Sharmilla, and other portraits

Sharmilla, and other portraits

Elleke Boehmer, ISBN:9781770098107, R165.00

Summary

Police question a Cape Town female escort about the whereabouts of her client, the mysterious and impassioned Mr C.  An elderly writer reflects on her experiences of the struggle and the complicated allegiances it has brought her.  A father works together with his daughter to bring, as he thinks, Bach to Africa. Sharmilla and Other Portraits offers a dynamic series of insights into a South Africa in edgy transition.  Its vivid and varied narratives follow a range of displaced children, mothers, and domestic workers, a stadium manager, an AIDS patient and an office secretary, as they look in on the new and changing situation.  In Sharmilla and Other Portraits the internationally celebrated writer Elleke Boehmer distils a compelling cycle of radiant snapshots detailing lived lives and their interwoven and secret undercurrents.  Sharmilla and Other Portraits will appeal to all readers interested in the intimate grief and pleasures of South Africans today. 

About the Author

Elleke Boehmer was born in Durban, South Africa, to Dutch parents, but has since been settled in the UK, teaching in several of the universities. Her current position at the University of Oxford is a return of sorts to an academic environment she had an earlier experience of as an Oxford student. Her works of fiction include Screens against the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993) and Bloodlines (2000). Boehmer has also published many articles, reviews and essays, and is editor or author of several texts, including Altered State (1994) and Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Migrant Metaphors (1995).