Devils Chimney

by Anne Landsman

In Anne Landsman's complex debut novel , The Devil's Chimney, middle-aged Connie Lambrecht lives a life of quiet desperation in a rural South African outpost called Oudtshoorn, where she runs a dog kennel, quietly suffers the abuse of her weak-willed husband Jack, and drinks to excess. Faced with such unremitting misery, it's no wonder that Connie becomes obsessed with two stories from the past: first, the disappearance of a colored servant girl in the Cango Caves, and second, an upper-class Englishwoman's doomed attempt to run an ostrich farm nearby. As Connie attempts to reconstruct these narratives, they intertwine with her own in an increasingly feverish--and sometimes confusing--way. Landsman writes with dreamlike intensity, and her novel is strongly influenced by magical realism. Yet The Devil's Chimney is also a meditation on the very real dichotomies of race and gender in South Africa--as well as the tension between passion and terror.

Genres: Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

ALTHOUGH I grew up in Worcester, a small South African town in the shadow of the Brandwacht mountains, that wasn't the real me. The real me was best friends with Petunia, the North American goose who left her gooseprints in deep snow; Scuffy, the tugboat, who bumped up against logs and loggers as he floated down an East Coast river; and Madeleine, the little girl who lived right near the amazing Eiffel Tower. The South African skies, the mountains, the endless varieties of indigenous plants - all these things were intensely present in my life as a child and also entirely absent from the world of my imagination, where I lived. Most of the children I went to school with were Afrikaans, had blonde hair and shockingly blue eyes. I was Jewish, my black hair curled in every direction and my nose was long. It added another layer of not belonging. And then there was apartheid, which was invented and established while I was growing up. I knew it was wrong, my parents knew it was wrong, but that's where we lived, that's where we had a house with a brass plaque on the front wall which read - Dr. G.B. Landsman, M.B.Ch.B., M.R.C.P. (Edin.) That's where we had loquat trees, and guava trees, a silver tree and a kumquat tree. I was always passionate about leaving. When I was very young, I believed London, Paris and New York were on the other side of the Brandwacht mountains because that's where I wanted them to be. I got the idea of leaving from my mother, who took me to the public library on hot afternoons. The idea of staying came from my father, whose plaque remained affixed to the wall in front of the house until the day he died. I switched hemispheres when I was 21. I had just finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town. I wanted to see London and Paris and New York, finally. New York stole my soul. It was everything South Africa was not. There was no Nature to miss in the tangle of buildings and the experience of a thousand cultures rubbing up against each other. I went to Columbia University and graduated with an M.F.A. in screenwriting and directing. My writing career started with the writing of screenplays, under the eye of the late Frank Daniel, the best teacher I have ever had. That's where I began to think of writing about South Africa, the place I never read about as a child. A short story I wrote which was published in the American Poetry Review became the prologue to my first novel, The Devil's Chimney. I then went on to adapt the novel for the screen, as well as teach writing myself. I also published essays, reviews and interviews and wrote a second novel, The Rowing Lesson, once again learning that some portion of my heart will always beat in that opposite hemisphere, in the shadow of the Brandwacht mountains, not far from the house with the loquat trees. Some part of me stayed down there. I belong where I am not"

Reviews

[Ben Tamm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesus. Anne Landsman, your writing is absolutely masterful, but…are you okay??

[Jenneffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talk about a tragic story! In some ways, the hardship and heartbreak each of the characters endures reflects the setting: the Karoo of South Africa. I visited Nieu Bethesda and surrounds in June 2010, which is wintertime in South Africa, and it is 1) so very cold because it is a semi-desert, and 2) bleak, stark and lonesome, but 3) very beautiful. Prickly pear and ostriches are farmed, but that's about it. Donkeys and rocky hills abound, wind and dust. It feels sleepy, like a ghost town that time forgot, but there are small evidences of life here and there.

Landsman includes some mysticism as part of her storytelling, much like Alexie, Anaya and Esquivel, except that she writes from an Afrikaner lens. Afrikaners are of Dutch descent, are white, and fiercely independent. The magic is woven through the story via the "hotnots" or Xhosa and Colored servants and farm workers who play large roles in the white people's lives. Are the white people the center of the story? Well, in some ways, yes. There are two ladies, one in the present and one in the past, who are the protagonists, who are intertwined like two clouds, or hazes.

The haze is seamless, but sad, because the main character in the present is a drunkard and doesn't remember everything clearly. However, she is not made fun of, or characterized in any way. Others in her life, such as her husband and mother, don't take her seriously, but the author gives her all the dignity anybody else would receive. These two women endure huge losses and are not the same afterward, and we are led along their painful journeys, sometimes unsure of where we are headed. That's what makes this book so great, the pulse that drives you to see what happens next, whether or not you fully understand at the time. But you do understand, the pieces come together.

One thing I'm not sure of is how well a person who is unfamiliar with South Africa, with Afrikaners, with the Karoo, could relate to this novel? There are quite a few colloquial terms and Afrikaans words, some that are not translated in the included glossary. I would like to see what others think.

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is good. Really good. Really well written. I did not like it at all. It is full of the ugliness of South African life and past. It follows on from a long tradition of novels about South Africa that expose the ugliness to a level that is difficult to digest. It makes me sad to read all of these books and to think that possibly all of the artistic writing about South African past and present can only be this ugly. Because that is what it was. That is all we have inherited. So it is a real and gritty and ugly story and reflects what we have to draw on, but it leaves me feeling hopeless and disturbed and uncomfortable. Which is possibly the only way I should feel after reading any book about our past.

[Gillian McCabe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating but not an easy read

[Tiah]

The writing style reminded me of Tracey Farren's Snake. Although the narrator in The Devil's Chimney is probably much more unreliable than the child in Snake. I was warned that this book was 'a lot of work' to read. It wasn't work, like Clockwork Orange, but it did require me to read slower (that's not always a bad thing). The book leaves so much to ponder. I'm surprised so few people on goodreads have it on their read list.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

broekies are panties in afrikans. superb novel. i'm sending it back to sa.

[Laurel Deloria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much alcohol, too much misunderstandings too much deception. Interesting way of writing, an South African novel setting sort of new to me.

In the shadows of the Cango Caves in rural South Africa lives Connie Lambrecht, dazed by alcohol and devastating memories. A "poor white," she is haunted by the disappearance of a young "colored" girl in a passage called the Devil's Chimney and obsessed with the story of an Englishwoman who arrived with her husband in 1910 to run an ostrich farm during the international craze for ostrich plumes. The story of Miss Beatrice--a lushly told tale of passion and transgression, violence and tragedy, retribution and redemption--entwines in surprising ways with Connie's own dark secrets. Set against a harsh, dazzling landscape and a social system in which the lives of women and black people are equally expendable--and compared by reviewers to the works of Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, and Flannery O'Connor--The Devil's Chimney is an artful, lyrical, and explosive debut.

[Lesley Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stark account of two interwoven lives, the protagonists are both women living in Oudsthoorn, South Africa; the present day narrator, the alchoholic Connie & Beatrice, a married British emigree living on an ostrich farm during the early 1900's during the grand era of ostrich feathers. A compelling read illustrating the darkest human desires, greed, lust, power found throughout history. The mysterious Cango caves are central to both narratives.

[Brenda Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the best book ever written about crazy ostrich farmers in Africa

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting story, about a woman taking over a farm for her husband in Africa, but went off into the metaphysical deep end near the end of the story, which I didn't particularly enjoy. I was annoyed by the use of Afrikaaner throughout the book; I had to flip to the glossary in the back, and I don't feel the sprinkling of words really added anything to the story. I got lazy and just made up my own meanings for the words.

[Marcella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read. The story takes place on an farm in So Africa during a short boom when Ostrich feathers were the rage in fashion. Passionate, sensual and kept my interest.