UR TV CAST

She has read Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, but is finding it difficult to persevere with Wordsworth. Lurie’s problem has returned.He becomes involved – and “involved” is entirely appropriate – with a pretty student named Melanie Isaacs She is 20, with theatrical ambitions. He has seen the woman who isn’t Soraya, and that intrusion means an end to Thursday afternoons. The following Thursday, in the anonymous hired apartment, the glance is not mentioned. He realises, in an instant, that “they can only be her sons.”Mother and children go into Captain Dorego’s Fish Inn They sit by the window Lurie and Soraya share a glance, to Lurie’s lasting regret. Next Thursday, he reflects, his problem will be solved again.

Lurie teaches Communications at the Technical University of Cape Town, more from duty than desire His real interest is with the Romantic poets. He has written a book on Wordsworth, whose Prelude features large in the special course he is conducting for the benefit of a group of lacklustre students. He is also toying with the idea of an opera about Byron’s affair with Teresa Guiccioli. He is on speaking terms with his second wife, whom he sees for a drink or a meal. His life is relatively settled.
Then, one Saturday morning, he catches sight of Soraya in the street She has two small boys with her The boys have “her lustrous hair and dark eyes”.

He arrives at two pm and leaves 90 minutes later, having first paid her R400 He is content for another week. But that is a small price to pay for such an unusual bag of goodies.. AT THE beginning of this painful novel, Professor David Lurie prides himself on having “solved the problem of sex rather well”. He is 52, twice divorced, and no longer capable of, or willing to sustain, a deep emotional relationship. Each Thursday afternoon, he visits a woman who calls herself Soraya for professional purposes They make love at a leisurely pace. My only caveat is that, sometimes, elliptical writing gets in the way of clarity. He is particularly good in the evocation of landscape, of aching nostalgia, of love’s hopelessness.

In several stories, the narrator goes “home” to the Subcontinent, in memory or in reality.Aamer Hussein writes with the charm and grace that comes from his knowledge of Persian and Urdu poetry, especially in the Sufi tradition. Yet once a writer has found a voice, then language itself becomes the homeland. But periodic returns to the original culture enrich both writer and language. In the end, we are all exiles – from history, politics, love, life itself. Here the dislocation, the splendours and ruins, and the attention of an aristocratic Indian, help her to recover her sense of self.These stories of displacement are raised to the metaphysical plane through the fairy-tales incorporated into their narratives. Helena, hitting a sticky patch in her career in London, maltreated and abandoned by husband and lover, runs away to India. Hussein skilfully weaves delicate strands of emotion as they evolve in this greenhouse atmosphere; while, all around, immutable Nature seems impervious to human desolation.In “The Actress’s Tale”, the migration is reversed.