It is difficult to compose a preface for a brilliant book. In one sense, there is nothing more to say, as what the book contains reflects its own perfection. Yet the very essence of Michael Wessels’ extraordinary and rich study of |Xam narrative is that nothing is ever closed and final. The interpretive act is never complete; indeed, the book is about multiplicities. |Xam narrative exists, Wessels tells us, as something in process, something unfinished, never to be cast in stone. His chapters in the section, ‘Reading the Narrative’ constantly force us away from a single and singular reading. Instead, he emphasises the rich and intricate texture of the narratives and shows us the ways in which they invite multiple interpretation and elicit multiple meanings. He invites us to concede difference and to understand that there is no easily marked out common Khoisan tradition. His approach thus takes us away from what he rightly sees as the ‘generalising tendency in the field that holds that all Bushmen (or even all Khoisan) belong to a single culture’. Instead, the book focuses our minds on particularities – the specificities of the |Xam language, out of which his study comes, within the wider sweep of Khoisan languages. He reminds us too of the particular delineations of the individual speakers who passed on their often rich and detailed knowledge and creativities to their interlocutors, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, at their home in Mowbray in Cape Town. Through his meticulous research in the Bleek and Lloyd archives and his use of Andrew Bank's work on the Bleek and Lloyd families and the |Xam informants themselves, Wessels presents for us the quite substantial differences between Bleek and Lloyd in their working habits and views of their informants’ culture. Lucy Lloyd emerges as a woman increasingly interested in the specificity of local cultures and the particularities of |Xam culture, thus moving away from her brother-in-law Wilhelm Bleek's belief in the dominant theories of social evolution and racial differentiation of his era.

Alongside the close gaze that Wessels asks us to engage in, we are taken into a new critical world. Bushman Letters sweeps away the stockades of an old critical habitus that has largely fenced off the study of what was/is often regarded as ‘traditional’ literature from texts seen as ‘modern’.