Could be spoilers. Part of the project to read at least one book by everybody listed in the Who's Who of Twentieth Century Novelists. I did not like this book. Not at all. It is told in the first person as the story of a boy/young man with uncertain racial identity in South Africa. He starts out in a privileged position & aside from a few comments nobody questions his right to be there. But then he gets into trouble and leaves home and in his new life he is clearly perceived as non-white. The characters are mostly unpleasant (I know...realism!), and the narrator is not very smart. There are lots of unpleasant earthy details, like ear-wax and flat feet. I guess..what...maybe this is a satire showing life in South Africa? The pub date is not 1997, but 1981, but it seems very old fashioned. Not like the sophisticated writings of the "great" South African writers. I found it slow to read & often hard-going; partly because of the language and partly because of the story.

Published in 1981, this novel is a brilliant satire set in late 1950s South Africa that is at its heart an indictment of apartheid. No wonder this book was banned in South Africa, and was controversial in many circles. The author, himself, who later won awards for this work and other books, was exiled from SA since 1975.

The story is a "confession" of Harry Moto, a 15-yr old white boy whose main preoccupation was, as befit his age, his fallen arches, hair that was becoming more crinkly by the day, plump breasts, and unusually dark skin. We follow his last days as a "white" person -- as a member of a middle-class family, as a student in a Catholic school, and as a typical teen-ager eager for experience and adventure. His "non-white" features increasingly obvious, more and more get him ridiculed and into very embarrassing situations. Before he could fully grasp it, events overtake him and he is forced to become the unthinkable. He has always known there was something "odd" about him, and so it is without qualm, indeed, it was with great relief and not a little joy, that he "morphed" into invisibility as a coloured individual. As we follow Harry's "descent", we learn, together with him, how it is to be the oppressor, then the oppressed.

I liked very much Hope's intelligent, crisp, unsentimental writing --- the book is very funny, outrageously funny even, it had me laughing off my seat many times, but there is nothing intrinsically funny about the subject matter, that is, Harry's fate and the nature of apartheid. And that is the brilliance of this novel --- he uses to maximum effect ridicule and satire, without ever demeaning into low humor or venturing into moral exhortation, to expose the cruelty and the absurdity of the racial system. And with this device, he gets the message across even more sharply and more effectively.

Hope is one of those breed of authors who write superbly and with incredible acuity and sensitivity, but who aren't a big commercial success because they write about issues that are politically sensitive, even offensive to some. But, for me, all the more reason to search out the works of this lesser-known jewel. ( )

Harry Moto is a crazy guy - or is he a normal guy to whom crazy things happen? - absurd, hilarious, corrosive, original, savage, unique, bizarre, horrific - and very, very funny. ( )