Matthee, Dalene

New York. 1986. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394552318. 320 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Walton Ford. Jacket design by Sara Eisenman. �. keywords: Literature South Africa Women. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Dalene Matthee's first novel, Circles in a Forest (published here in 1984), was called ‘profoundly moving' by the San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times Book Review found in it ‘the fervor and passion of a Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence novel.' Now, in her new novel, one of South Africa's most successful writers again takes us back to the late nineteenth century, as against the background of forest mountains and veld she gives us the deeply affecting story of two families struggling for possession of one child, and that child's own struggle to know who and what he is. The boy is Benjamin, who appears one night at Fiela Komoetie's farm and is raised as one of her own, though she is black and he is white. He becomes her ‘hand-child' - 'like the hand-lamb that the ewe does not want that has to be hand-fed' - taken in without hesitation, loved as dearly as her own children. But the boy may also be Lukas van Rooyen, who wandered away from his family's forest home when he was three years old - wandered into the dense, forbidding forest and disappeared. When Benjamin is twelve, the arrival of two census-takers (‘peace-breakers' in Fiela's words) begins a chain of events that leads him away from the only home and family he knows, and to the van Rooyens. Now he must learn not to call white men ‘master,' learn that Barta van Rooyen is his mother and Elias his father. He must leave the open sky and the starkly beautiful hills of the kloof for the darkness and mystery of the forest. He must shed the skin of Benjamin and enter that of Lukas. And Fiela must accept that Benjamin was only ‘lent to her' and will not be coming back. But the boy's fate is not so easily sealed: as Benjamin takes on the life of Lukas, he takes on as well the aspects of young manhood - his curiosity about the world growing, his sense of independence deepening. Yet, more than merely rebellious, Lukas feels himself reaching out toward something that might otherwise pass him by, if only he can first satisfy the driving need in himself to know, finally and forever, who he is. His search for the answer takes him back into the forest and the mountains, into the stories each family tells of its past, and, most revealingly, into his own deepest feelings - the only place, perhaps, where the truth of his identity can reside. Fields Child offers what so few other novels do today: powerful drama infused with intense emotion. It is set in a world utterly unlike our own, yet comes compellingly, vividly alive. Born near Capetown, South Africa, in 1938, Dalene Matthee began her career as a short-story writer. Fiela's Child is her sixth novel. inventory #1891 ISBN: 0394552318.