I sat there divided. Though my grandfather was visibly shaken by the
force of this memory, and I knew I was seeing him more vulnerable than I
had ever seen him, I felt a bubbly thrill because this was such good
stuff, and I remember turning my eyes away from his distressed face to
make sure the wheels of the dictaphone were still turning. When Daniel
is tasked with writing the biography of his grandfather, Jules Browde -
one of South Africa's most celebrated advocates - he sharpens his pencil
and gets to work. But the task that at first seems so simple comes to
overwhelm him. As the book begins to recede - month after month, year
after year - he must face the possibility of disappointing his
grandfather, whose legacy now rests uncomfortably in his hands. The
troubled progress of Daniel's book stands in sharp contrast to the
clear-edged tales his grandfather tells him. Spanning almost a century,
these gripping stories compellingly conjure other worlds: the streets of
1920s Yeoville, the battlefields of the Second World War, the courtrooms
of apartheid South Africa. The Relatively Public Life of Jules Browde
turns the conventions of a biography inside out. It is more than the
portrait of an unusual South African life, it is the moving tale of a
complex and tender relationship between grandfather and grandson, and an
exploration of how we are made and unmade in the stories we tell about
our lives.
