I Remember King Kong

by Denis Hirson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.47

  Imagine you are in an aeroplane at daybreak, your eyes blurred with sleep. The pilot has just announced that the flight will be over in a few minutes. The city tilts towards you now. You catch a glimpse of street-lamps, cars silently torching the soft grey air, a few yellow windows in the massed darkness of buildings. As the plane veers towards the airport, you are filled with the sense of an entire city stirring from the intimacy of the night, about to blink at itself in the mirror, still indifferent to your presence though it will soon draw you down into the immediacy of its preoccupations. Now imagine that this is not a city of the present but a city of the past, your past; a place you have not lived in for decades, and which you are returning to as if it were still all it had ever been before you left. Imagine that the lights you see are your own glittering, floating memories, rising into focus across the foggy gap of absence, reminding you that despite all the years spent in another place, your previous existence is still very much alive in your mind. I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) is a book of reminiscences which are, and could only be, South African in their timbre, scope and feeling. The memories, some personal and some public, will take you on a journey to a time and place that you'll savour long after you have put the book down.