On a trip into Newcastle, I went into a book store, browsed the shelves, and enquired of the pony-tailed young man behind the counter if he had anything by Stuart Cloete. He looked at me blankly. Stuart who? Figuring I’d mispronounced the name, I wrote it down. He stared at it, shrugged, and said he’d never heard of him. And that was that.
Now this was a presumably literate person of Afrikaner extraction looking at the name of a man who was South Africa’s major novelist, short-story writer, and whispered candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature into the 1960s, and who died as recently as 1976. Yet his books were not on bookstore shelves, and his name meant nothing to a bookstore employee.
This was before the advent of the Internet and its flood of information (and, more commonly, misinformation) and today, fortunately, there is scattered material available about the life and works of Stuart Cloete — a man, where he was mentioned as one of the then-current giants of African literature. This reference caused me to buy Cloete’s 1963 masterwork, , and I’ve been searching for, and reading, Stuart Cloete ever since.
