The hunter's breath
The breath of the hunter (original title in Afrikaans : Infanta ) is a crime novel by the South African writer Deon Meyer from 2004. It is the first novel with the South African police inspector Benny Griessel as the main character. He is chasing the hero of the previous novel, The Hunter's Heart , the gigantic Xhosa Thobela Mpayipheli, when he throws all of South Africa into turmoil with acts of vigilante justice . The German translation by Ulrich Hoffmann was published in 2007.
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The former hit man Thobela "Tiny" Mpayipheli and his eight-year-old foster son Pakamile get caught in a robbery at a gas station in Cathcart . The robbers shoot their way out and the boy falls victim to the bullets. The perpetrators, John Khoza and Andrew Ramphele, are soon caught, but their lawyer attacks Thobela's credibility in the course of the trial, and during a break in negotiations they manage to escape. Thobela wants revenge for the death of his son, but he does not manage to get hold of the two men. Instead, he becomes aware of a man who, out of the superstition that he can cure his AIDS illness, raped a baby and was released because of a procedural error. He kills the man and decides to devote his life to atonement for all those crimes against children who are not prosecuted by the South African judiciary.
The public responded with great approval and demands for reinstatement of the death penalty on the series of murders Thobelas that all his actions with a Assegai commits the traditional short-peer of the Zulus . Speculations about a woman as the perpetrator are making the rounds, and the pseudonym " Artemis " spreads. Detective Inspector Benny Griessel leads the investigation of the Cape Town Police . But he mainly has to struggle with private problems: He tries to get his alcohol addiction under control in order to win back his wife, who unmistakably put him out of the door, and his two children. When the “Artemis murderer” kills a lesbian woman accused of manslaughtering her partner's daughter, Griessel doubts the victim's guilt for the first time. With her confession she just seems to have covered the real perpetrator, the mother of the child.
Griessel senses his chance when the daughter of the prostitute Christine van Rooyen is kidnapped. The alleged perpetrator is Carlos Sangrenegra, who is not only a suitor from Christines, but also the representative of a Colombian drug cartel in South Africa, which is monitored by Wilhelm "Boef" Beukes and the organized crime department. Nobody believes the professional criminal's assertions that he has nothing to do with the girl's disappearance. Nevertheless, at Griessel's instigation, he is released on bail to use him as a decoy for "Artemis". Thobela actually swallows the bait when the press reports the suspect's release and kills the alleged child murderer Carlos with his assegai. He escapes from the crime scene, but the police stay on his trail.
Only in retrospect does it become apparent that Christine van Rooyen staged the kidnapping of her daughter in order to evade herself and her daughter from the stalkings of the violent and possessive Carlos. César Sangrenegra, an ice-cold professional killer, travels from Colombia to avenge the death of his brother. He kidnaps Griessel's eighteen-year-old daughter Carla and forces the police officer to hand over the murderer to him. Griessel succeeds in bringing Thobela under his control. In a direct conversation with the police officer, the "Artemis murderer" learns for the first time that his vigilante justice has cost innocent lives. Shaken, he promises to help Griessel to free his daughter.
Together with the gigantic Thobela, Griessel manages to free Carla. He personally shoots César and his gang members when he hears that they raped Carla. Beukes is exposed as an informer of the Sangrenegra clan. John Khoza and Andrew Ramphele, the fugitive murderers of little Pakamile, are arrested and face a regular trial. Christine van Rooyen starts a new life with her daughter with money from Carlos's estate. And although Griessel testifies to the death of the "Artemis murderer" in the exchange of fire with the Colombians, rumors are spreading that the black giant is on the road again through South Africa with his BMW R 1150 GS .
background
Thobela “Tiny” Mpayipheli, an “unforgettable protagonist” according to Marilyn Stasio, already played a central role in the two previous novels Death Before Dawn and The Hunter's Heart . His opponent Benny Griessel was a supporting character in Meyer's first internationally published novel The Sad Policeman . According to the author, he had already grown fond of him back then and had him in mind as the main character of his own book. To do this, however, he had to break the “cliché of the drinking policeman”, which Griessel had made into a rather comical figure on his first appearance. In order to create a tension-creating conflict, he let Griessel fight his “demons”, his alcoholism and the separation from his wife in his first novel.
reception
The novel won the South African ATKV Award for Prose in 2004 and, six years later, the Swedish Crime Prize for best crime novel translated into Swedish in 2010.
Katrin Raith describes The Hunter's Breath as "an oppressive story about vigilante justice" that fathoms out how a person reacts when the most important thing in his life is taken away. The novel is "extremely exciting, brilliantly told, with a sophisticated plot and credible portraits of broken heroes", especially gripping because of the "unique political background". For Johannes Kaiser, Der Atem des Jäger is a “grandiose thriller as a realistic reflection of a society in upheaval.” It consists of three stories told in parallel, which are linked in a “cleverly enhanced, rather surprising finale”. Sarah Weinman particularly emphasizes the author's strong empathy for his broken figures. Sylvia Staude compares Meyer with the two fathers of the classic hard-boiled crime novel : Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler . The world of his books is just as “dark and hard”, but unlike the two American classics, “the almost desperate desire for brightness and beauty can be felt” under the hardness.
expenditure
- Deon Meyer: Infanta . Lapa, Pretoria 2004, ISBN 0-7993-3314-X .
- Deon Meyer: The hunter's breath . Translated from the English by Ulrich Hoffmann. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-352-00746-0 .
Web links
- Devil's peak by Deon Meyer on complete-review.com.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Marilyn Stasio: But Is It Art? . In: The New York Times, April 13, 2008.
- ↑ a b Devil’s peak ( memento from June 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on Deon Meyer's website.
- ↑ Katharina Granzin: "Benny fights against demons" . In: the daily newspaper of December 11, 2012.
- ↑ Katrin Raith: Breaking a taboo . In: Deutschlandfunk from February 11, 2008.
- ↑ Johannes Kaiser: A thriller from South Africa . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from February 1, 2008.
- ^ Sarah Weinman: Into Africa . In: Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2008.
- ↑ Sylvia Staude: As good as you can . In: Frankfurter Rundschau from August 28, 2007.