BookBrowse Review

An epic novel that connects the reader to the unimaginable through the force of poetry and a far-reaching imagination

Imprisoned for life in the Robben Island prison colony, Sila talks in her mind with her dead son, Baro, and later with a whole host of spirits from her past. She remembers her love and desperate grief for Baro, and for her other children mostly lost to her: Carolina, Camies, Pieter, another boy "who came and went too quietly for a name", Meisie, Catherina and Debora - all the result of rape either by her former owner or by prison guards, but intensely loved nonetheless.

Through her lyrical, rambling voice that reveals her mental state to be closer to madness than sanity we slowly learn of her life, from when she was stolen as a small child by slavers in Mozambique, through her ownership by a variety of masters, to the ultimate irony of her present life as a freed slave (slavery having been abolished) condemned to life imprisonment.

As she breaks stones in the prison quarry and attempts to care for the small children born to her in prison, she looks back on the daily humiliations and larger injustices that have defined her life, but also on the few brief pleasures she has been able to eke; and slowly we learn what the law considers to be her crime - setting free the person she loved most in the only way available to her.

Unconfessed is rambling, circular and sometimes confusing; but it's also a lyrical, powerful and important piece of writing. Depending on your viewpoint you may side with the reviewer for Kirkus who describes it as "a gorgeous, devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni Morrison's Beloved" or Entertainment Weekly who thinks it "plods along like Gertrude Stein with a head cold."

This review was originally published in January 2007, and has been updated for the September 2007 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.