Product Description
Decima
Author: Eben Venter
Format: Paperback
Sunday Times Literary Award for Fiction 2024
South African Literary Awards: Literary Translators Award 2025
A novel
A mountain of flesh she is, this Decima, as she lies. She summons her strength to rise, all four feet on sand and shale. Puffs twirl and settle as her toes find their place. Three on each foot. Decima stands.
In the veld of the Eastern Cape a writer imagines her: Decima – a magnificent black rhinoceros cow. Mother to Tandeka, herself plumped up with calf, Decima and her crash of rhinos await the birth of the new baby. Decima still recalls how she became an orphan many seasons ago, and tension mounts with the passing of each full moon.
Conjuring up the life of Decima, is Eben. How do you write about this animal as a sentient being? he wants to find out. With the story of the rhino matriarch and her kin, comes the various characters that impact on their lives: poachers, their clients, those who practise traditional medicine, also those whose calling it is to protect the animals. Entwined in Eben’s work on the rhino, is an account of his fragile, ageing mother. But ringing loudest in his ear, is the voice of Decima.
Eben Venter’s book, a creative blend of autofiction, animal fable, mystery and scientific enquiry, is an urgent plea to save one of earth’s megaherbivores. An elegiac work for numerous voices, Decima is a moving and thrilling lament to loss in all its many guises.
About the Author
Eben Venter's seven critically acclaimed novels include My Beautiful Death, Trencherman, and Wolf, Wolf. He is also the author of two books of short stories and a collection of columns, and his work can be read in Afrikaans, English, Dutch and German. Raised on a sheep farm in the Eastern Cape, he migrated to Australia in 1986. Over the years he has won numerous awards for his work, including the prominent KykNet-Rapport Prize. Green as the Sky is Blue was written in partial fulfilment of a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.
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