Red Dog

Description

A blistering, brutal novel of the South African frontier from a major new literary voice

In the eighteenth century, a giant strides the border of the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight.

Red Dog is a brilliant, fiercely powerful novel – a wild, epic tale of Africa in a time before boundaries between cultures and peoples were fixed, based on the life of a real historical figure.Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize

The Booker judges call Red Dog ’a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project.’

‘Sensational… Anker writes like a talented demon’ Antonia Senior, The Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month

‘One of the best antiheroes you will read this year leaps from the pages’ The Times Best Summer Books

‘Ambitious… brings South Africa’s bloody birth to life’ Spectator

‘A powerful and stark historical novel… A twenty-first century story in the vein of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness… This staggeringly original blend of fact and fiction is savage but totally gripping’ NB Magazine

‘The hottest piece of writing out here… a highly readable and relentless tale … passionately nihilistic with inserts of great noir humour and even sometimes truly moving tenderness’ Marlene van Niekerk

‘The Afrikaans equivalent of the postmodern cowboys-and-Indians tales of Cormac McCarthy.’
Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart

‘Extremely wild, dramatic, original, dangerous and riveting. It is a literary experience that I will not forget.’
Sissi ReadsWillem Anker was born in Citrusdal in the Western Cape in 1979 and lectures in creative writing at Stellenbosch University. His first novel, Siegfried, was published in 2007. Red Dog was published in Afrikaans in 2014 and won six major literary prizes in South Africa. It is his first novel to be translated into English.1
Come and see! The lizard on the rock, white ant in its beak. Its jaws
start churning. It surveys its surroundings, all along the kloof. Its
chomping subsides, its eyeballs roll. The colour of its head and
forepaws proclaims its readiness to mate. It displays its red-brown
back and ruff. It looks up, swivels its neck to the right. The blue skin
of its neck strains and stretches.
See, behind the crag lizard I arise from the rock. I dust my hat,
light my pipe. Behold me: I am the legend Coenraad de Buys. Come,
let me contaminate you, my reader of tainted stock. If you read this,
you see what I see. And I see everything. I am of all time, I am
immortal. Do not call me soul. I have a multitude of names. Call me
rather Coenraad, or Coen if you are my mother or sister. Pen me
down as De Buijs, De Buys, Buys or Buis, just as you see fit. Call me
King of the Bastards, Khula, Kadisha, Moro, Diphafa or Kgowe. I am
all of them. I am omnipresent. I am Omni-Buys. You will find me in
many embodiments. You will come across me as itinerant farmer and
anthropologist, rebel and historian. I am a vagabond, a book-bibber,
a smuggler, lover and naturalist. I manifest as hunter, bigamist, orator,
pillager, patriot, stone-shagger. I am a warrior and a liar; I am a
scoundrel and a teller of my own tale. I am going to blind you and
bewilder you with my incarnations, with my omnipotent gaze. I am
a bird of passage, I am the wind beneath your wings. Stroke the small
of my back and you will know I am no angel. I know you well. I know
you can’t look away.
May I bewhisper you further? The little hairs in your ear vibrate
as my breath comes closer. Migrate with me through human memory,
over the unmarked dusty wastes as far as the primal footprint, the first
built fire, the troop of ape-like creatures heaving erect in the grasslands.
Hear the feet stamping in the caves. See the half-human animals
scratching and painting on rock faces, how they trace the trajectories
from animal to human, voyages between hand and paw, snout and
nose, transitions to the other side.
How far are you prepared to follow in my footsteps? Have you
taken fright already? Behold the scars of my passage, the marks of
my skin on mother earth. Note well: My hide is this dust and sand.
Hear me in every footfall, every hoof-fall. See me reflected in every
eye gazing into a fire: I am both mark and mirror. I am of this land,
bred from stone.
See, the crag lizard swallows the termite, minutely adjusts its foot,
scarcely skims the soil. Listen, history is starting to quake, the dust
of forgotten battles and unrecorded deaths is shaken up, quivering
under the seething surface.
Rush headlong with me in the frantic flight of time to where the
hunters and diggers of roots are shouldered aside by herdsmen and
tillers of the land. Onward, through eras of wandering and settlement.
Hurry past seafarers planting crosses in their wake. Skim past
shipwrecks named for saints, smashed to smithereens on the rude
rock of Good Hope. Come wade with me through the rivers of blood:
pulsing from noses during dances, spurting from bodies, pouring
down hafts and blades of wood and iron, later from bullet wounds,
primordially from the wombs of mothers, from hymens and umbilical
cords; all the blood always slurped back into the soil.GB

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