Thresholds, frontiers, or bridges can function as barriers or points of access, and they can represent opportunities or risks. They are indispensable in our way of perceiving and categorising the world, and make for a fascinating topic of creative endeavours as well as their interpretations. Focusing on diverse genres from different places and time periods, the twelve essays collected in this volume offer insightful glimpse into this area of research. The topics range from a reading of borders and abjection in the film version of Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1994) to ideas of insanity and transgression in Thomas Harris’s thriller The Silence of the Lamb (1988). Read as a whole, the collection calls out for a bridging concept of borders, their crossing and dissolving in such farflug places as Lappland, the Karoo, or the human mind.

Book mark first published in the Cape Times, 21 March 2014, p. 10.

Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries
Ed. Hein Viljoen
Rodopi, 2013