Change of heart | 7 February 2013

A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures.

So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return eight years later, bored and homesick. My Traitor’s Heart was his attempt to come to terms with his hate-filled, colour-obsessed, violent country of birth, and if you haven’t read it, well, you should.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight is a more serene work, and so it should be.