Dusklands

J. M. Coetzee · 1974 CE · Novel · South African · Contemporary

An American mythographer drafting a report on propaganda for the Vietnam campaign keeps being sent back to revise it by a supervisor he despises, and comes apart inside his own prose while his marriage goes. Bound with him is an eighteenth-century Boer elephant hunter riding north across the Great River into Namaqua country, whose narrative arrives as a translated document with an editor's afterword. A first book that sets a bureaucrat of empire beside its frontiersman and lets the two rhyme.

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