222 mm x 146 mm, 304 pages RRP: R165, ISBN 978-1-4152-0047-6 Publication date: 26 March 2008, Category: Fiction Sly, sardonic comedy … as sharp as a stiletto and just as lethal. Barry Ronge Description A darkly ironic comedy of family life and family tragedy, played out against the background of university life with its corrosive effects on those caught up in its coils. The story is told by Edward, the somewhat naïve brother-in-law and uncle to the main characters. The main character, Professor Rex Duval, an English professor with a frustrated obsession with long-dead writer Finch Magnus Finch. Rex and his wife Milla have three daughters and a host of family skeletons that won’t stay in the closet. For one thing, Rex is a reckless libertine with a reputation as an obdurate troublemaker. Milla, a born-again Catholic, makes it her job to make her husband pay for his sins. Their three daughters all carry their resentments and grievances around with them with varying results. To complicate their lives even more, Rex is secretly enamoured of Milla’s sister, Gladys, who happens to be Edward’s wife, and who knows what feelings Edward harbours for Rex that he has difficulty acknowledging? Never relinquishing the humour and lightness of touch that Tim Keegan so amply demonstrated in his comic crime novel, Tromp’s Last Stand, he elegantly brings My Life with the Duvals to point of crises, after which there remains only the settling of scores. From My Life with the Duvals, page 7 They were all there, the university people, as scruffy as always, standing around in little groups, muttering darkly to each other, their shifty eyes darting around, pretending to mourn his passing. At the very least they might have tried to look presentable! Yusuf Vesey showed up – the cheek of it, after everything he’d done – looking appropriately furtive and leery, more to scoff than to grieve, I thought. And all her arty-farty friends too: large women in diaphanous drapes, with long grey hair, munching on canapés and vol-au-vents and hugging wine glasses to hefty bosoms, and small, mousy, schoolmarmy things, looking nervous and conspiratorial. To read on Barry Ronge says of My Life with the Duvals: Tim Keegan’s corrosively funny account of a mediocre UK academic, who lords it about in Cape Town, bullying his family, screwing his students and infuriating his colleagues is beautifully done. The detail is exact; the evocation of period is precise; and the sly, sardonic comedy is as sharp as a stiletto and just as lethal. It’s a vision of our past that we seldom see, and it is like looking at 40 year-old photographs, that make us remember – and wince. From the Reviews: A hugely entertaining read. — Stephen Randall, Buffalo City.info, 12 May 2008. Read the whole review. E-mail us a comment on this book. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) To buy this book www.exclusivebooks.com www.kalahari.net home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za