Page 46 - Waterfall City July Issue 2023

Waterfall City Book Reviews

The Covenant Daisy de Melker
of Water By Ted Botha
By Abraham
Verghese A true crime classic
about Daisy de Melker in
Spanning the years 1900 ragtime Joburg – a city
to 1977, The Covenant of murder, mayhem and
of Water follows a gold. Ted Botha takes the
family in southern India reader into the underbelly
who suffers a peculiar of Johannesburg in the
affliction: in every 1920s and ’30s as he
generation, at least one traces the fascinating
person dies by drowning story of the mysterious
– and in Kerala, water is Daisy de Melker, who was
everywhere. hanged for poisoning
her son. Many also
At the turn of the believed she poisoned
century a 12-year-old two husbands for their life
girl, grieving the death insurance money.
of her father, is sent by
boat to her wedding, In the shadow of ever-
where she will meet her growing mine dumps, she
40-year-old husband for went about her business
the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch quietly and unnoticed – the most unlikely of killers. Even though people close
– known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at to her kept dying, no one suspected a thing for 20 years. When someone finally
large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and spoke up, it led to one of South Africa’s most sensational trials.
the struggles of hardship.
De Melker’s story unfolds in tandem with those of colourful Johannesburg
A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, characters of the same period, such as the Foster Gang, Herman Charles
The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human Bosman, the dashing conman Baron von Veltheim and a Bonny and Clyde-style
understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past couple, Dicky Mallalieu and Gwen Tolputt.
generations for the sake of those who are alive today.
Some cross paths with each other as well as with famous writers of the era such
Imbued with humour, deep emotion and the essence of life, this is one of the as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sarah Gertrude Millin.
most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
Price: R300.00
Price: R370.00

Greenlights
By Matthew McConaughey

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

44 Waterfall City Issue 7 2023