The Devil's Chimney

In Anne Landsman's complex debut novel , The Devil's Chimney, middle-aged Connie Lambrecht lives a life of quiet desperation in a rural South African outpost called Oudtshoorn, where she runs a dog kennel, quietly suffers the abuse of her weak-willed husband Jack, and drinks to excess. Faced with such unremitting misery, it's no wonder that Connie becomes obsessed with two stories from the past: first, the disappearance of a colored servant girl in the Cango Caves, and second, an upper-class Englishwoman's doomed attempt to run an ostrich farm nearby. As Connie attempts to reconstruct these narratives, they intertwine with her own in an increasingly feverish--and sometimes confusing--way. Landsman writes with dreamlike intensity, and her novel is strongly influenced by magical realism. Yet The Devil's Chimney is also a meditation on the very real dichotomies of race and gender in South Africa--as well as the tension between passion and terror.