I wish I had sat down as soon as I was done with this book to jot down my thoughts on it. It just was not to be and here I am wanting to post about this classic book yet not fully remembering all that happened in it. I just have this great feeling of having read a good book... First published in 1989 it fell into my hands only now. It was a gift from H for my birthday. Whenever he decides to give me a book as a gift he always gets it right. He says it is with the help of the clerk at the book store but I'll take a good book any day over other gifts.
It took me while to finish it. I put it down at times only because I had to. It tells the story of a boy somewhere at the beginning of the apartheid in South Africa. A lonely boy who learned to take that loneliness by its neck and turned it around to a place of inner strength despite or because of all the experiences that came his way. Please read it and you will find yourself pausing at times and going back to re-read some stuff time and again because it speaks to something in you. Here is one: "-how I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed". And another: "The power of one was based on the courage to remain separate, to think through to the truth, and not to be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expects to maintain power."
Bryce Cortenay passed away in 2012 but he will live forever through the power of his words.
It took me while to finish it. I put it down at times only because I had to. It tells the story of a boy somewhere at the beginning of the apartheid in South Africa. A lonely boy who learned to take that loneliness by its neck and turned it around to a place of inner strength despite or because of all the experiences that came his way. Please read it and you will find yourself pausing at times and going back to re-read some stuff time and again because it speaks to something in you. Here is one: "-how I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed". And another: "The power of one was based on the courage to remain separate, to think through to the truth, and not to be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expects to maintain power."
Bryce Cortenay passed away in 2012 but he will live forever through the power of his words.
