[Tsotsi] is an intense work set in a South African slum. The protagonist, a tsotsi ("thug" or "hoodlum")—he knows no other name—is a brutal leader of a small-time gang of murdering thieves; he has no past he can remember, no feelings, no conscience; his vision reaches no farther than the planning of each day's crime. Fugard attempts to convey the workings of this tsotsi's mind as it moves from a brutish, atemporal condition toward the beginnings of "human" instincts, sympathies and conscience…. Fugard can hypnotize with his sense of place, and the condemnation of policies that have created such a place is stronger for being left implied rather than lectured on. Yet his confining the action of the novel to six days presents me with something of the problem I have in reading classical French or Restoration tragedy—knowing that "unity of time" is a convention doesn't help. Fugard's attempt to bring his tsotsi from near-animal to man within so constricted a time seems unnecessarily artificial. For all its earnestness, Tsotsi is too realistic to work as fable, and too fabular to convince as psychology or tragedy. (pp. 309-10)
George Kearns, "Fiction Chronicle," in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1981 by The Hudson Review, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXXIV. No. 2, Summer, 1981, pp. 299-313.∗
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