About the Book
“Violence rendered things visible”, writes Denis Hirson in this beautifully crafted, musical story, which is as much about seeing how people lived at that time as it is about desire, loneliness and the desperate, blind need for revenge.
Lemon Street runs down-slope through a leafy, peaceful suburb of Johannesburg. It is early 1960. One resident of the street, a young widow, believes she has finally met the new man of her life. In a narrow room at the back of the garden, her maid impatiently awaits the arrival of her lover. Across the street, while his parents engage in yet another heated argument, a schoolboy dreams of a girl. And down past the willow trees at the bottom of the street this girl’s mother prepares a party to celebrate her twentieth wedding anniversary, which will hardly turn out as she expected.
Meanwhile, tremors run through South Africa. Hundreds of men die in the great Clydesdale mine disaster. There is an assassination attempt upon the Prime Minister, Dr Verwoerd. There is the Sharpeville Massacre, which will radically shape the political climate of the country, and permanently alter the lives of certain people on Lemon Street.
About the Author
Denis Hirson has lived in France since 1975, yet has remained true to the title of one of his prose-poems – The long-distance South African. He has written five books, all of them concerned with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa, all of them crossing the frontier between prose and poetry; edited anthologies of South African short stories and poetry, and is now publishing with Jacana another book on the history of South African writing, Worlds in One Country.
