towards the end of May 2022, unaware of the earlier accusations. About halfway in – before I noticed the“As far as other quotations, references and rewritings are concerned: Omni-Buys saw it all, read every word. He eats as he reads. As he plunders mission stations and cattle kraals, so he plunders the texts of others far and wide in order to tell his own tale. Should you then in his retelling stumble across the remains of other authors, regard it as the homage of a scoundrel.
They might add: we hardly expect novelists to declare influences and sources that go into the making of their work. Isn’t intertextual play the beating heart of the modernist tradition to whichbrings tribute? Half the pleasure in reading a work of literature is that it enlists our participation.’s Bible and transforms it to match the wilderness of late 1700s/1800s South Africa, and also Buys’s untamed psyche:A sceptical reader must agree that this is a fine bit of transposing.
Given the barefaced translation of Beckett that soon follows, “but not the words” reads either as suppression or provocation. Albeit in a different language, it’s exactly the words of Beckett that manifest on the page.. It’s much more expressively generous than its English counterpart, magnanimity . To beis to be disposed to complexity – as a principle of compassion but also of intellectual broadmindedness.
Except, of course, if the homage remains unrealised. By trading on the beauty of Estragon and Vladimir’s exchanges, by drawing from the well of Beckettian despair, and by securing a buy-out through a cover-all acknowledgement, Anker has his cake and eats it too.view must also admit the possibility that Anker was seduced by his very seductive creation. Buys declares himself to be a rover, a plunderer. He acts with impunity not only in the world of the novel but across time.