Earlier this month, Marlene van Niekerk appeared together with Toni Morrison in an event chaired by PEN president K. Anthony Appiah, as part of the PEN Festival of International Literature, New York City.

During this remarkable interview, Toni Morrison had even more good things to say about Marlene's novel AGAAT: 'I opened this book, and I was totally taken in by it instantly. I wasn't sure who was speaking. I was drawn in by the sensibility. I read it through. It took me two days. It is so beautifully written, so interesting in its architecture, which is where reading really lives. It was fully imagined.This is absolutely the most extraordinary book I've read in a long time. You must read it.'    

See the video or hear the full audio file of Toni Morrison in conversation with Marlene van Niekerk here. You can also read a review/summary of the event here.

Shortly thereafter these amazing reviews appeared in the New York Times Book Review and in Bookforum:

'Books like AGAAT, the second novel by the South African writer Marlene van Niekerk, set in the last five decades of the departed century, are the reason people read novels, and the reason authors write them. It's a monument to what the narrator calls "the compulsion to tell," expressing truths that are too heartfelt, revelatory and damaging for proud people to speak aloud - or even to admit to themselves in private. Observed from the distance of time, they present a pattern of consoling completeness. Through incantatory visual and aural imagery (van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist), AGAAT brings to life a landscape whose significance lies not only in its outward appearance ("deep kloofs overgrown with protected bush, the old avenue of wild figs next to the two-track road...hills with plots of grass and soft brushwood for the sheep to overnight") but in the inward imprint it has left on its inhabitants. How startling, how awe-inspiring, how necessary it is that the story van Niekerk assembles here is relayed by a woman who cannot speak...AGAAT was first published in South Africa, in Afrikaans, in 2004 - 10 years after the end of apartheid, the racial segregation policy that came into effect in South Africa in 1948, the year of Agaat's birth. The novel first appeared in English in 2006, fluidly translated by the novelist Michiel Heyns. His pitch-perfect rendering of the music of van Niekerk's prose reappears in the first American edition, which was released this year (by no coincidence) on April 27, the anniversary of the 1994 elections that brought the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela to power. South Africans call this date Freedom Day. Van Niekerk's first novel, TRIOMF, a dark satire of an incestuous Afrikaner family in a working-class white suburb of Johannesburg (built on the rubble of the black township of Sophiatown), appeared in that historic year. TRIOMF was a sharp, rollicking, bitter allegory of the politicized Afrikaner hysteria that accompanied the demise of apartheid. AGAAT, of course, is also an allegory, but one that covers a greater range, in a more generous and humane register. It is apartheid itself that Agaat and Milla embody, two women, black and white, ink and paper, who together, over 50 years, inscribed upon each other a scroll of wrongs, betrayals and sacrifices that cannot be redressed, only reread.'
--  Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review

'Few books I've read carry the visceral impact of Marlene van Niekerk's AGAAT, it is the South African writer's second novel and fifth book, and it is stunning. Set in the apartheid era of the 1950s into the '90s, on a dairy farm contentiously run by a desperately unhappy white couple, Milla and Jak de Wet, and their half-adopted, half-enslaved black maid, Agaat, it is about institutional racial violence, intimate domestic violence, human violence against the natural world, pride, folly, self-deception, and the innately mixed, sometimes debased nature of human love. It is especially about how this mixed nature is expressed through the deep and complex language of the body; I don't believe I've ever read a book that so powerfully translates this physical language into printed words...In revealing this much of the plot I am scarcely giving away the story, because it is van Niekerk's telling that makes it extraordinary. The author's terrible entwining of intimacy, deep physical understanding, abuse, disregard, and real affection - the tension between the will to cruelty and the will to love, between the social machine and the small beings that must live within its strictures - cycles relentlessly through the story, taking us to a more devastating place of understanding with each turn. In AGAAT, each dichotomy - love, sorrow, purity, shame, betrayal, fidelity, goodness, and brute political will - is equally and tragically real.'           
-- Mary Gaitskill, author of BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO and VERONICA, Bookforum

Click here to read an excerpt from AGAAT.