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The Seed and the Sower

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Country
  
South Africa

Publication date
  
1963

Originally published
  
1963

Page count
  
246

Publisher
  
Hogarth Press (UK)

4.2/5
Goodreads

Language
  
English

Pages
  
246

Author
  
Laurens van der Post

ISBN
  
701132353

The Seed and the Sower t3gstaticcomimagesqtbnANd9GcRm7lIGWCJF80KBEr

Media type
  
Print (Hardcover & Paperback)

Preceded by
  
The Heart of the Hunter

Adaptations
  
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

Works by Laurens van der Post
  
Night of the New Moon, Venture to the Interior, The Lost World of the Kalah, The Heart of the Hunter, A Story Like the Wind

The Seed and the Sower is a book by South African writer Laurens van der Post, consisting of three interrelated stories blended into a novel, first published in 1963. The novel was filmed in 1983 as Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, directed by Nagisa Oshima and starring David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kitano.

Contents

Plot

The first story is set in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Java during World War II and is a first person account of the relationship between John Lawrence, a British officer, and Sergeant Hara, one of the camp’s senior guards. This segment was initially published as a short story in 1956 as A Bar of Shadow.

The second, lengthier story is also set in the P.O.W. camp but is narrated in the third person from the diary of Major Celliers, a South African officer serving in the British Army, who perished in the camp and his relationships with his disabled brother and with the camp commandant, Captain Yonoi. Both of the first two stories attempt to convey the conflicting feelings the principal characters felt towards each other and their attempts to understand each other’s cultures and their widely opposed codes of honour.

The final segment is Lawrence’s reminiscence of a brief affair with a woman whose name he never learned, shortly before his capture by the Japanese.

Film adaptation

  • Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
  • Reviews

  • https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/laurens-van-der-post-6/the-seed-and-the-sower-2/
  • http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=11760
  • References

    The Seed and the Sower Wikipedia