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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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WOLF, WOLF

Eben Venter

Literary fiction set in post-apartheid South Africa.
Mattie Duiker is trying very hard to live up to his dying father's wishes. He is putting aside childish things, starting his first business, taking responsibility. His patriarchal, conservative Pa is proud. But at the same time, Mattie is pulled toward an altogether other version of masculinity, in which oiled and toned bodies cavort for him at the click of a mouse. His porn addiction both threatens his relationships and imperils his inheritance....

Venter’s WOLF, WOLF embodies some of the crucial changes in post-apartheid South Africa in the struggles of identity, principle and inheritance between the generations in Afrikaner society. But as well as its particular local virtues it is also a universally compelling novel about fathers and sons, models of masculinity, the limits to tolerance in a family, the difficulties of sexual freedom and social purpose, the irruption of unseen power shifts.

Venter left SA for Australia, where he now lives and cooks in the Byron Bay area. His writing has won many awards in South Africa, and he has taught at Rhodes University. With uncommon sensitivity to place, time and sex, WOLF, WOLF will reveal Eben Venter to the world outside his homeland as one of its most astute and acute observers, giving shape in story to some of the sea-changes of our time.
Available products
Book

Published 2015-03-01 by Scribe

Book

Published 2015-03-01 by Scribe

Comments

Eben Venter's Wolf Wolf is a wild ride of hope and resentment...brilliant, emitting flashes of light, but brutal and, dare I say it, loosely, in the lineage of the great Coetzee, with an all-seeing narrator so tough on himself and also in its lurch towards a day of reckoning. Read more...

Wolf, Wolf is a mesmerising novel. Much as Goldblatt’s portraits did in their time, he skewers his world into place with detail. Matt Duiker rings true – stuck between the old South Africa now passing away, and a new world painfully coming into being. Read more...

...It's very well-written - Venter has a punchy, vivid style, with a lot of unusual sentence constructions that flow really well together - but boy, it's hard going. Emotionally, psychically, even spiritually if that's your thing: you'll feel you've been put through the wringer. That means Wolf, Wolf wouldn't be to everyone's taste. However, if it sounds like it's yours, the book makes for a rewarding and satisfying read. Read more...

I am deeply impressed. An outstanding novel.

WOLF, WOLF is shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award 2014

The novel won the Sunday Times best Afrikaans novel of the year award 2014.

A patriarch is dying, his liver-spotted hand hovering shakily above the cheque book while estranged children and conniving servants circle around the family home. It is a familiar narrative set-up but one given some extra twists in Eben Venter’s often caustic, sometimes tender novel Wolf, Wolf...

WOLF, WOLF is the winner of the kykNET-Rapport Fiction Prize 2014