Living in a solitary farm, with limited social contact made even scarcer by the mistress of the house’s inhospitality, the family members and their servants are pitted against each other and held together by bonds of affection, rivalry, hate and need. Through Sussie’s uncertain recollections, we see tragedy building on the horizon. The farmsteaders’ monotonous life is altered by the arrival of a young woman coming to the house as a bride. The newcomer’s presence will change everyone’s lives in unforeseen ways; but it’s the mother of the family’s incapability to feel or offer any love that will ultimately bring them all to grief.

Schoeman’s haunting, evocative prose manages to turn a fairly simple storyline into compelling reading. While delving into her people’s half-remembered, often mysterious actions and trying to make sense of events that happened long before, Sussie often comments that, after all, most of these men and women are long dead – a sobering idea that rings strangely ironical when one thinks of their grimness in life.

But Schoeman is at his best when describing through the old woman’s eyes the stark landscape she so clearly loves, which comes alive in her reminiscences in all the eerie beauty of its barrenness and the changing seasons.

There are few characters in this introspective novel that the reader can warm to. Even the dominated, miserable coloured servants, which in a less skillful work might have been more sympathetically depicted, are shown in all their petty meanness, bent under the weight of their own hatreds.

And yet, in spite of the unlikable characters and their suffocating isolation, ‘This Life’ is an engaging work of fiction: by turns somber and luminous, pulsing with the power of human struggle, and brimming with unspoken emotion.

Laura Chalar is a 29-year-old poet-cum-lawyer from Uruguay, South America (currently living in Buenos Aires, Argentina). Her first book of poetry was published in Montevideo in 2005. She is in charge of the poetry section of the Uruguayan literary magazine Letra Nueva, where she also publishes book reviews and articles, and of the cultural section of the community periodical La Farola, where she contributes reviews and articles on literary and historical issues. In 2006 she will be a guest editor of Versal magazine.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.