Dusklands is among the first truly modern novels in English written and published in South Africa. Doris Lessing and Dan Jacobson left their homelands many years ago and have abandoned southern African subject matter; Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and others continue to write well and conservatively and are published abroad. Although the Afrikaans-speaking section of this country has always been equated with conservatism, it is the Afrikaans novelists who were the pioneers in the field of the avant-garde novel. Calling themselves "Sestigers," men of the sixties, they modeled their works on the novels of France, Germany, Holland of the previous decade. Again paradoxically, since Afrikaners are the main exponents of white South African nationalism, the Sestigers rarely chose a truly South African background or wrote of matters of immediate South African concern.
In both respects J. M. Coetzee has taken a lead. Dusklands consists of two short novellas, the second of which ["The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee"] is based on a historical incident involving a white explorer among the Hottentots in the eighteenth century. It is the tale of the individual savageness of modern civilization pitted against the collective savageness of the untamed. The first story ["The Vietnam Project"], by way of analogy, deals with an American specialist in psychological warfare working "in the spirit of absoluteness," "of intellectual ferocity," on a cold-blooded propaganda project to destroy Vietnam.
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