'n Beter hemel | Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies

Danie Schreuder

This collection of stories, sketches and narratives is regional literature at its best. It speaks of a wisdom nourished by a very intimate knowledge of and love for a specific piece of land. The mouth that speaks here speaks from the abundance of the heart, and the heart is filled with a little place by the name of Koringberg and its surrounds. Danie Schreuder’s stories are mostly about growing up, and for that reason the recollections are about those aspects of rural life that formed a young mind – and eventually led this storyteller to write.

Schreuder’s stories are not merely about evoking a bygone living space, but also about the manner in which this space has found a resonance in his mind. Looking back is also wry, however, for example when he remembers a reviled domestic worker and writes her a desperate letter in an attempt to correct something hopelessly too late. They also deal with the injustices and bitterness of the past that have not been erased by time. They deal with incidents that still cause an involuntary sob to shake his chest a lifetime later. But it is essentially a tribute to an existence lived close to the earth, full of people who were part of that earth, that air, that sea... Is it then particularly a book for those who can still remember such people?

Perhaps. But through these characters Schreuder exposes a timeless humanity, and for that reason it is a book for everyone. These are stories from an era of unflagging religious zeal and political friction between Nat and Sap. In the midst of this a young man’s sensibility developed, particularly on the farm Middeldrift, and from his then already skeptical perspective he was able to say: “Middeldrift and the veld and its brackish furrows and the rivers seemed to me to be a better heaven in many respects.”