Intriguing, poignant, profound, and breathtakingly imaginative, these are some of the superlatives that I can use to describe Vivian De Klerk’s latest offering.
My brain is still tingling from what I had just read. I have never read anything like that before. Vivian deserves to be congratulated for delivering this great piece of fiction.
In Serpent Crescent, Vivian takes the readers to Qonda township to allow a self-confessed sociopath Megan Merton to share with us the juicy secrets about the inhabitants of the Crescent.
Megan details all of these secrets in her to-be published memoir, where nothing and no one living in the Crescent is left untouched.
I need to admit that how the protagonist is telling all these secrets and her role in finding about them truly evoked mixed emotions in me.
Listen, Megan is a hardcore sociopath, make no mistake about that, but as a reader, I find myself at times commending her evilness in exposing some of the secrets of the inhabitants of the Crescent. And Elizabeth Cardew will agree with me on that one that Megan is not that evil. Some of her narcissistic behaviour is driven by the need to “correct” the wrongs of other people(I actually do not believe that I said that). On the other hand, I was extremely angry with how her sociopathic narcissistic behaviour was just pure evil.
Perusing through the pages of this book, I find myself not only appreciating Vivian’s storytelling prowess, but her ability to write characters like Megan who make you as a reader to have a love-hate relationship with them. And it takes a special skill from an author to make readers feel like that.
Never has a book been so heart-wrenching and heartwarming at the same time.
I must add that while this is a brilliant and unique story, it was, however, a bit difficult for me to breakthrough the linguistic flair in telling the story (I had to always refer to my dictionary quite a few times). And this speaks to Vivian’s background as an academic. That academic background show itself in the choice of words from the two leading characters(Megan and Elizabeth) throughout the pages. And at times that slowed my reading momentum, because English is not my home language. However, for some readers, the linguistic flair might be an opportunity to learn new and big English words.
Besides that, this is a cracking novel and this is an exceptional achievement for Vivian. Her star continues to rise.
I have finally joined her fan club.