This book is both refreshing and restrictive – and in a number of ways. It provides a fresh look at work related to the famous Bleek and Lloyd collection of the southern African /Xam narratives, but it is somewhat unfortunate that this has left comparatively little room for a fresh look at the narratives themselves. The book is divided into four sections. The first introduces the collection itself and revisits some classic interpretations of similar bodies of narratives (above all those by Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski). Section 2 takes issue with three major contributions that deal with the Bleek and Lloyd collection, namely the works of Roger Hewitt, Mathias Guenther and Andrew Bank. While section 4 provides comments on two further ways of making reference to the /Xam collection, J. D. Lewis-Williams' theory of San religion and A. Krog's poetry, it is only section 3 that deals directly with /Xam narratives. Correspondingly, one of the main propositions of the book is that theoretical debates at the meta-level are the best way of bringing us closer to the narratives themselves.

One of the book's achievements is that it reconnects the work on an old corpus, originally compiled at the end of the nineteenth century, to new theoretical ideas about text, orality, religion, Orientalism, modernity and morality. In other words, it prevents anti-theoretical dust from settling on the Bleek and Lloyd collection, which would reduce its scope to the attention of a few devoted folklorists instead of putting it back in touch with some key debates in the humanities. It is also refreshing that the author lays open the theoretical ideas (of Foucault, Bourdieu, Spivak and above all Derrida) that have inspired his work. Having said that, it is a major limitation that Wessels stops with Derrida's deconstructivism. He insists, with Derrida, that “even if we had access to the spoken performance of /Xam narratives rather than to the translated texts, we would still [….] have to read these performances as texts” (p. 63) because he considers the separation of speech and writing to be an ideological one. This is no longer state-of-the-art, since there are a number of new approaches that underline the continuity between speaking and writing (think of Tim Ingold's “Perception of the environment” and other phenomenological work) without falling into the trap of hegemonically subordinating everything under the notion of text and code. Some of the issues raised point towards studying texts as speech instead of the other way round. Since the narrative context of the stories is largely lost in the way in which they were recorded, it would be legitimate and productive to relate them to the available evidence about storytelling practice, a route that the author, following Derrida's dictum, prevents us from taking.

With regard to direct engagement with the narratives Wessels once again has refreshing things to say, for instance about the way in which narrators and interpreters deal with different variants of the same story. It is indeed questionable to treat different variants either as surface phenomena of an underlying hidden structure or simply in terms of geographical diffusion and cultural origin. The tensions between variants may actually be a sign of cultivated heterodoxy, of allowing for ambiguity and openness. When apparently “mundane” small topoi such as “how the hare got his split lip” are combined in a narrative with existential “big questions” of life and death, classifying a story from the start as “aetiological” or as a “myth of origin” encourages, according to Wessels, “the erasure from critical analysis of the play of signifiers in /Xam discourse” (p. 198). With less hubris we may say that it is simply bad practice to superimpose any general label without giving sufficient attention to the story itself and to the way it is being told. A detailed and critical analysis, by contrast, suggests more modest conclusions about these narratives (and their respective variants) until we have a good analysis of the texts in their original language that deserves the notion of a “close engagement” with the narrative. If particulars matter, working with translations and editorial compositions is highly problematic. It is true that /Xam narrators themselves probably continually rearranged the stories but it is also likely that they did it in very different ways, and with different motivations, when compared with Bleek and the other compilers of the edited stories.

It is refreshing that Wessels directs us back to a critical study of the particulars of the /Xam narratives but it is restricting that he combines this with a rigid aversion to all comparative study as if “particular” necessarily has to mean “singular”. In fact, given that the Bleek and Lloyd collection is heavily influenced by the prominent modes of thought of the collectors and editors and their time, and since we no longer have access to the original narrators, we will not get far without comparative evidence from other corpora and from contemporary storytelling practice. The critical exegesis of these texts will make advances not by restricting itself to the narratives themselves, nor by theoretical reflexivity alone, but rather through careful comparison combined with detailed linguistic analysis.

The book cover labels Bushman Letters as “metacritical” (which would make this review “meta-metacritical” and whatever you as the reader think of this review “meta-meta-metacritical”). But this (post)modernist idea wrongly suggests that the greater the distance from the object of study the better the view, and in fact there is much in this book that recommends less distance rather than more. For practical purposes, therefore, the book may play a useful role when teaching students the intricacies of Khoisan narratives and of dealing with oral narratives more generally. It will stimulate discussion in the classroom since it provides a theoretically interesting critique of existing works, but I suggest it should always be complemented with ethnographic studies of storytelling, ideally with direct exposure to storytelling events in field research and through available video records, and of course with the direct work on the collected texts themselves, ideally in their original language.