I am sending this book to Professor Gewirtz at the Yale Law School for his course on Law and Literature, for it beautifully captures the conflict of a scholar steeped in the law confronted with an ironclad (and justified) belief in the mystical. Bottom line: human law loses, Claude Levi-Strauss and Carl Jung win. Also a great book for gaining a multi-dimensional insight into the complex and often overly simplified Afrikaner history / mindset.

The description of this book lead me to believe it was about an aboriginal tribe in South Africa. Instead, it is a DNA-helix of living and dead members of the Moolman family. Their ancestor, FounderAbel Moolman, was intelligent, domineering, and full of raw energy, qualities he needed to forge an empire in an untamed land. He also imposed a strong code of ethics on his descendents, a code that is inescapable even in death.

The story unfolds through the visit of a magistrate sent to investigate a tragedy in the family and the spiralling tale told by the living and the dead wraps around the reader and draws him along, spell-bound. Reading the end of most mysterious stories reveals the plot, but this tale can only be untangled with patience. Comprehension doesn't fully come until each page has been examined and unwound.

I read this book while a student in South Africa at the end of the 80's. Being Afrikaans, like the author/principal character (I believe that a lot of what the principal character experiences in the book, happened to the author in real life) it really spoke to me at the time. I cannot say how I will react to the book today (maybe the principal character's angst will irritate me now), but I think the book paints a good picture of a time when many Afrikaners started questioning the establishment, if only in their hearts.

A book like "The Long Silence of Mario Salviati" suggests that there must be a number of very interesting novelists writing in Afrikaans. Etienne van Heerden has woven touches of magic realism into the appealing history of the town of Yearsonend, a dusty little nowhere town on the stony plains of the Karoo, making us realize that magic realism has not run out of steam, and that in the hands of some writers it still has the power to amaze and amuse.

Word of an astonishing sculpture appearing the yard of a local eccentric brings art administrator Ingi Friedlander from Cape Town with the aim of acquiring the piece for South Africa's new parliament houses. She is surprised when its discoverer, an impish fellow named Jonty Jack Burgh, not only refuses to sell it, he won't even show it to her. Not one to give up easily, Ingi sticks around and becomes entranced by the strange tales swirling around the tiny town which involve, among other things, gold, a man entombed in a cave with four horses and a carriage, the decorative feather industry, and a deaf, mute, and blind former Italian prisoner of war named Mario Salviati.

Ingi's poking around has the whole town on edge, including the local angel--a beaky fellow who spends most of his days picking at fleas on his wing feathers. The Yearsonenders see themselves as a closed-mouthed crew but in fact they are not, and Ingi collects a great deal of information. Might she be just be the person who has to release Yearsonend from its guilty trance? Or should she just run like hell and risk returning to Cape Town without the sculpture?

We don't get to read much non-topical literature from South Africa, and this novel is an interesting slice of pre-and-post Apartheid 20th century. "Mario Salviati" is a charming, touching book , nicely written, well-translated, and different.

I enjoyed the author's earlier Casspirs and Camparis, but cannot say the same about this book. I found it contrived to the extent of becoming irritating, and wonder why I bothered finishing it. The mystical element in the story is unnecessary and seems to be an all-too-popular device in modern Afrikaans fiction. Why not just give us a well-written, plain story (such as Remains of the Day), and spare us the spirits?

To me the best thing about the book was the descriptions of the town where it is set, which seems to be an amalgam of my beloved East London and Port Elizabeth, the two major cities of the Eastern Cape (where Van Heerden lectured for a number of years). But that is insufficient to redeem it.