Father, Daughter and ‘Estranged Belonging’: Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson

Abstract

In this article, I analyse aspects of a father/daughter story that is emblematic of dislocation and a yearning to belong. It is a story of a deep-seated, recurrent condition of ‘estranged belonging’. Most critical responses to Anne Landsman’s prize-winning novel have focused on the narrator’s (the daughter’s) memory and nostalgia within the trope of an ‘elegy for a dying parent’. I embed such a trope, however, in the quite insistent – but hitherto largely ignored – societal dimension of the story. Accordingly, the expatriate daughter reconnects with her dying father not only by recollecting her affective memories of him and the ‘lessons’ learned. She also reconnects by entering imaginatively into the life of her father as the son of a poor, immigrant Lithuanian family. The reader enters, intimately, into the ‘estranged belonging’ of a country doctor, in the class marginalisation, hardship, fracture and resilience of small-town South Africa.

Key words: Anne Landsman, The Rowing Lesson, double dislocation, estranged belonging, father-daughter