The Crack

This somber portrait of the apartheid regime’s impact on one white couple from South Africa-born Radmann (Held Up) begins on Jan. 1, 1976, several months before the Soweto Uprising. Pregnant housewife Janet Snyman lives in a suburb of Johannesburg with her policeman husband, Hektor-Jan, and their three young children, Pieter, Shelley, and Sylvia. Hektor-Jan works as a police interrogator, barbarically torturing arrested black “terrorists.” The police are determined to find and confiscate hidden arms caches belonging to anti-apartheid groups in order to preserve the status quo. Janet, when not practicing for her part in an upcoming local production of Brigadoon, oversees the activities of the couple’s black live-in housemaid Alice and gardener Solomon. She’s disconcerted to discover a crack at the bottom of the family swimming pool but decides not to tell Hektor-Jan about the problem, waiting until it gets much worse and then asking Solomon to repair it. When Doug van Deventer, the Snymans’ creepy next-door neighbor, who is a voyeur and gossip, sees Janet directing Solomon’s work, he mistakenly assumes that they’re having an affair—a mistake that has bloody consequences. Radmann has crafted a scathing literary condemnation of apartheid and its dehumanizing effects. (June)