The Long Silence of Mario Salviati, by Etienne van Heerden, tr Catherine Knox <br></br>Bitter Eden, by Tatamkhulu Afrika

Strange tales from a bitter paradise

A preoccupation with history and memory is becoming something of a trademark in South African fiction. While it is not surprising that two recent novels should have this theme, it is curious that both should have a prisoner-of-war as a central character. If, for the Afrikaans writer Etienne van Heerden, the exploration of the past is almost entirely invented, in the case of Tatamkhulu Afrika it is based on his own experiences as a PoW in Italy and Germany.

Van Heerden follows his novels Ancestral Voices and Kikuyu with another expansive tale set in South Africa's Karoo. When arts administrator Ingi Friedländer arrives in the fictional town of Yearsonend to procure a sculpture for Cape Town, the feuding Pistorius and Bergh families take her into their midst with a multitude of stories: the legendary wagon of Kruger gold from the South African war, romantic intrigues, inter-racial love.

Despite the title, the eponymous deaf, dumb and now blind stonecutter from Florence is just one of a cast of characters whose story gets told in this capacious novel. Salviati and his fellow Italian PoWs arrived when Karel Bergh had his big dream. He wisely chose this stonecutter to assist him with an improbable venture: to get water from lush land miles east into the dam at Yearsonend. Using Bernoulli's Law of Flux and Mario's skills, the project was launched, but failed, and Big Karel vanished. Mario stayed, marrying Karel's sister Edit, a singer of arias who nearly became a nun.

Fantastical and outrageous, Van Heerden's novel is reminiscent of Devil's Valley by André Brink, his colleague at the University of Cape Town. Exuberant and imaginative as it is, in the end this repetitious novel says too much.

By contrast, Bitter Eden is harsh, exquisite and concise. Although Tatamkhulu Afrika is an established poet, now 80, this is his "début" novel. The narrator is a South African PoW, Tom Smith. Set during the Second World War in a prison camp in Italy, then in Germany, the story is about the bittersweet memories of male friendship in wartime.

The clinging but loyal nurse Douglas becomes mad with jealousy when Tom abandons him to be "best mates" with boxer Danny. With the meagre rations and brutally cold nights, the only diversions are theatrical productions (Tom plays an exceptional Lady Macbeth). The physical closeness in the all-male camps brings an unexpected, if not entirely acknowledged, intimacy between Tom and Danny. The war ends shortly after the Germans march the prisoners through the snow, planning to shoot them in the mountains. The route has mercifully been cut.

An elegantly crafted work, Bitter Eden is an astonishing story about men in close quarters forging relationships that border on trust and betrayal – and how love, in war, is an ambivalent bond.