The Alley
In the very first image of the novel, Curren describes a neglected section of her yard to her daughter: "There is an alley down the side of the garage, you may remember it, you and your friends would sometimes play there. Now it is a dead place, waste, without use, where windblown leaves pile up and rot" (3). The "you" has yet to be defined, so in these first lines of the book, the reader is left wondering who is being addressed. The alley marks a memory. The imagery is bleak and demonstrates to the reader that Curren, as she narrates, is racked with nostalgia and longs for times past.
The Bay
On their first drive together, Curren takes Vercueil to the lookout point overlooking False Bay. She describes what she sees to her daughter:
A breaker, perfectly straight, hundreds of yards long, rolled inshore, a single crouched figure on a surfboard gliding ahead of it. Across the bay the mountains of Hottentots Holland stood out clear and blue. Hunger, I thought: it is a hunger of the eyes that I feel, such hunger that I am loath even to blink. These seas, these mountains: I want to burn them upon my sight so deeply that, no matter where I go, they will always be before me. I am hungry with love of this world. (18)
This image, too, is full of longing and unsatisfiable nostalgia. Curren looks upon the picturesque landscape and grieves for herself, not long for this beautiful world around her. What Curren doesn't consider is that it is a colonized landscape. In earlier drafts of the novel, Coetzee wrote this scene as highly politicized, drawing attention to the fact that the beautifully described land has been withheld for centuries from the people native to it.
Site C
Curren describes the chaos in Site C as she, Florence, and Thabane frantically search for Bheki: "It was from the people gathered on the rim of this amphitheater in the dunes that the sighing came. Like the mourners at a funeral they stood in the downpour, men, women, and children, sodden, hardly bothering to protect themselves, watching the destruction" (95). Curren relates the misery and the bleak, burning landscape. The mist and smoke in the air and reference to people as ghosts and wraiths draw on imagery from Virgil's Aeneid, positioning her foray into the settlement as parallel to Aeneas's journey to the underworld.
Waking in the Woods
After the police kill John in her house, Curren refuses to sleep there for a night. She falls asleep on the sidewalk and Vercueil finds her. She asks him not to take them home, so he takes them to a wooded area and they sleep on the ground. She describes waking up: "It was quite light now. On our flattened-out box in the vacant lot we must have been visible to every passerby. That is how we must be in the eyes of the angels: people living in houses of glass, our every act naked. Our hearts naked too, beating in chests of glass. Birdsong poured down like rain" (166). Curren actually feels better after sleeping outside. The imagery focuses on nature and the oneness of nature with the crossover of natural sounds like birdsong and rain.
