Short stories
Mafeking Road and Other Stories
Herman Charles Bosman · 1947
Synopsis
Stories from the Groot Marico, a remote district of the Transvaal, told by Oom Schalk Lourens, an old Boer farmer who considers himself the best storyteller in the district. He tells of lost loves and jealousies, family dramas, the unevenly fervent faith of the farms and tragicomic encounters with the English at the time of the Boer War; we meet indolent ox-drivers, concertina players, dreamy lovers and legendary leopards.
Context
The collection appeared in 1947 from Dassie; its stories, many of them conceived during the author's London years, draw on the short stay he had made in 1926 as a schoolteacher in the Groot Marico, the source of almost all of his roughly one hundred and fifty short stories. The storyteller, simple in appearance but cunning, often opens his tale with an ironic moral, and the story moves in a single movement from laughter to sorrow; his American publisher compares him to Mark Twain.
Who it is for
Short stories in English, in the spoken tone of a storyteller by the fireside; the irony often lies in what the narrator does not say.
Prizes and reception
It earned its author recognition as a master of the short story, and has never stopped being reprinted since its publication.