Whatever the cause, Paul is soon seeing Dr. His father, who owned a pest-control business, died in their black maid’s room when Paul was still in school: he may have been having an affair with her, he may have committed suicide, or he may have miscalculated the amount of poison he was using to fumigate her room. In the first section, which covers the years 1968–87, Paul recounts his childhood in a white Johannesburg suburb, where he attended a public school that taught a slanted history of the country’s race relations.
Narrator Paul Sweetbread, a Jewish South African, claims to have a “picture-perfect memory,” but we soon see that total recall has been a poisoned gift. Expatriate Eprile ( Temporary Sojourner, stories, 1989) revisits his homeland’s apartheid years, detailing all its horrors in a first novel that seems more a collection of set-pieces than an absorbing narrative with compelling characters.
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