THIS book of twenty-one short stories by a young South
African should find an English publisher, for Mr. Bosman, who (it seems) published his first novel last year, is a writer of quite unusual evocative power. Not since Olive Schreiner has the heavy, slow, traditional life of the veld been so well recorded—the shadowless dead heat, the thorn-trees, the stoney earth, the relentless sun. The stories themselves are slight. Each is constructed round some incident— a dream ; an arrest ; the bite of a brown mamba ; the effect of a biograph show in the local town upon a young girl's mind—but each is sensitive, nostalgic and clean-cut. Mr. Bosman conveys not only the conversational idiom of the old Dutch trekkers, but also their astute and cumbrous processes of thought. All of Mr. Bosman's stories give you that rare and desirable sense of getting a glimpse into a world remote fro•in your own experience: a sense, almost, of riding out into the veld at high noon.
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