The Jack Bank by Glen Retief

Like male aggression itself, young schoolboy bullying is everywhere this season, playing a central part in the indie documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, the Oscar winning foreign film In a Better World, those ubitiquous YouTube videos for the It Gets Better campaign which is now a book [[Kindle]], and bullying is the troubled heart of Glen Retief's new autobiography The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood [[Kindle]]. Toward the end of aparthied, white Glen lives in bliss at Kruger National Park, until at 12 he is sent to a hellish boarding school where older boys make younger boys strip nude, jump up and down and receive swattings with cricket bats or electrical shocks to their genitals. Trouble is, when Glen is older he derives "enormous, surprising pleasure" from administering the beatings to younger boys. He connects the Boer system of abuse and torture to South Africa's greater ills, and he struggles to reconcile the shameful experiences that he considers "life's defining moment" with his homosexuality.

Not my kind of book but those who've read it are impressed:

“A remarkable memoir with the deeply resonant literary power of the finest fiction. The Jack Bank  is an important book by a supremely gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler

“One of those books that you never forget and never stop talking about.  Retief belongs in the pantheon of white African writers Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Coetzee, and Gordimer.”—Bob Shacochis

“Glen Retief’s Jack Bank is a transgressive, harrowing and illuminating work of literary art.  In a language marked by a brutal childhood in the last years of the apartheid regime, and with uncommon wisdom, Retief’s epiphanic narrative draws us into regions of  cultural importance beyond the scope of traditional memoir.  Thus, he changes what we imagine this genre to be, allowing it to become something truer.”—Carolyn Forché

"Eloquent...readers everywhere will be caught by the searing detail about family, friendship, sex and love."—Booklist

"Visceral and emotionally complex--an impressive first book."—Kirkus Reviews

Comments

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