About Us	Search	Advertising

	Brought to you by:

THE Hero of Currie Road, Alan Paton, Umuzi, R140. The overwhelming success of Cry the beloved country - possibly the best known South African novel (over 20 million copies sold and still selling in the region of 50 000 copies a year) - has overshadowed the rest of Alan Paton's fiction, including the novel that followed three years later, Too late the phalarope (1951), which critics consider the better of the two works.

Paton's published work includes another novel, Ah, but your land is beautiful, two autobiographical volumes and two political biographies, as well as a number of short pieces that appeared in a variety of journals.

The present collection, The hero of Currie Road, highlights Paton's short fiction, bringing together in one volume the ten stories that originally appeared in 1961 in Debbie go home (published in the US as The Troubled Land) and ten other fictive pieces, chiefly from Knocking on the Door, a miscellaneous collection of Paton's writings published in Cape Town by David Philip in 1975 and by Scribner (the publishers of Cry the Beloved Country) in 1976 in the US. One of the 20 pieces in The Hero of Currie Road - 'A Deep Experience' - is not strictly fictive but more of a memoir essay.

Likewise, the collection includes an excerpt from an interview on the subject of the play Sponomo, also the title of one of Paton's short stories.

The notes at the end of the present collection are an invaluable source of information on such points.

The collection opens with Paton's scintillating interview with himself, first published in the Sunday Tribune in Durban on November 6, 1966. It begins with a classic exchange: "Ah, Mr Paton, thank you for agreeing to let me interview you. Let me tell you, I have a high opinion of your work. Do you also?" PATON: "Some of it. When I read past work, I say to myself, that was good and that was not. I am glad to say that, in general, the better was published and the worse not."

The collection, which includes the cluster of Diepkloof Reformatory stones. Paton was principal of Diepkloof Reformatory in Johannesburg from 1935 to l948, the year in which Cry the beloved country was published.

Both comprehensive and unique, the present collection rightly takes its name from its last story, 'The Hero of Currie Road' - a profoundly realistic story of a gentle little man who belongs to the All Races Party and believes in equal opportunity for all, based on strong moral principles.

It is a timeless vision of the rainbow nation and the troubles of our time and is at a significant distance from the simple faith in Christian enlightenment that characterised Paton's famous first novel.

One DistrictMail reader can win a copy of the book. Send your name, address and phone number during office hours to Paton Giveaway, PO Box 58, Somerset West, 7129, before July 18.

	Back to top
© Tel. (021) 853-0211 Fax. (021) 853-0234 2003 Somerset Press (Pty) Ltd on all information and photographs.