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Indlæser... Praying Mantis (2005)af André Brink
   Ingen Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. 1   SassyLassy | Apr 18, 2020 |    ) huizenga | Aug 3, 2015 | Jeg holdt ut til midten av boka før jeg ga opp. Denne historien engasjerte meg overhode ikke. Tvert i mot kjedet den meg noe voldsomt. Selv ikke det forhold at min yndlingsoppleser Nils Ole Oftebro leste, hjalp det minste. Kanskje var det takket være ham jeg kom så langt som til midten ... Dette er nok en bok for spesielt interesserte. (  ) Rose-Marie | May 22, 2009 |  ) brusselsbook | Jun 25, 2008 | ) tsutsik | Sep 1, 2007 |
 But, considering that this is a novel about religious people, we find out curiously little about Cupido’s theology. Brink gives us the letters Cupido wrote to God (which have survived), but the man himself remains curiously opaque. It is the less whimsical and more historical sections dealing with the way in which the colonists mistreated the indigenous peoples which grasp the reader’s interest. This is a book as much about apartheid and its consequences as it is about events in the Cape in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is equally a book about its author, whose life has been inseparable from struggle. "There was," James Read concludes of the burnt, stone-strewn landscape on which he hopes to have made some mark, "an extraordinary, almost exultant, sense of being in a space suspended between heaven and hell, where one's presence, in some wholly inexplicable way, mattered." Brink conveys a genuine animation when he confronts ideas like this; and of the characters in the book, you feel that Read, puzzled Lutheran, speaks most often for André Brink, puzzled feminist, magic realist and tireless advocate of a new South Africa. "In fighting against the weakness of others," Brink has him decide, "we became trapped within our own human weakness, blocking the way to so much more that we might have been." While it remains more than the historical record of Cupido Cockroach's entrapment and betrayal with which it began, Praying Mantis, too, never quite becomes what it should.  Based on the true story of the 18th-century Hottentot convert Kupido Kakkerlak, Brink's fable is a potent stew of bush wisdom and Christian dogma, in which Cupido's combative style leaves him penning angry missives to God complaining that even the cacti refuse to listen. Brink enlivens this cautionary tale of religious fundamentalism with magical flights of fancy, earthy humour and some exotic soap recipes, including one involving hippo fat, which promises to leave your laundry "not your everyday white, but white as the inside fibres of a sheep's best wool". Quite dazzling, in fact.
Historisk roman om sydafrikaneren Cupido Cockroach (ca. 1760-1825) som efter et udsvævende ungdomsliv omvendes til kristendommen og bliver den første præsteviede "Hottentot"-missionær i Kap-provinsen, men ender med at lide en ufortjent og grum skæbne, da både hans familie og hans menighed forlader ham. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (3.87)
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1
This eagle was not the only animal to feature in Cupido's history. That very night, the child died, and was laid out to be buried the next morning. When the hung-over villagers arrived to bury him, they saw a bright green mantis praying over the body, restoring him to life. Clearly, this child was destined for a life that would take him far beyond this farm. As his mother said,"If you ask me, he has been chosen to become a man like no other... he will be a free man."
The year was 1760 and freedom was not a likely proposition for this child of a Hottentot labourer. Cupido's childhood and adolescence did not offer much hope of fulfillment for his mother's prophecy. While he was bright and ambitious, he was not at all diligent, preferring instead to pursue those things which interested him. When Cupido was about seventeen, an itinerant pedlar turned up on the farm. Like Cupido's now disappeared mother, Servaas Ziervogel was a teller of tales and a singer, but this man's tales came from something called the Gospel. There were other stories too, of lands far beyond the horizon, places with strange and unusual names like Damascus, Vladivostock and even Pluto. Cupido absorbed them all. It was a time of learning. Ziervogel taught him to read, but also gave him a taste for arrack, women, and fighting.
Eventually the two parted amicably. Cupido wooed and won the indomitable Anna Vigilant. Anna believed true freedom was only given to white people. A soap-maker, her desire to be free had led her to put her foot in the boiling lye in an effort to whiten herself, as her soap whitened everything else. She was left lame for life. She was also left with a strong distaste for the ways of the white people, especially when it came to their religion. Cupido, on the other hand, felt its pull and succumbed.
Brink has used a straightforward narrative up to this point. Part II, covering the years 1802-1815, switches format and perspective. It purports to be written retrospectively in memoir form by the disgraced Reverend James Read. It is set against a warring background between English and Dutch for control of South Africa. It depicts more immediately the struggle for domination of all around them, be it land, animals, or souls. Read is unusual in his sympathies for, and belief in, the indigenous peoples. He happily took on Cupido as a protégé. Learning in turn from Cupido, Read developed in his mind an almost mystical feeling for the land. Travelling with Cupido, he "came to see it through our brother's eyes and be made aware of the manifold minutiae in which life can express itself: an ever renewed discovery of riches in indigenous peoples, animals, birds, insects, plants, even rocks and stones".
While continuing with some of Cupido's more extreme eccentricities, this section introduces hard reality. Brink, through Read, does not hold back on the treatment of the indigenous peoples by the Europeans.
Read's summary ended with the year 1815. Part III returns to the narrative structure of Part I. Cupido was now far in the outback, in an area prone to drought. Quoting Deuteronomy, Brink says "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness." Like many before him, Cupido was being tested in the desert by his faith. The question for him was which faith: the animist ones of the people, or the new ones brought by the Europeans.
Although [Praying Mantis] deals with questions of belief, it is not a book with an obtrusive religious message. Rather, it takes the reader back to a time when two groups of peoples came together with very different ideas of the world. How were new ideas to be reconciled with existing ones, or was reconciliation even possible?; would cultural clashes and their resulting wars ever be resolved?
In a note at the end of the novel, Brink suggests he may have had difficulty writing it. He started it in 1984, stopped, started again in 1992. However, it was not until 2004 that he actually finished it, after resolving to write a book for his 70th birthday. What precipitated the fits and starts he doesn't say. He does say though that Cupido Cockroach was a real person, Cupido Kakkerlak, whose story appears from time to time in records of the London Missionary Society in South Africa, and also in academic journals. Reverend Read and many others of the characters are also based on real people. Knowing this made Cupido's faults and struggles, his drive and determination, credible in a way they might not otherwise have been. As Brink says "... the enigma of another's life can only be grasped through the imagination (which is no less reliable than memory)."