Azure's parents were murdered about three years ago in Cape Town, South Africa. He's twelve years old, almost thirteen, when we meet him in Thirteen Cents, hustling with other street urchins, doing anything to survive each day. Cape Town has a market for sex with underaged boys so Azure sells sex to the white men who pick him up from the dark streets. Selling his body fetches a paltry sum that he uses to eat, cloth himself, pay for protection on the streets, and any leftovers get put away in savings. It's a rough life out there on Cape Town's dangerous streets. It's crazy.Thirteen Cents is unsettling and very compelling. It's just the right size at 190 pages and I kept wishing I could read it in one sitting without interruptions. The story contains bits of foreign language without any English translations. It didn't affect my reading and I appreciated the absence of translations. Thirteen Cents is bold, dark, and violent. Kudos to the late K. Sello Duiker.
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Interesting, I have added to my TBR, I haven't about it before.
ReplyDeleteYeah I hadn't heard about it until I stumbled across a reference on a book blog. It's a really good read in my opinion.
DeleteWow... I just looked up the author's name on google and found this article from 2005: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/feb/07/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries. I don't know if you've read it, quite tragic.
ReplyDeleteBut this seems like a good book! I'll add it to my TBR. Are there any happy South African book/stories out there? I just finished 'Disgrace' by JM Coetzee and it had lots of sad, heavy topics as well (great book though lol) :/
Heyy. Thanks for sharing that article. I had googled him before but I read some other one and also Wikipedia I think lol. I keep seeing JM Coetzee's name everywhere but none of his works have appealed to me yet. I'll see what you say about "Disgrace".
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