Nerine Dorman’s Reviews > Jimfish > Status Update

p175 – Your family probably descended from slaves and pirates, and Hottentots, Malays and Bushmen. If there is any German or Dutch blood in you, it's from the press-ganged scum of the Berlin gutters and the dross of the Amsterdam pot-houses. Rogues who sailed to the Cape of Good Hope, slept with their slaves and told themselves they were the master race.

Racial ambiguity is a big theme running throughout the book.

Jimfish finds that he has violent responses when that which is dear to him is threatened. This makes him no better than the people he reviles.

P110: If the really serious question in life was how to arrive on the right side of history, then he felt further than ever from finding an answer. All he had learnt so far had been that those who claimed to have reached that blessed destination had go there by wading through blood.

More coinkydinks when we discover a Major Character isn't dead after all.

"He had begun to see that such things depended on a triad of useful principles: first – on who had the guns; next on who was dead when the shooting stopped; and last but most important: on who was in charge of the words used to talk about what had happened when it was all over." (p60)

Jimfish asks the questions no one else wants to and he often states the obvious, which seems to be the facts others refuse to see. He is there when the Berlin Wall comes down.

Jimfish has his brush with disastrous Chernobyl and his crazy luck holds out despite catastrophe.

People keep expecting Jimfish to pick sides but he believes there is a right side of history that he will one day find. In every predicament in which he finds himself, and the awful things that happen, he is always saved by the kindness of strangers or sheer chance.

Okay, the cover is ... I admit I'm horribly allergic to every South African book that has a sunset and a thorn tree on the cover. Publisher could've done better than fall back on this tired donkey. The book is not like this. We meet up with Jimfish, who's absolutely delightful as a fish out of water. Writing style reminds me a little of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and the Margarita.