We asked a host of South African writers, most of whom had a new book out in 1996, what their favourite book of the year was
Andre Brink, author of Imaginings of Sand: I have no hesitation in nominating as my book of the year the novel Self-Portrait with Woman by the Polish Andrzej Szczypiorski (Grove Press). The main character, an “ordinary” Pole, has been invited by a Swiss radio programme to record the way in which the changes in his country have influenced his life. What he tells, instead, is the story of the women in his life, each of whom captures a small and poignant part of what it means to be human, to love, and to challenge death. He does tell the story of his country over the last 60 years, but all of it subsumed within his most private experience. Anyone who may believe that after apartheid there is nothing left to write about should be newly inspired by this beautiful novel.
Zakes Mda, author of Ways of Dying:The Dead Will Arise by JB Pieres (Ravan) is about a teenage prophetess called Nongqawuse who allegedly led the Xhosa nation to kill their cattle and burn all their crops. Although it’s a book about history it reads like a novel and is full of mystery and magic. It’s well written and the man makes history come alive.
NADINE GORDIMER, author of Writing and Being:My book of the year is Naguib Mahfouz’s Echoes of an Autobiography (Doubleday), an autobiography not of fact but of the imagination, in the form of brief stories and ironic myths. Impossible to read this work without gaining, with immense pleasure and in all gratitude, illumination through a quality that has come to be regarded as a quaint anachronism in modern existence, where information is believed to have taken its place. Ipronounce with hesitation:wisdom, Mahfouz has it. It dangles before us a hold on the mystery that is life.
Mbulelo Mzamane, author of Children of the Diaspora and Other Stories about Exile: As a child nurtured in the struggle tradition with very little knowledge of the apartheid state, I found that Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party 1948-1994 by Dan O’Meara (Ravan) gave me an insight into South Africa’s past. The book is an attempt to examine the ongoing conflicts inside the NP, and is a useful gauge as it shows how change is possible in South Africa.
Ashraf Jamal, author of Love Themes for the Wilderness and co-author of Art in South Africa: Jane Mendelsohn’s novel IWas Amelia Earhart (Jonathan Cape) is a work of courage, recklessness, passion and adventure. For shattering integrity and awesome visualisation by a young woman writer, I can only compare it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We live with Earhart and her drunk navigator as they hurtle around the world through breathtakingly described skies, on a fatal journey that will, climactically, force a realisation of the boundlessness of the soul.
Chris van Wyk, author of The Year of the Tapeworm: My choice would be Living and Partly Living by Moteane Melamu (Vivlia). Tsotsis, policemen, delinquents, shebeen queens, hawkers, politicians, lovers, cuckolds … Melamu writes with a huge heart and a sense of humour that are bound to turn some of these tales of the ordinary people of suburban southern Africa into classics that will be repeated in anthologies again and again for years to come.
Joan Hambidge, author of Swart Koring: Hard to decide! But if Ihave to choose, ASByatt’s phenomenal Babel Tower (Chatto &Windus) would be a first. This intelligent masterpiece is an analysis of the private versus the public discourse. A private marriage is retranslated in a bitter court case; a writer’s “pornographic” text misunderstood by the legal system. Her revival of the Sixties and Anthony Burgess is as powerful as a film of the period or a biography of this writer.
Don Mattera, author of Azanian Love Song: I reread Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Writers in Politics (Heinemann), which reminds me of my freedom and responsibility. The book focuses on how literature can shape society, concerning the role of writers and how they look at themselves. Although published in 1981, it still has relevance to South Africa today. Whites are leaving the country because they see their freedoms being whittled away, and young blacks who will step on anyone to get to the top.
Stephen Gray, author of Drakenstein: Joseph Hansen, the West Coast American novelist, is the only author of whose work I’ll purchase a new title instantly; then days of exhilarated escape from the world follow. His latest, Jack of Hearts (Plume) –‘the prequel to Living Upstairs –deals with the up-and-coming of (to us) already mature characters, caught in the dazzle of amateur drama, hoping for Hollywood. Good humoured; as always, superb.
Rachelle Greeff, author of Al die Windrigtings van My W’reld: My choice is The Book of Nights by Sylvie Germain (Dedalus). This French author has written five novels and one collection of short stories. This one, her debut, written when she was 31, was sent to me from England. The only other publication of hers Ihave managed to find locally is her later The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague. Her prose is simultaneously lyrical and terse, and travels at a breathtaking pace. The Book of Nights deals with the carnage and futility of war over 100 years of French history — worth searching for.
Paul Clingman, author of A State of Symmetry: Mr Mani, by Israeli writer ABYehoshua, is the bok Imost valued and enjoyed reading this year. Set in various places and times across the Mediterranean of the last 200 years, moments in the lives of several members of a single family are interpreted against the background of the times they live in. This oblique evocation of history as it is bound up in the repeated yearnings and desires of individuals is a profound, enthralling and provocative work of art.
Mandla Langa, author of The Naked Song: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (Oxford University Press) is the best South African novel I have read in a long time. It starts to set a path for new South African writing –the magical themes which are explored have a lasting effect on the reader.
Mark Behr, winner of the 1996 M-Net Book Prize for The Smell of Apples: Volume two of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, translated from the Italian by Joseph Buttigieg, appeared this year from Columbia University Press. We now have for the first time in English the five earliest Notebooks, written in prison between 1929 and 1932. These include writings on education, intellectuals, subaltern history, political theory and culture — including popular literature. I found this second volume, like the first that appeared in 1991, utterly absorbing to read: beautifully written, sensitively translated and very well annotated.
SARAH RUDEN, winner of the 1996 CNA Literary Award (creative category) for Other Places: The book of the year, for me, is Charles van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Share-Cropper 1894-1985 (David Philip). I learned more from this book than from any other I read recently. The combination of original subject matter, careful research and good writing really drew me in.
JO-ANN RICHARDS, author of The Innocence of Roast Chicken:At the risk of sounding like a mutual admiration society, Ithink that Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa (Macmillan) is the book that I remember most of those I read this year. I found it utterly familiar yet compelling, and it gave me a very real slice of life and a descriptive commentary on a society.
FARIDA KARODIA, author of Against an African Sky:Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (Bloomsbury) was so beautifully written, with wonderful images; it was a mystery story and it kept you in suspense right until the end. Tied with that for first position was The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate), whichhas a lovely sardonic wit and brilliant images.
Gomolemo Mokae, author of The Secret in My Bosom:Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying (Oxford University Press) has a wonderful mixture of African oral tradition and magical realism. It is well written — Mda’s ‘graduation’ from playwriting to novel-writing is amazing. It’s about the violence which gripped the black townships and the role played the book’s protagonist, who is hired to act as a professional mourner. A truly enjoyable read.
BRIAN WILLAN, editor of Sol Plaatje’s Selected Writings:No doubt at all about my book of the year: Charles van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (David Philip). This is a superb recreation of the long life of a hitherto obscure black sharecropper, Kas Maine, and the world in which he lived, and a brilliant vindication of the craft of oral history. Compulsory reading, in my view, for anybody with a serious interest in South African history.
JOHANN DE LANGE, author of Vreemder As Fiksie: Eben Venter’s latest novel, Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe (Queillerie) tore my heart out. It is one of the most disturbing novels about death I have ever read in Afrikaans. The slightly “old-fashioned” style of thought-speech is strange at first, but becomes second nature after a few pages and brings the reader very directly into contact with the narrator’s inner world. A tour de force by a writer who suprises one with each new book.
DENIS BECKETT, author of Trekking: Recently Chris van Wyk wrote angrily to The Star that they ignored his book to splurge their space on white writers (including myself. Hah! They gave me one dumb paragraph). Ihadn’t known that Chris had produced, and Ifelt for his author’s pique, so Ihunted down The Year of the Tapeworm (Ravan). Chris has a marvellous way of hitting the missable. There are township jokes, a rare sight in print; there is some punchy semi-taboo African/ coloured interthwacking; there is lots of nicely new phonetic send-up of South African accents; and there are frequent sudden ambushes of thought. I’m less happy about the central thrust, an uncertain amalgam of custard pie and MCBP, middle-class black paranoia. To think we once thought that in the liberated South Africa the chains of race would crumble!
Marcia Leveson, author of The People of the Book: Michael Holroyd’s updated biography of Lytton Strachey (Penguin) was beautifully written. It was not academic, yet it put one in touch with the times’ thoughts, feelings and attitudes. It was also lucid and as readable as a novel.
IVAN VLADISLAVIC, author of Propaganda by Monuments:Nothing Ihave read this year rivals the breadth and perceptiveness of Charles van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (David Philip). He unfolds the extraordinary drama of an ordinary man’s life against a vast backdrop –the cycle of the seasons, the history of modern South Africa. It is hard to imagine a more relentless indictment of apartheid, yet the writing is always subtle and sympathetic.
MIKE NICOL, author of Horseman: For six months Norman Mailer’s enormous Oswald’s Tale (Minerva) lay on a table while Iwondered how to find the time to read it. Eventually its sheer presence forced me to open it and for the next three days the only world that existed was that of Lee Harvey Oswald. Books can be compelling in various ways: Mailer’s is riveting as a narrative, as a technique that mixes journalism with the devices of fiction, as history, as a portrait. It’s more entralling than The Executioner’s Song — which is saying something — and it’s not only the most remarkable book I’ve read this year, but in a clutch of years.
@SPORT