A grandfather's diaries paint a picture of suffering and survival, writes Jessie Neilson. Hertmans takes his grandfather's precise observations and weaves around them a partly biographical, partly fictional account of this copyist-cum-soldier's experiences. It is dense with sensitive observation of the entanglement in life of peace and war, beauty and ugliness, simplicity and complexity. The reader follows this man through an unceasingly laborious childhood into the desolate landscape of war and back home again. Overwhelming is the visual quality of the prose and the pervasive sense of one man's suffering, enduring and, finally, surviving.

Source: Otago Daily Times October 09, 2016 17:15 UTC