The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology

Abstract

Mark Behr's novel The Smell of Apples, first published in Afrikaans in 1993, has been described as an autopsy, a meticulous dissection of apartheid's moldy corpse (Morphet 226-27). But for a reader like me, who grew up as a child of the Afrikaner elite in exactly the same period as the children in the novel, it is more like a haunting, an uncanny encounter with nearly forgotten, yet instantly recognizable shades and echoes. The stale notions and phraseology recited by the novel's young narrator--for example, "the Communists will use pop music to take over the Republic" (67), "a Volk that forgets its history is like a man without a memory" (38)--are as intimate to me as the names in the parade of faded celebrities that the novel resurrects: Pierre Fourie, Glenda Kemp, Eddie Barlow, Mitzi Stander. They greet me as familiars--Mitzi's tragic car crash, Louwtjie Barnard's broken heart, John Vorster's détente, the Rapportryers! It all comes back, across an ocean and across the even wider gap of the English translation. 1