Love Child Paperback – 28 Jun. 2011

Looking forward to reading this. looks good.

I'm a big fan of Sheila Kohler's work; I've read most of her novels and LOVE CHILD stands out for me as one of her best. As with CRACKS, she is writing out of a place she knows and feels deeply--her homeland, South Africa. Her subtle political, racial and class references prove a vast knowledge of how apartheid worked both on and below the surface of everyone's lives. Her imagination is also operating out of the raw crucible of family and it shows in the emotive power of her narrative and the fluid profundity of her language, which is beautifully descriptive and evocative, lush and yet pointedly lean when it needs to be. And, lastly, her handling of the tricky interplay between past and present could serve as a model for any writer currently wrestling an unruly novel, or a reader simply interested in spending time in the mind of a master of form.

Like most of Sheila Kohler's constantly expanding oeuvre, but perhaps more than any of the others, this new novel keeps delivering startling but credible surprises. The flashback-flashforward format seems natural almost from the beginning, and seemed to me the exact right frame for one of the novel's messages -- that life's "progress" can be driven by abrupt zigs, zags, reversals, triumphs, and unpredictable outcomes both good and bad, and when they occur there is no way to know whether they will turn out to be positive or how long they wll last. The disparate characters -- comprising (it seemed to me) something of a sociological tour of South African society in the early and middle twentieth century (not altogether different, one imagines, perhaps from other western societies, American in particular -- are compelling, interesting, all given to self-damaging, and often other people-damaging, behavior patterns and decisions, but they are not cardboard or one-dimensional. One of the aspects that affected me was how realsitically insuperable constraints , people's necessarily limited grasp of where things stand or, especially, where they could be going, generates life choices and decisions which may seem tragically askew in hindsight but are quite understandable given the scene when they were made. A really great read and a really fine novel.

I completely enjoyed this novel. The story flowed very well even though it went from the future to the past to the middle past... and I usually don't like that sort of thing but in this novel the author worked it extremely well. Don't let that put you off if you, like me, are not fond of that. This novel is absolutely a must read in my opinion.One of the reviewers said she had a "quibble" with the novel because she didn't like the main character. Of course that's fine. I agree that Bill was not perfect and I agree some of her thinking made me say "hmmm..." but that made the novel all the more interesting to me. Not having a perfect main character is so much more interesting than having a predicatible and non-flawed one. IMHO.

I bought this on my Kindle because everyone here gave it such glowing reviews. Also, the New York Times review was good. But I found it full of cliches and not a single likable character. I finished it because it was very short, and the writing, line by line, was okay, although completely bland and predictable. The details about life in South Africa are watered down versions of those far better described by Nadine Gordimer. This is just a romance novel fooling naive readers into thinking it is literature. Overall it was a waste of $10 bucks.

The language in Love Child is so beautiful, lush, evocative, and fluid that it's mesmerizing, akin to entering a meditative state. The South African details, and the exploration of race, class and sex fascinate, and the novel maintains a heightened level of suspense through the last page. A fast read, the book also reflects the highest literary standards; Sheila Kohler is a a masterful, award-winning author, and this is my favorite book of hers since Cracks (also available as a film), and the best book I've read in a long time. The novel is full of surprises--always spinning in unforeseen directions; the flawed but sympathetic characters are fully developed, and the internal and external conflicts always compelling. I highly recommend this novel to general raeders seeking a great read, as well as to aficionados of literary fiction.