Spieserye | Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies

Jan Spies

Spieserye – tall stories, funny stories. Stories as only Jan Spies could tell them.

In Pilatus tot molshoop we encounter stories about cars. There is a Ford that hides from its owner in the cattle kraal, and another Ford that brings an angel to the farm one night. Oubaas and Mankoeran’s Bokshol, on the other hand, has a very troublesome clutch and brake and it is something of a miracle that all three stay on the road. Here we also have farming stories – goings-on involving chickens in a boarding house room, moles that must be lured out, and cats that are not what they appear to be.

This is followed by Poort deur die koue, in which, amongst others, Spies tells of a student nurse’s clever plans involving a bucket of false teeth, a baboon that haunts someone in place of a deceased farmer’s wife, a feast in a gemsbok park, and a war veteran’s language problem on the parade ground.

Expert hunters and lead singers, ghosts and storytellers – they are all in Profeet met kondensmelk. Along with the woman who frightens away the devil’s whole evil way of thinking one Communion weekend, imaginative children who change Proverbs into Leviticus, Revelations into Habakkuk, and an old doctor who has to transport a huge crate of rusks and moskonfyt over land and sea.

In Pille vir servette Spies also brings to life a bunch of characters that readers will not easily forget. Funny, lovable, ingenious. If you have half a day to listen, old Orrelkosie can explain to you exactly how to get a pill down a sick chicken’s throat. A Kalahari farmer, on the other hand, makes it clear how one gives a bothersome hawker what for in the desert.

As a bonus there are also three ‘new’ stories that appeared in Spies op sy stukke: One of them Jan dug out of the bottom of a drawer, at the insistence of PG du Plessis. It is an unusual Spies story that pays a moving tribute to storytellers through the centuries. The other two Jan Spies had only told by special request: about the problems two young boys experience with their dim-witted fathers, and about the robust woman whose church dress would not sit right.