Page 24 - IFV Issue 7_2023

Book Reviews

Daisy de Melker The Covenant of Water
By Ted Botha By Abraham Verghese

A true crime classic about Daisy de Spanning the years 1900 to 1977,
Melker in ragtime Joburg – a city of The Covenant of Water follows
murder, mayhem and gold. Ted Botha a family in southern India that
takes the reader into the underbelly of suffers a peculiar affliction: in every
Johannesburg in the 1920s and 1930s generation, at least one person dies
as he traces the fascinating story of by drowning - and in Kerala, water
the mysterious Daisy de Melker, who is everywhere.
was hanged for poisoning her son. At the turn of the century a
Many also believed she poisoned twelve-year-old girl, grieving the
two husbands for their life insurance death of her father, is sent by boat
money. to her wedding, where she will
In the shadow of ever-growing meet her forty-year-old husband
mine dumps, she went about her for the first time. From this poignant
business quietly and unnoticed–the beginning, the young girl and future matriarch - known as Big
most unlikely of killers. Even though people close to her kept dying, Ammachi - will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large
no one suspected a thing for twenty years. When someone finally over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of
spoke up, it led to one of South Africa’s most sensational trials. love and the struggles of hardship.
De Melker’s story unfolds in tandem with those of colourful A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of
Johannesburg characters of the same period such as the Foster time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine
Gang, Herman Charles Bosman, the dashing conman Baron von and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the
Veltheim and a Bonny-and-Clyde-style couple, Dicky Mallalieu and hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those
Gwen Tolputt. alive today.
Some cross paths with each other and also those of famous Imbued with humour, deep emotion and the essence of life, it is
writers of era such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sarah Gertrude one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
Millin.
Price: R370.00
Price: R300.00

Greenlights satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know
By Matthew McConaughey how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges
- how to get relative with the inevitable - you
From the Academy Award-winning actor, an can enjoy a state of success I call ‘catching
unconventional memoir filled with raucous greenlights.’
stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the So, I took a one-way ticket to the desert and
hard way about living with greater satisfaction. wrote this book: an album, a record, a story
I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been
trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights
and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and
been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of
the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts,
failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me and getting wets while trying to dance between
marvel, and things that made me laugh out the raindrops.
loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good,
How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars
to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without
life. How to be more me. having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those
diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising
poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I
found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more Price: R365.00

22 • Issue 7 2023 • The Villager