The Rowing Lesson

　　"Anne Landsman's glittering, shimmering new novel is a tour de force. . . . Elation and pain, anxiety and exuberance, and the uneven beat of living are all caught in language as silky and fluid as music."-Roxana Robinson

　　"Like Joyce or William Gass or John Edgar Wideman, Anne Landsman fashions a sensual web of memory and desire, rescuing a world at the brink of extinction through the power of her lyricism."-Stewart O'Nan

　　"An elegy for a lost father and a beloved world on the point of disappearing. Rarely in South African writing will we encounter language of such fire and passion."-J. M. Coetzee

　　"A fierce elegy, a daughter's imaginary inhabitation of the memory of her dying father . . . an adventure in language. . . . It makes art of a life."-Louis Menand

　　Betsy Klein is summoned from her home in the United States to her father's hospital bed in South Africa. Orphaned young, he had to struggle to become a doctor and to win the respect of his Boer patients. We first meet young Harold Klein on an excursion with his friends on the Ebb 'N Flow, a river to which he often returns. That is where he later teaches his little daughter to row, and finally, where he makes his last metaphoric passage.