Sweef | Die laaste opstel – Martie Preller | English Summary

Sweef en ander Verhale

Die laaste opstel – Martie Preller

The year is 3009, and the narrator lives in a perfect society. Everyone is smart, beautiful and engineered to perfection. They live in a bubble, incapable of experiencing negativity or even love. They can travel through time and upon turning 14-years-old, they decide to stay in their time period, or to travel forwards or backwards in time to have their lives restart there. Naturally, this is irreversible. The author chooses to head back to 1995 –
the advisors plead with her to change her mind since the world in 1995 was a total mess. They send her to the museum to educate her on what she’ll be in for in that time period. However, since she spends all her time there, she already knows. One of her tasks prior to time travelling is to read through an essay titled “My Last Essay”. She has no context for it whatsoever except for the fact that she will be reborn in Cape Town, in the year 1995, set to turn 14 in 2009 and... she will be the girl who writes this essay as the last one of her grade 8 year.

The essay is very meta in the sense that it is very much a written essay, but it is a compilation of reasons why she couldn’t do her essay. Dated on the 22nd of October 2009, the essay is written in the first person. Reasons that range from comical to serious, things like her cat chasing a rat around her room all night keeping her up. She claims her fatigue made it difficult for her to think. Her uncle’s recent infidelity sparks a sense of dread because she has someone she likes and she would be broken if it all came down to him cheating on her too. She also writes that she cannot answer the essay prompt about the future because she knows not what it holds and the uncertainty makes her insecure. She tries to focus on the present. Finally, she writes that her last excuse isn’t so much an excuse as much as it is a question. “What is the point of this exercise?”, she asks. Aside from getting the marks to pass the class, she finds it completely pointless and boring - she has better things to do.

She signs it off with kind regards as one of her teacher’s grade 9 students - Chantel.

• Summaries
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