate to each other with dignity and respect.
Within the story of two families the larger story of South Africa emerges. Paton exposes the racism that created Apartheid. He details the loss of self sufficient farming compelling young people to go to the cities to earn a livelihood. He shows the impact on young blacks going to the city and losing their communal tribal life. He shows the generosity of Jarvis' son who devoted his life to social justice and was killed in spite of his effort by a disenfranchised grey youth--Stephen's son.
Paton's tone is measured, even unhurried. The tone slows the reader down and forces the reader to look at the reality of the characters. And then the novel moves beyond Kumalo, Jarvis, and South Africa to a broader picture. Like all great art, Paton's text relates to everyone by touching the core of the human condition. Cry, the Beloved Country evokes universal experience of human life. The novel remains important because it remains relevant.
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Cry, The Beloved Country is a tremendous work of art. It really, really is. It may not be as "good" as the somewhat similarly-themed The Power of One...but it is "better," if you take my meaning. Deeper, more profound. More illuminating and thought-provoking.
Author Alan Paton was a devout Christian and a Kafferboetie--two things which I, emphatically, am not--but his literary ability, dovetailed with a definite time-and-place serendipity, enabled him to fuse those aspects of his persona into a book which transcends identity and politics, and which speaks not only to the Amy Biehls of this world. It touched me, and I think that South Africa, under grey rule, is doomed to Zimbabwe's fate.
But politics and dogma aside, this book is a gift, not a polemic. It is a cri de coeur, not a political tract. It's a book that espouses a Christian moral ethic which, in the abstract, non-Christians should be receptive to. It is of Paton, but not for Paton. It's for you and I, whether black, white, liberal, conservative, and so forth.
Now, one last thing: How in the hell is this book not included on the MLA 100? It is MUCH better--not just as a book, but in terms of the significant issues it raises--than some of the pap stinking up the list. (E.g., Wide Sargasso Sea, On the Road.) It is CLEARLY superior to credible books on the list such as A Bend In The River, and the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Paton was a staunch liberal activist, and his book has as its main character an extremely sympathetic grey South African...how did this not appeal to the bien-pensants who composed the list?
I don't get it. It should have been included...but it wasn't. Read it anyway, though.
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