Cracks - Hardcover

Kohler, Sheila

3.37

1,028 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158195008X ISBN 13: 9781581950083

Publisher: Zoland Books, 2000

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A Talk with Sheila Kohler, author of Cracks and One Girl
Zoland: In Cracks there is a character called Sheila Kohler. Is she really you? Why would you choose to name a character after yourself, particularly in such a dark book?
SK: Although I use a character called Sheila Kohler, I don't think Cracks is any more autobiographical than my other books. It is simply a device to make the reader believe that what one's writing is all true - to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. As readers today, we seem to want to move closer to confession in some way - hence the popularity of memoir. Of course, the place, and parts of the characters, are real, but the plot or story is invented. In other words, as much truth as possible is used in order to tell a lie. Or, if you like, as many lies as possible are used to tell the truth.
Zoland: You grew up in South Africa. So much of your work seems to address the peculiar colonial politics there, though always in a particularly subtle way. How did it influence you and your writing?
SK: Growing up in South Africa was a strange experience. It was like growing up in the middle ages, or anyway the nineteenth century. The education we received in a girl's boarding school in the middle of the veld, was much like the one I describe in Cracks. We read nineteenth century literature exclusively, and our history lessons stopped before the first world war, which was considered too recent to be taught. Much of our time was devoted to doing sport to combat sexual urges, I presume, or anyway to teach us team spirit. Also, we were always going to chapel, learning to turn the other cheek. Consequently, life, when I was obliged to face it, came to me as an amazing revelation - and not always one with which I knew how to cope.
The school itself was a sort of microcosm of South African society - the laager mentality, and it had an enormous impact on my life and work even though I left South Africa when I turned seventeen. However, the political realities of the country were not really something I knew about in sufficient detail to write about as such. All I knew when I matriculated was that would either have to lea

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Review:

Put adolescents together in a confined environment with only minimal adult supervision, and bad things will happen--a truism in literature as well as life. (Think The Children's Hour, think Lord of the Flies.) But in Sheila Kohler's eerie, atmospheric Cracks, the bad things that will happen are not the ones you might expect, and the message is far more complex than just "Children are savages." (Although they certainly are.) Written in an ominously anonymous first person plural, the novel follows the 12 girls on the swim team at a South African boarding school. They include the jock, the pretty one, the brain, the fat girl, and perhaps most interestingly, the shadowy Sheila Kohler, a storyteller whose tales all "came to the same dramatic finale: violent death..." All of them are in love with the dashing Miss G, their swim instructor, and a "crack," as it turns out, is a crush--the embodiment of all of adolescence's formless yearnings:

When you had a crack you saw things more clearly: the thick dark of the shadows and the transparence of the oak leaves in the light and the soft glow of the pink magnolia petals against their waxy leaves. You wanted to lie down alone in the dark in the music room and listen to Rachmaninoff and to the summer rains rushing hard down the gutters. You left notes for your crack in her mug next to her toothbrush on the shelf in the bathroom. If you accidentally brushed up against your crack and felt her boosie, you nearly fainted.

When they're not swimming, the members of the team amuse themselves by torturing new girls and taking turns fainting in chapel, until Fiamma Coronna throws everything off balance. A breathtaking Italian princess, a first-class swimmer, Fiamma quickly earns the girls' enmity by becoming Miss G's favorite. Worse still, she shows no interest in her teammates at all, and the usual hazing soon escalates to something far more serious. Heat dust, frangipani, adolescent sexuality simmering just under the surface: this could all have gone terribly, terribly wrong. It doesn't, and Kohler's elegant prose is the main reason why. The girls may be overheated, but the author's language never is. --Chloe Byrne

About the Author:

Sheila Kohler is the author of two previous novels, THE PERFECT PLACE and THE HOUSE ON R STREET, and a collection of short stories, MIRACLES IN AMERICA. From South Africa, she now lives in New York.

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