
The Classifier
Wessel Ebersohn(Author)
Umuzi (Publisher)
Published on 11. June 2011
Book
352 pages
978-1-4152-0215-9 (ISBN)
Description
15-year-old Chrissie grows up in an Afrikaans household in Durban in the 1970s. His taciturn father is to him a god-like figure, and is known as someone with a very important job in the Government. When his father at last begins to take notice of him and takes him along to his workplace, Chrissie learns that his father is the region's chief classifier of races for Apartheid South Africa, dealing mainly with "problem cases". At first Chrissie is unable to see a conflict between what his father is doing to protect white people, and the fact that he has fallen in love with a girl, Ruthie, who is not white. He cannot resist this girl; their clandestine meetings become more and more difficult to maintain, and something has to give. Told retrospectively, we know that Chrissie has grown into the wealthy businessman he was always going to be as an obsessively entrepreneurial youth, but also that he has become an expat, flung away from his country and from happiness by the system of laws that did not obey the natural ways of human love. A classic and poignantly told rights-of-passage story that calls The Boy in the Striped Pajamas into recollection.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
South Africa
Publishing group
Penguin Random House South Africa
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 148 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
500 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4152-0215-9 (9781415202159)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Wessel Ebersohn lives in Johannesburg. Most of his books have been international successes. They include A Lonely Place to Die, Divide the Night, Store up the Anger and Closed Circle. His two most recent novels, The October Killings (2009) and Those Who Love Night are being published in America. Together with his wife Miriam he is the founding owner of Succeed, a magazine for entrepreneurs.