Blog Entry 1

Blog 1

“This is what happened.” The Power of One starts with this small yet powerful sentence, which is full of meaning. Already I was drawn into reading this book. It is as if the writer of this book is letting you in on his story, or his secrets. I knew from the start that this book was not a true story, yet some of the facts were true about it. The thing about the opening sentence is that Bryce Courtenay already brings you, as the reader, into the book by writing this sentence; it’s as if he is encouraging you, or even daring you, to read on. And this is just the first sentence. It starts off with how this boy, of whose name we know not, comes into the world. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t nursed by his mother, but by a Zulu nanny. This already gives the feeling of a broken home. Not much is really said about the first five years of this boy’s life. As the reader I could feel that there was a strong relationship between this child and his nanny. Especially when it says that he was torn away from her big white smile and sent to boarding school. I can almost picture the nanny’s smile: a large black woman with massive pearly white teeth. You sympathise with this little nameless boy right away.

The next thing I noticed was the fact that he spoke English and English only. He lived in South Africa and yet he did not speak the language. He was English and he knew it, he was a Rooinek and the writer admits it as if it is a really bad thing, a curse to be an Englishman. He mentions that this was the infected tongue that ‘had spread like a plague into the sacred land and contaminated the pure, sweet waters of Afrikanerdom.’ This is a very descriptive and very negative sentence. The whole of the first seven chapters seem to follow this same sort of pattern. He is torn from what he loves and he is beat up, he finds something he loves and he looses it. He has to learn to put up with everyone else’s behaviours and he puts up the ‘camouflage’ of being dumb to fit in. He gets a name, ‘Pisskop’ which is Afrikaans for Pisshead. Not a very pleasant name, but he puts up with it. He also gets a friend, and something you would expect. This is because his friend is an animal, but not the type you would usually see like a dog or a cat. Instead he gets a chicken and calls it Granpa chook. He also has to put up with the Judge and Jury who pick on him. They make him do things like hold a bar out in front of himself for as long as he can, eat human excrement and sit in the shower where they piss on him. This is where he gets the name Pisskop from. Basically what I expect from the rest of this book is the rising and falling of Pisskop. He will find something good and hold onto it and then it will suddenly be taken away from him.