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Karel Schoeman. Die uur van die engel. Cape Town. Human & Rousseau. 1995. 386 pages. R69.95. ISBN 0-7981-3395-3.
Karel Schoeman's oeuvre encompasses a large and impressive output of fiction, biography and editions of the diaries of early-nineteenth-century missionaries and others in the Orange Free State, the area of his own roots. His fiction, largely introspective, has a visionary power. Some of his novels have been well received and have done well in English and German translations, among them Promised Land (1978; see WLT 53:4, p. 736), Another Country (1984; see WLT 59:3, p. 479), and the latter in German, In einem fremden Land. His novels have become more and more situated in the harsh nineteenth-century frontier life of white expansion toward the northwest: the parched northern Cape and southern Orange Free State. I emphasize "life," as Schoeman is not interested in historical events, to which he...