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Inside the neoliberal dystopia

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neoliberal cult of the free market.

The ties that bind

In the opening paragraph of Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon (Picador), the narrator Helen Knightly sets the searing tone for the rest of the novel by telling the reader: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily. Dementia as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother's core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers."

Of graceful retreat

JM Coetzee's latest protagonist is none other than JM Coetzee, in a disguise constructed to fool no one. But Coetzee is far too clever to become his own hero -- the simulation serves complex functions, not all of which are yet apparent. He uses an artifice that serves his purpose better than if he simply delivered his opinions about the world as it was and as it has become, writes Yunus Momoniat.

Non-fiction review

Born in about 1556, she was 26 years old when she married William Shakespeare, a glove-maker's son eight years her junior. It seems he was already a budding poet. An early sonnet, written in jaunty octosyllabics and concluding with a laboured pun (hate away / Hathaway), is thought to have been a courtship poem.

The phantom Bard

Given how little we know about William Shakespeare's life, an awful lot has been written on the subject. Of course the plays and poems produce a seemingly endless amount of commentary and interpretation and reinterpretation, but the hard facts of his life are few and far between. As Bill Bryson writes: "Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an ­academic obsession."

Passion in print

Every province deserves one, but thus far only Mpumalanga is so blessed. Deeply researched, written and edited with admirable clarity, and attractively presented, Mpumalanga: History and Heritage (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press) is the Mail & Guardian's choice for non-fiction book of the year, writes Darryl Accone.

South African fiction

The MD of Struik, Steve Connelly, was quoted by Celean Jacobs in her very interesting article (No woman, no cry, Sunday Times, June 11 2006) as saying that their new imprint of Oshun, "wanted to access the book-club market, which is mainly women". And, he continued, "… trying to create an environment where authors who happen to be women are writing for readers who largely happen to be women".

The patchworkof identity

No matter how complete our idea of a person or an event might be, it is always adulterated by our own subjectivity. A multitude of individual nuances accompanies each of our understandings, despite the desire to try to explain things as truthfully and adeptly as we can. This idea is at the core of Michael Ondaatje's latest novel, Divisadero (Bloomsbury).

Over the rainbow?

As the secondary literature on the post-apartheid novel continues to expand (possibly faster than the post-apartheid novel), Cheryl Stobie takes an interesting and hitherto unique line. The figure of the bisexual in South African fiction is a marginal one, yet in Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels (UKZN Press) Stobie places that figure centrally, writes Shaun de Waal.

The controversialist

In 1974, Ronan Bennett, an 18-year-old Irish republican revolutionary, was wrongly convicted of murdering a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer and spent 18 months in Long Kesh prison (later renamed the Maze). He has told the story of his arrest and imprisonment many times, and doesn't like to go over it again.