Contemporary Authors

• Weeping Waters - 2018 World Noir,

• Amazon -

  Karin Brynard is a former political and investigative journalist and uses her research skills and eye for detail to fascinating effect in Weeping Waters. She is, today, one of Penguin South Africa’s biggest authors.

• Human & Rousseau - http://www.humanrousseau.com/authors/7798

  Karin Brynard
  Biographical info
  Karin Brynard is a journalist who has earned her stripes in the burning streets of Soweto during the Freedom Struggle of the eighties. As political correspondent for a nationwide newspaper, she witnessed the release of Mandela and the subsequent political settlement that ended Apartheid.

  She now works as a freelance journalist and lives in Stellenbosch.

  Karin won the UJ Debut Prize for Creative Writing 2009 (Afrikaans) for Plaasmoord.
  Books still in print
  Onse vaders, Human & Rousseau (2012)
  Plaasmoord, Human & Rousseau (2009)
  Awards
  University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing (2009) – Plaasmoord
  M-Net Literature Award in the film category (2010) – Plaasmoord
  List of publications
  Prose
  2012 Onse vaders, Human & Rousseau
  2009 Plaasmoord, Human & Rousseau

• From Publisher -

  Karin Brynard is a journalist who earned her stripes in the burning streets of Soweto during the Freedom Struggle of the eighties. As a political correspondent for a nationwide newspaper, she witnessed the release of Nelson Mandela and the subsequent political settlement that ended apartheid. Her first two novels, Plaasmoord and Onse vaders, took the South African market by storm, becoming instant bestsellers. She has won numerous literary awards, including the UJ Debut Prize for Creative Writing and two M-Net Awards.

• Blake Friedmann - http://blakefriedmann.co.uk/karin-brynard/

  Karin Brynard
  Agent: Isobel Dixon
  Biography:
  'Brooding. Riveting. Brilliant.' — Deon Meyer
  Experienced political correspondent, now a bestselling South African crime writer. She burst onto the scene with her Afrikaans debut, PLAASMOORD (WEEPING WATERS), characterful literary crime in the Scandinavian mould.

  Human & Rousseau published PLAASMOORD and ONSE VADERS in Afrikaans. Penguin South Africa publish the English editions as WEEPING WATERS and OUR FATHERS, and her next novel HOMELAND (TUISLAND). Her books are also sold in Holland and France.

  Awards:
  University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing (2009) – Plaasmoord (Weeping Waters)
  M-Net Literature Award in the film category (2010) – Plaasmoord (Weeping Waters)
  M-Net Literature Award in the film category (2013) – Onse Vaders (Our Father)
  ATKV Literature Prize (2013 – Onse Vaders (Our Father)
  Longlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (2015) - Plaasmoord (Weeping Waters)

  FOUR BLAKE FRIEDMANN AUTHORS LONGLISTED FOR SUNDAY TIMES PRIZE IN SOUTH AFRICA
  April 8, 2015

  We are delighted to announce that four of our authors have been longlisted for the Sunday Times Prize in South Africa.

  WEEPING WATERS by Karin Brynard (translated by Isobel Dixon and Maya Fowler), A SPORTFUL MALICE by Michiel Heyns and RACHEL’S BLUE by Zakes Mda are on the longlist for The Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, formerly the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Now in its fifteenth year, this prize is awarded annually to a novel that is of ‘rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.’
  In the non-fiction category, DIVIDED LIVES by Lyndall Gordon has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Non-Fiction Prize. This award, now in its twenty-sixth year, is awarded to non-fiction with ‘compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity.’

  Previous Blake Friedmann winners of these prizes include Ivan Vladislavić (who has won both the fiction and non-fiction prizes for PORTRAIT WITH KEYS and THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET), Marlene van Niekerk for AGAAT (translated by Michiel Heyns), Zakes Mda (HEART OF REDNESS) and Hugh Lewin for STONES AGAINST THE MIRROR.
  The shortlists are usually announced at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. For more information on both prizes, check out:

  http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2015/04/06/the-2015-sunday-times-barry-ronge-fiction-prize-longlist/
  http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2015/04/06/the-2015-sunday-times-alan-paton-award-longlist/

• Pen South Africa - http://pensouthafrica.co.za/qa-with-author-karin-brynard/

  Q&A with Journalist and Author Karin Brynard
  27 May 2015
  in Literature

  Karin Byrnard is a journalist and author whose 2009 debut novel Plaasmoord won the UJ Debut Prize for Creative Writing (Afrikaans) as well as the M-Net Literature Award in the film category. Her second novel Onse Vaders (2012) also won the M-Net Literature Award in the film category and the ATKV Prose Prize.
  Plaasmoord was recently translated into English by PEN SA member Maya Fowler and Isobel Dixon and published as Weeping Waters. It was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. An English translation of Onse Vaders is set to be published this year along with a third novel in Afrikaans.
  Favourite South African novel?
  Most recently: Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes.
  What are you working on at the moment?
  Next crime novel featuring Captain Beeslaar. It will hopefully be published in Afrikaans as Tuisland.
  Can you tell us a bit about your fourth novel?
  It is still mostly in my head, but will involve a hostage situation. But first I have finish to Tuisland.
  Favourite part of the writing and publishing process?
  Thinking up new characters in a first draft, recrafting them in a second draft and seeing the final product in print. I like the production part, where one is left on your own, playing god with fictional peoples’ lives.
  Any characters (yours or another writer’s) that have stuck with you?
  I love sergeant Gershwin “Ballies” Pyl, the rookie cop in Weeping Waters. He makes me laugh a lot. Also Dam de Kock, the San/Griqua farm manager who is prime suspect in the farm murders. I often think about him and wish I could meet him in the flesh. Other writers’ characters: Margie Orford’s somewhat aloof Dr Claire Hart. Further afield: Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, Australian Peter Temple’s sleuth, Jack Irish, who also makes antique furniture and bets on horses. Also: Prof Joe O’Laughlin, the psychologist with Parkinson’s Disease in Michael Robotham’s novels. Lisbeth Salander in the Stieg Larsson trilogy is my all time favourite.
  Any advice / tips for writers starting out?
  Remember to play; remember there’s more than one right way.
  Hardest part of the writing and publishing process?
  Uncertainty, fear and doubt – those two are my biggest enemies.
  South African writers or books that have made an impact on you?
  Growing up I read Leon Rousseau and Karl Kielblock’s excellent crime books for youth, which addicted me to this genre. Andre P Brink and Athol Fugard (his published plays) opened my teenage political eyes. Deon Meyer, whose world class crime novels made mince meat of local literary snobs. Marlene van Niekerk, Antjie Krog and Breyten Breytenbach who opened my heart to the incredible beauty of Afrikaans and South African poetry.
  What are you reading at the moment?
  Just finished Belinda Bauer’s The Facts of Life and Death (brilliant) and I’m about to start Mike Nicol’s Power Play, but I’m also reading Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
  If you had to pick one book to give to all South Africans to read what would it be?
  A change of tongue by Antjie Krog.
  Any other genres that you’re interested in trying your hand at?
  No, really, one is enough!
  Proudest moment of your writing career?
  Seeing my first book in print. My husband and I danced around our kitchen table like mad people.
  Favourite quote from a book?
  SA book: “I listen, watching for a story, which I want to hear … that it may float into my ear … I feel that the story is the wind” – !Xam quote from My heart stands in the Hill by Janette Deacon and Craig Foster.
  International book: “Death is my beat. I make a living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it.” The opening lines of American crime writer Michael Connelly’s The Poet.
  What was the process of having Isobel and Maya translate your book like?
  Each one brought something different to the translation – Maya as prize-winning author of youth fiction and Isobel as accomplished poet. I learned so much from them and I really count my lucky stars.

• CrimeReads - https://crimereads.com/south-africas-farm-murders-come-to-crime-fiction/

  South Africa's Farm Murders
  Come to Crime Fiction

  Karin Brynard on Shifting Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa
  April 19, 2018 By Lily Meyer

  Weeping Waters, the South African crime writer Karin Brynard’s first novel to appear in the United States, is the rare book I would recommend to anybody. It has elements of police procedural, of the supernatural, of history and politics and art. The writing and translation are exceptional, and the prose is deeply, multi-lingually South African. It’s impossible to forget that the action of this book takes place at the seam of English and Afrikaans.
  The novel’s hero, Inspector Beeslaar, is a traumatized Johannesburg cop newly moved to the Kalahari Desert, where he finds himself contending with a string of brutal murders, a stock-theft spree, and a group of white right-wing extremists who think they, not Beeslaar, represent the law. There’s a chic, bitchy developer trying to turn the town into a resort; the local Griqua tribe, meanwhile, was trying to reclaim land before Beeslaar arrived, but suddenly that’s going nowhere. The murders are only the start of the questions.
  Plenty of those questions are American, too. Brynard writes with uncommon nuance about racism, oppression, and victimhood. She empathizes with everyone, and cuts no one any slack. There are no saints, no saviors, no one-sided villains. There’s just a small town with problems as big as the world.
  Lily Meyer: What was the origin of this novel?
  Karin Brynard: It all started out from the idea of the farm murder.
  I was intrigued by this particular form of homicide, the often brutal nature of it, the frequency, the horror, the large emotions it evoked in a minority section of “Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation,” while it seemed to leave the rest of society rather cold.
  Why was that, I wondered. And what kind of strange schizophrenia was this for a society to have?
  One school of thought pronounced it an act of genocide, claiming it to be a scorched-earth strategy to force (mostly white) farmers off the land, covertly sanctioned by government and condoned by an apathetic police force.
  Was it some sort of “punishment” for colonialist and apartheid sins? Was it an Afrikaner-only issue—the Afrikaans language, a derivative of colonial Dutch, being the language associated with apartheid and spoken by most commercial farmers? Is that why the English-speaking (white) community and the black majority paid less attention to it?
  The journalist in me wanted to understand, wanted to sort the facts from the emotion, the reality from the rhetoric. When I started the research, I did so as a journalist. But soon I realized that there was much, much more to explore than mere facts.
  It was then that the idea for a novel arose. And, being a crime junkie as a reader, it naturally followed that it would be a crime novel.
  It allowed me to explore and voice all the different aspects of the phenomenon: from the murder victims through to the historical, pre-colonial owners of the land, the outraged white community captured by extremist politics, the racism, the drowning-out of reason, the ongoing greed of people and the human tragedy following in the wake of that greed.
  Meyer: And what does the phrase farm murder mean to you, compared to what it means to your characters?
  Brynard: This was ultimately the question I wrestled with.
  I am a member of the Afrikaans-speaking community. We are the people held responsible for apartheid, we are the descendants of European settlers, of the colonialists, the oppressors, the land grabbers and exploiters. How do I live with this history, this ancestry? How do I exist and behave? How do I be?
  Most of the people getting killed on farms are Afrikaans speaking, although black farm workers are often victims too. They are ordinary people, most of them middle class, some struggling, some others better off. My people. Do I betray them if I don’t join the outrage? If I maintain that we should be outraged by all the farm murders–how do I overlook the fact that our national murder rate is 52 per day and the majority of victims are black?
  How, indeed, did I feel about this? Where do I stand? Do I even have to take a side? And are there really “sides” in this? What, then, is my truth?
  What I discovered is that, of course, there are no simple truths.
  ”I relish the fact that you can put the basic building blocks of a good, honest murder mystery to work in solving bigger societal puzzles.”
  My only task is to keep asking the question, and what better way to address the issue than in an entertaining whodunit? I relish the fact that you can put the basic building blocks of a good, honest murder mystery to work in solving bigger societal puzzles.
  Meyer: As I read Weeping Waters I thought often of Coetzee’s Disgrace. We have Beeslaar, the disgraced man from the city retreating to rural South Africa; we have a violent act against a woman alone on a farm; we have heartbreaking cruelty to animals. Are those parallels intentional? And how does the idea of disgrace inform this book?
  Brynard: Now that you mention them, I see those parallels. But I think they are incidental. I just wanted to write a whodunit, but I wanted to stage it in a setting that I found relevant, interesting and challenging.
  In terms of the themes you highlight: It has become more or less inevitable that post-apartheid stories are framed against our political background. Writers are, like most thinking South Africans, trying to figure out a way to understand why the violence has shifted from the political stage onto the criminal arena. And why it persists. And why it is so intense and fierce. And how do we fix it? More violence? More charity, often misguided?
  Then there is the story of race, of blackness and whiteness, of white men who have lost political power, who are in the process of losing the land, who are accused of having fathered the violence. Do they dare call themselves victims?
  Meyer: Speaking of which, you do such a good job demonstrating the racism of the idea of white victimhood in post-apartheid (or, in the U.S., post-slavery) society. There’s an explicit moment when Buks Hanekom, the right-wing leader in this community, says, “We are the victims here, us white farmers.” To me, Weeping Waters reads as a rebuttal of this idea. Did you intend it to be?
  Brynard: I wanted to lift the skirts, so to speak, of the blameless nature of victimhood. If you write crime, you are constantly challenged by the question of the blameless victim versus the evil perpetrator.
  “Although this form of crime in South Africa has a racial face, it is not a black-and-white issue. There are just way too many grey areas in reality.”
  The fun thing that crime writing allows you to do is to debunk the notion of the “poor” and “blameless” victim. Quite often the hapless victim turns out to have had an awful personality or unsavory history. The victim’s backstory is a favorite tool of the crime writer’s craft. Same goes for the perpetrator.
  The reality is that farm murders are hideous crimes. Doing research for the book, I travelled a lot through rural farming areas and spoke to a lot of survivors, people who had lost family members—(white) farm owners as well as (black) workers. In writing the story, I had to remain sensitive to and respectful of the suffering of these people. Getting to meet them, speaking to them and hearing their stories, changed any preconception or judgment you might have had of them.
  At the same time, I researched the perpetrators, mostly young men, mostly black and poor and badly educated. How different their lives could have been, I often wondered, had they been born in different circumstances.
  In the process I was often baffled by the human capacity for cruelty—in the present as well as in our blood soaked past. Put against the background of world history, we are no different.
  And although this form of crime in South Africa has a racial face, it is not a black-and-white issue. There are just way too many grey areas in reality.
  Which allows even more space to write a challenging suspense novel.
  Meyer: You also do such a good job of preventing Beeslaar from being a white-savior character, and you gently make the point that Freddie, the novel’s first murder victim, wanted to be the “rescuing white madam.” How did you approach that question?
  Brynard: Beeslaar is a bit of an anachronism in the current social climate here, not only because he’s an old school cop, but also because of his physical appearance, his Afrikaans-ness and his whiteness. He is a very big man, the size of an ex-rugby player, and he comes across as the no-nonsense type. He might be mistaken for the typical traditional conservative white male. If he was sitting alone in a bar, the rednecks would automatically drift towards him, trying to buddy up with him.
  But his heart works differently. It is the heart of a person who has vowed only to serve and protect the vulnerable.
  Freddie, on the other hand, is more the typical white liberal who desperately wants to atone for the sins of the fathers by forcing their charity onto people they deem to be in need of it. This rather romantic, paternalistic notion is often misplaced and just as often exploited. And then rejected for its naiveté. I try not to judge and belittle it.
  Meyer: Do you write in Afrikaans for personal reasons, political reasons, or both?
  Brynard: I write in Afrikaans because that is the language in which I express myself best. It is an earthy language, rooted in Africa and forged by slaves in the hot kitchens of the Dutch settlers over the past two centuries. Thus it is weirdly peppered with words and phrases from other tongues, ranging from Malay through European and indigenous San languages. There is poetry in it and a richness of description for the veld and natural world. I can’t help but use it.
  Unfortunately, it is also a language under pressure, losing out to the domination of English, its number of mother tongue speakers dwindling fast and its status as official teaching language caving in. Apart from that, it is also a language with political baggage. And as such not the flavor of the century, politically speaking.
  As such you could expect that touching on politically sensitive matters could send you straight to the public shaming pole. But the language itself provides great freedom. You can write what you like. So as a cultural tool, the language is thriving. In music, movies, theatre and books, it is alive and generating lots of creative content.
  My choice to write in it has everything to do with my ability to best express myself in it and nothing with making any political statement. Naturally, like every other author, I prize the idea of having a wider audience for my books which is afforded by the excellent translations into English and other European languages.
  Meyer: And finally, how does your experience as a journalist inform this book?
  Brynard: I have been a journalist for most of my life. It’s the only job possible for the perpetually curious and inquisitive. It has provided me with important life skills like growing a thick skin against criticism or surviving bullies of all sorts—I even survived the death list of a right-wing assassin who killed a prominent politician destined for Mandela’s first democratic cabinet. It also taught me everything about research, authenticity and doggedly digging for the truth.

• Karin Brynard Website - http://karinbrynard.com/

  BIOGRAPHY
  Born and bred in rural towns in the Karoo and Northern Cape, I often return to this landscape for my books.

  I attended University of Pretoria from 1976 to 1980 and started working as translator before I joined a small Pretoria based newspaper, Oggendblad.
  Spent the rest of career as political journalist, working on several newspapers and magazines in SA – Die Vaderland, Insig, De Kat, Star newspaper, Rapport, Leadership magazine and covered most of the struggle wars raging in the black townships around Johannesburg.
  When Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, I was political correspondent for a Sunday paper, Rapport, which gave me a ring side seat at the birth of a new democracy.
  After the watershed elections of 1994, which saw Mandela become South Africa’s first democratically elected president, I started working freelance from my home in Stellenbosch near Cape Town. During this time I worked for cultural magazines like Insig – both as writer and at times as copy editor and assistant editor.

Weeping Waters

Jane Murphy
Booklist. 114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Weeping Waters. By Karin Brynard. Tr. by Maya Fowler and Isobel Dixon. Apr. 2018. 512p. Europa, paper, $18 (9781609454463).
This arresting English-language debut from South African crime author Brynard validates her reputation as "The Afrikaans Stieg Larsson." Johannesburg cop Albertus Beeslaar has transferred to a post on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, hoping to escape the horrors of big-city violence. But he soon finds there is no peace to be found in rural South Africa either. Despite the seductive landscape, he realizes that he has totally underestimated the oppressive, debilitating desert heat, and he faces a sweltering uphill climb to connect with the somewhat hostile local people and his resentful new colleagues. Even worse, unspeakably brutal crimes are being committed at an alarming rate on the outlying small farms. When a white eccentric artist and her daughter are murdered, the daughter's Bushman farm manager becomes the prime suspect, and Beeslaar has his hands full investigating while holding the angry neighboring white farmers at bay. Brynard brings a strong, authentic voice to the country's conflict-ridden past and its current complex society and entangled land claims. A brilliant ensemble cast, well-measured suspense, straightforward dialogue, and nice pacing add up to an outstanding thriller. Fans of other South African authors, from James McClure to Deon Meyer, will relish Brynard's new and distinctive voice, although readers should be prepared for the book's gritty and, at times, gruesome details.--Jane Murphy

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Murphy, Jane. "Weeping Waters." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 35. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771853/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9aa13fb3. Accessed 27 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771853

Weeping Waters

Publishers Weekly. 265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Weeping Waters
Karin Brynard, trans. from the Afrikaans by Maya Fowler and Isobel Dixon. Europa,$18 trade paper (512p) ISBN 978-1-60945-446-3
Personal and professional issues have forced Insp. Albertus Beeslaar, the beleaguered hero of South African author Brynard's impressive debut novel and series launch, to leave his position in Johannesburg for the unforgiving platteland of the Northern Cape. There Beeslaar and his two inexperienced sergeants look into the murders of artist Frederika Swarts--tagged "the Madonna of the Kalahari" by the media--and her four-year-old adopted daughter at their remote farmhouse. The artist's estranged sister, Sara Swarts, is convinced that the double homicide is not connected to other brutal farm murders in the area and returns to her childhood home to investigate. Together Beeslaar and Swarts begin to uncover a grand conspiracy that's entangled in tradition and mythology, historic injustices regarding land ownership, and unadulterated greed. Though the momentum suffers mightily in places, crime fiction fans will find the picturesque backdrop, cast of authentic characters, and knotty story line to be more than satisfying. Agent: Isobel Dixon, Blake Friedmann Literary (U.K.). (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Weeping Waters." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810376/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e4181d08. Accessed 27 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810376

• BusinessDay
  https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/life/books/2015-04-17-book-review-weeping-waters/
  Word count: 749

  BOOK REVIEW: Weeping Waters

  17 April 2015 - 08:40 Eugene Goddard

  None
  WEEPING Waters, the translated version of an Afrikaans crime novel by former journalist Karin Brynard, is an oddity. For starters, its title is not a direct translation of its predecessor’s, Plaasmoord (farm murder). The title of this prize-winning debut of a few years ago, plumbed the aggression and abject anguish due to what a segment of our society believes is a determined campaign of brutal criminality against farmers.
  With its English translation that field of reference is much expanded, beyond boundaries of linguistics, land, and fear-fuelled rhetoric. And for the sake of a larger audience, and potentially one that includes readers from abroad, Farm Murder just wouldn’t have cut it. Suffice to say that the original title is far more specific and drenched in dirty ideology. The English title is looser, more vague, sinister actually, hooking one into the story from a different angle, and "hook", certainly is what Weeping Waters does to the reader.
  From the get go the novel is inhabited by characters that, in name, mimic the mystique behind a farm called Weeping Waters (Huilwater in Afrikaans).
  Details

  TITLE: Divided Lives, Dreams of a Mother and Daughter
  AUTHOR: Lyndall Gordon
  PUBLISHER: Virago
  There’s Albertus Beeslaar, the gruff, prop forward of a cop washed up from the city and a failed relationship and his two fumbling detectives, Pyl and Ghaap. There is also Dam de Kok, the mysterious farm foreman and field guide whose veins pulsate with the blood of his San ancestors, and Nelmarie Viljoen, whose first name is an amalgam, a popular practice among Afrikaans families from Pretoria East; and several other characters as crusty and cracked as the dry earth of the Northern Cape in which this story is set.

  ADVERTISING

  inRead invented by Teads
  It’s as if Brynard draws a hoe over the heraldic significance of our polyglot population, illustrating how phonetics and place are often closely linked.
  Beeslaar, for example, is like a bull (bees means cattle), stubbornly drawing a laager or dragnet closer and closer around the events of a blood-curdling farm murder.
  His one assistant, Ghaap, takes his name from a flesh-eating plant also used as balm by the arid-adapted locals, and Pyl (arrow) — well, just think sharp guy cruising through dusty streets with his arm out the window of a customised Ford Cortina. Dam de Kok is a direct reference to Adam de Kok, a Griqua pioneer of the region north of the Orange (Gariep) River.
  In fact, one can argue that the nomenclature of Weeping Waters is only normal in death, that of its murdered protagonist, artist Freddie Swarts.
  "Weeping Waters" itself begs examination. Does it refer to the tears of joy when water is found in the scorched northwestern part of the country? Or does it have something to do with the redemptive spiritualism behind water and how it slots into a deeper, strife-ridden context in SA and its primary problem: land? Think, for instance, erstwhile National Party minister Adriaan Vlok begging forgiveness through washing the feet of former foes.
  Brynard, however, doesn’t allow dissection to stand in the way of a good story. With Weeping Waters she doffed her journalism cap for the art of story telling, forsaking factuality for the benefit of nuance, intrigue, and slow-burning revelation.
  Like a master she walks a thin line between parody and pathos as she turns one farm murder inside out, showing how land dispossession and the sins of the fathers do not always lead to brutal retribution. Sometimes, crime is just crime, caused by the lure of ill-gotten pickings for those desperate enough to serve the execrable greed of criminal kingpins.
  Weeping Waters is a great, gripping read and sometimes you don’t know when to laugh or cry.
  Unfortunately its primary qualities, from its roguish characters to its sharp stabs at crimes belying SA’s land discourse is compromised by the threadbare unfurling of the final chapters. It’s as if novelistic inquiry brought Brynard to a journalistic realisation, forcing her hand in explaining a few things, telling and not showing the story anymore. As a result the conclusion is a matter-of-fact business, fast-tracked and factually wrapped-up compared to a novel that, for the most part, is characterised by a taught and tense, mesmerising plot.

• International Noir Fiction
  http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com/2018/02/weeping-waters-by-karin-brynard.html
  Word count: 322

  Monday, February 19, 2018
  Weeping Waters, by Karin Brynard

  One of the reviewers of the original South African edition of Weeping Waters, by Karin Brynard,

  called the author "the Afrikaans Stieg Larsson," but the comparison is way o ff the mark. Even the author's own tribute to Deon Meyer, the most prominent Afrikaans crime writer, doesn't really illuminate Weeping Waters very much. Brynard's novel made me think of both Zoe Wiomb's David's Story (for its evocation of the Khoi-San people of South Africa) and Gillian Slovo's Red Dust (for its examination rural post-apartheid South Africa): but Weeping Waters doesn't imitate either of thos ebooks.

  Brynard uses the form of the police procedural rather loosely, as one element of her lengthy (just over 500 pages) story of a family torn apart by illness and misunderstandings, of the indigenous people of South Africa (a very complicated story, examined at lennth in various passages of the book), of fear and racism among the white farmers underthe new regime, and of a lonely cop exiled into a rural town that he has difficulty understanding or coping with.

  There is a violent murder (and references to even more violent murders, white supremacist preachers and farmers, there's traditional culture and history, and there are the murder victim's haunting paintings. The central characters include the cop, the victim's journalist sister, the victim's farm-manager (of indigenous background), and various other cops, farmers, devvelopers, farmhands, and others. The story can be repetitive, but never drags: the repetitive elements spiral toward a violent conclusion that highlights the country's struggles with inequality, history, and rapidly changing society afte rthe fall of apartheid. Of the substantial number of crime writers in the new South Africa, Brynard is one of the most ambitious in scope, but her style is straightforward, always focused on the reality of the characters' lives.

  Posted by Glenn Harper at 7:07 PM