Anthony Fleischer

Garibaldi's Ski-boat Anthony Fleischer

GARIBALDI'S SKI-BOAT by Anthony FleischerExtracts from press reviews: SUNDAY TIMES, Johannesburg"This second novel more than fulfills the promise of the first. It has dignity, simplicity and an ease of narration that makes it not a tale told but a pattern of people and events evolving independently through some natural process 'Somehow,' the novel begins, 'one knows when the night is turning into morning, the darkness is a morning darkness and the air is chilled.' The sense of atmosphere conveyed in this opening sentence is maintained to the end of the book. Throughout, the tree chief characters move, speak and fulfill their destinies against a background of the elements."SUNDAY TIMES, London"To Grribaldi, Cape Coloured fisherman, comes by luck and coincidence an amazing fishing boat. It's unsinkable, they say, and at last he can venture into the Indian ocean for real fishing instead of skulking in a leaking tub in the muddy waters, with his friend Sky But Sky lost his wife to the terrible ocean and can't overcome his terror, so Garibaldi goes it alone. This is really an elongated short story but it is beautifully told."THE OBSERVER, London'The author handles the transition from the simple fun of the quayside to the elemental disaster of the climax with great skill. He is a real writer, and he knows what some writers never learn: when to stop.'TIME & TIDE, London'It is difficult to pin-point the extraordinary attractiveness of this story, perhaps it is because the author never, by so much as a nod towards a more complex world, leaves the setting and the characters he has drawn. There are no symbols to worry us, no folk wisdom to fox us, no archetypes, only people with special wants and special likes: In all this he shows an unpretentious confidence-perhaps unconscious-and skill lacked by many more famous European novelists.'