Violence makes a strange ending for a love story, even if the setting is South Africa. But because Dan Jacobson has the ability to create sensitive, intelligent people and make them act sensitively and intelligently despite the background of guilt and shock, The Evidence of Love is neither propaganda nor sensationalism. It is, instead, a considerable artistic achievement, all the more impressive because it was written calmly out of the same tensions as created the South African explosion. It is the story of...

[The] Republic of Sarmeda is located somewhere outside the geography of history. It is the setting of Dan Jacobson's The Confessions of Josef Baisz, an account of a systematic traitor and police-spy whose confession of "my days as a petty functionary" is, at least partly, an allegory of the artist as political Judas. Like Judas, Josef Baisz "can love only through betrayal", and his justification of his sins contains occasional insights into the psychology of disloyalty. Ba...

For all the grimness of its subject, Dan Jacobson's facility of invention makes [The Confessions of Josef Baisz] a surprisingly lighthearted book. He obviously had a lot of fun inventing Sarmeda…. As a political fantasy it is at once playful and provocative, and as a study of the psychology of betrayal—that complex tangle of love, pity, self-hatred, and power-seeking—it is compelling. While a certain off-handedness makes me wonder if Jacobson was bringing all his considerable ene...

I have had a feeling all along that some day Jacobson would write a "big" novel, big in scope. Some fiction writers do better with small canvases, and that's fine, but others need room to move around in. The diversity of Jacobson's experiences has seemed to demand the development of a large and complicated pattern. This is what he has worked out in The Beginners, which portrays several generations in several countries…. [The] prologue, beautifully told, gives us the charac...

Childhood is frequently thought of as the staple source of the short story writer's inspiration. Standard themes of short stories are the conversion of childhood into adolescence, adolescence into adulthood, and the contrast of an innocent world with one not so innocent. Dan Jacobson's stories [in Inklings: Selected Stories] fit, like an illustration, into this pattern. His setting is, of course, South Africa…. The peculiar and vicious social arrangements in South Africa are, to a write...

Jacobson's austere narrative [The Confessions of Josef Baisz] follows out with the clarity of a syllogism its chilling logic. As a newly-conscripted soldier, Josef Baisz finds himself through a series of absurd chances and petty enmities in a position to betray a friend. When he does so, the effect stuns him: Everyone had got Judas wrong! That was my great discovery. When he pressed his lips to the master's, he did it passionately, with a breaking heart and expectant eye, full of ...

Mr. Jacobson [in The Price of Diamonds] presents his people with subtlety and intelligence, carefully sets them down in an unappetising South African township, and then, with the reader's interest fully and skilfully aroused, sets them ticking at a nicely calculated pace. But alas, the nicely calculated pace can apparently neither be varied nor halted, and one can only pray for the breakdown which Mr. Jacobson is much too efficient to allow…. After a promising and almost striking start, and wi...