Dreaming the Karoo

A People Called the /Xam

Dreaming the Karoo
Julia Blackburn
RRP:
NZ$ 70.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 56.00
Hardback
h240 x 156mm - 304pg
16 Jun 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781787332171
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A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa. She had long been fascinated by the indigenous group called the /Xam, who were brutally forced from their ancestral lands by European settlers in the nineteenth century. Facing extinction and the death of their language, several of the /Xam people related their stories to a European philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his English sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd. In 12,000 pages of notebooks, Lloyd and Bleek meticulously recorded their words - their dreams, memories, hopes, history and beliefs - creating an extraordinary archive of this now extinct people. Blackburn' s journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. As the world is plunged into a bewildering new state, she immerses herself in the stories of the /Xam. The /Xam saw themselves as just one small part of the complexity of nature. Their belief system gave voice and dignity to everything that surrounded them, the dead and the living, birds and animals, the wind and the rain, the moon and the stars. All things were once people, they said - everything was speaking to you, if you only knew how to listen. This is a haunting book about loss, colonialism, nature, and about how we live in the world and what we leave behind. In mesmerising, deceptively simple and often profoundly beautiful prose, Blackburn conjures the voices of a silenced people, revealing the weight of their omission from our collective memory and our imaginations. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers.
Julia Blackburn listens. To the voices of a people who call out from a distant time, and to the sound of her own careful, inspiring way of listening. To what it has meant for a hunting society to be locked out of their own lives as well as for her to be locked down. Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers, what we hear from those they dispossess, and what it means to be at the heart of who we are. Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity and power. Again and again, as I read, I gasped at the intense relevance and importance, as well as the beauty of this book. -- Hugh Brody It is such a wonderful book. It made me stretch my hand to my lover. It made me want to show my children the footprints, scars and stones under our feet. It made me want to sit down to look at the sea. . . It made me deeply grateful that I am alive. * Max Porter (Praise for Time Song) * Both Wordsworthian and Woolfian . . . This book is a wonder. * Adam Nicolson (Praise for Time Song) * Breathtaking. . . [a] splendidly rich book. . . I admire the intelligence, the appetite for discovery and the shining imagination that have gone into it. * Gillian Tindall (Praise for Time Song) * This book gripped me by its clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past and Julia Blackburn' s extraordinary sympathy and perspicacity in finding in the lightest and smallest traces the story of our human species * Antony Gormley (Praise for Time Song) * Poetic and fascinating * Olivia Laing (Praise for Time Song) *
Julia Blackburn has written ten books of non-fiction, the most recent of which, Time Song, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize. Her family memoir The Three of Us won the 2009 J. R. Ackerley Award, and her two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper' s Companions, were both shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Suffolk and Italy.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781787332171
Published: 16 Jun 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Hardback
Height: 240mm
Width: 156mm
Spine: 40mm
Weight: 750g
Pages: 304

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