Apartheid novel focuses on fate over free will

Kafka's Curse: A Novel
by Achmat Dangor. Pantheon Books. 225 pages. $22.

     Though Americans may think of South Africa in terms of black and white, the South African poet-novelist Achmat Dangor knows better. Set during the dismantling of apartheid, his "Kafka's Curse" unravels tangled genealogies of race, culture, and class.
     The novel, the first of Dangor's works to be published in the United States, tells of people who are not as they appear. Oscar Kahn, a moderately successful Jewish architect, was born Omar Khan, part of a family both "coloured" and Muslim, with roots that are Indian, Malaysian, and Dutch. Changing his name allowed him to "pass," enabling him to prosper under apartheid's caste system - and to marry outside of his race.
     Each of the first three sections focuses, respectively, on Omar/Oscar, his wife Anna, and his brother Malik; a fourth part returns to Anna and gives voice to other characters. The final pages focus on Amina Mandelstam, Omar/Oscar's therapist and (later) Malik's lover. While this Modernist device provides little in the way of narrative drive, it does deliver effective character sketches, allowing the stories to unfold with subtlety.
     Open to nuance but by no means reticent, the novel can be quite blunt in its discussion of the intimate relationships between these characters. Direct, though not lurid, "Kafka's Curse' treats both sex and a subplot of sexual abuse with sensitivity.
     While the family histories that led to the abuse may be part of the curse of the title, the "Kafka" seems to refer both to metaphysical transformations and to inescapable structures of power. Emphasizing fate more than free will, Dangor nonetheless shows his characters' choices rooted in the social, legal and national history of South Africa.
     PHIL NEL
     (Phil Nel is an adjunct professor of English at the College of Charleston.)