Agaat tells the story of the complex dynamics of a small South African farming family, Milla, who inherits a family farm, her husband Jak, Agaat, the neglected and abused young daughter of one of her mother's farmhands, who Milla adopts, and Milla's son Jakkie.Milla is lying paralysed and dying of motor neurone disease, able only to blink her eyes but fully lucid, while Agaat cares for her, and the story is told through her thoughts, flashbacks and diary entries.The novel packs in several different themes:- complex inter-family and master-servant relationships. Milla is unsparing on even herself in her recollections, recalling her husband's complaint"But do you know Milla, what it's like to spend your days next to a woman who always knows better. In whose eyes you can't do anything right? For whom everything you tackle is doomed in advance"- indirect but very telling observations on the apartheid regime, as Milla brings up the coloured child Agaat and encounters prejudice from family, neighbours, the establishment and even the farmhands. Even Milla's own motivations are suspect - she seems to treat Agaat more as a trained animal performing tricks than a pari passu family member, and once she has a biological son Agaat is soon relegated albeit to a still relatively priviliged housekeeper role.- a deliberately painfully detailed and claustrophic description of Milla's last days. Neatly the story offers parallels between Agaat caring for the helpless Milla and Milla's drawout attempts to communicate through Milla's eye contacts and blinking, with Milla's own initial caring for the mute and feral Agaat when she is first adopted. Indeed Agaat appears to quite deliberately be mirroring her treatment as a child as Milla regresses to childhood helplessness.- and a warts and all heavily researched and detailed, indeed perhaps overly detailed, description of farming life.The overall effect is that the novel is an impressive achievement, but the net effect is a rather sprawling read of almost 700 pages. I have no objection to long books, quite the contrary if the story or quality of prose justifies it, but here one felt van Niekerk has tried to pack too many things in, and failed to come up with a more compact way of covering the different themes.Which, of course, only increases my admiration for the translator, Michiel Heyns. At 576 pages this was a big read, but one I loved. A beautifully told story about a White family operating a large farm in South Africa and the complicated relationship with the Africaans people who work the farm. The book focuses on the relationships between a husband and wife and two children they raise, one born of them and one adopted by them. The adopted child is Black and is later cast in the role of nanny, maid, farm manager of sorts and many other roles.The narrative of the story focuses in the present on the caretaker role the adopted daughter, Agaat, plays for her widowed mother during her death from ALS. Through that narrative that includes memories, diaries, free thought, the voice of Milla conveys to the reader the perspective of losing control of her body over a three year period taking us right into her death. For me this was riveting and masterfully done by the author.The complicated but deep relationship between Milla and Agaat plays through the novel, conveying deep love and loyalty, trust and respect pushing boundaries of race and class divisions in Apartheid South Africa.The relationship of the men in the novel, notably Milla's husband Jak and son Jakkie, present an interesting foil to the relationship among the women and between the women and the men.The story takes place over a 40 year period, 1953 to 1996.Even though it is clear from the start of the book that Milla will die of ALS, I cried at the end when she died. The narrative of her death passage is that moving and dignified.I will add that the last 100 pages of the novel moved quite slow for me and at that point I was feeling the book was too long. But then the final days leading to death for some people are long when the time of death is uncertain and I framed those final 100 pages in that perspective and then they really worked for me.An incredible read.
