Louise Viljoen
VIR ‘N PERS HUIS by Karin Cronj (Human &Rousseau)
Karin Cronj’s novel Vir ‘n Pers Huis starts with a scene in a supermarket. The narrator is overcome with disgust as she observes a woman who gorges herself on the Danish pastries she is loading into her shopping trolley, and cringes pathetically while selecting tampons in front of the other shoppers. Gradually one becomes aware that the narrator is talking about herself.
This scene is the starting-point of a fresh and powerful debut novel in which the narrator moves from extreme self- loathing to a point where she has regained her confidence, independence and self-esteem. The reader is given a vivid account of her struggle to extricate herself from the relationships that define but also constrict her.
She has to reconcile herself with the fact that her husband is slowly drifting away from her, enveloped in his own existential misery. She takes leave of her dying mother in an extraordinary dance scene that is both infinitely tender and grotesque. She also has to loosen the hold that other characters have over her: her boyish lover, her dour mother-in-law and her duplicitous friend Johannatjie.
The narrator’s journey towards self- reliance is narrated in terms of intense physicality. The focus on bodily experiences like eating, vomiting, touching, menstruation, masturbation and sex bear out her insight that truth lies in the body. In this context, listening to music becomes a breathlessly erotic experience, as when she describes the movements of her lover’s foot while he is playing the violin in an orchestra.
The narrator, who feels weightless and insubstantial in the beginning of the novel, is slowly born back into substance through the process of writing. It is no coincidence that one of her first steps away from a life lived vicariously through her husband, the Big Writer, is a story about sex with her lover.
At first she is dependent on his approval and feels that her writing is inferior to his because it is so intensely private. Although she reaches emotional independence through literally (re)- writing herself, she finally commits herself to life rather than writing. In this way, she frees herself of the patronising power of those (like her husband and friend) who invest everything in their writing.
The narrator’s lack of a coherent identity is borne out by her double name, Klara/Carole, as well as the use of two languages in the novel. Although most of the narration is done in Afrikaans, considerable parts of the novel are also written in English. Because her mother tongue, Afrikaans, is associated with her prudish upbringing, she unconsciously slips into English when she writes her first story with its explicit sex scenes.
At first the slippage from Afrikaans to English worries her, because she wonders how she will be able to write herself if she does not even have one continuous language. In the end, she reconciles herself with the fact that the range of being human cannot be pinned down in a single language.
At one point in the novel the narrator dreams that she presents her father with a plate of dark-red “cakes”, made of her own tissue, blood and marrow. This dream-image gives an accurate impression of the raw, almost visceral quality of the writing in this novel. The language is vivid, coarse and irreverent, reflecting the narrator’s delightful capacity to ironise and mock herself.
Despite the feeling of spontaneous energy radiating from the narration, the writer manages to pull together diverse styles, languages and surprising images in an artfully constructed whole. One example of this skill can be found in the way in which she manipulates the different images of blood (present in the references to menstruation, childbirth, a pulled tooth) and links them to the purple house of her childhood and its eccentric inhabitant.
By the end of the novel, a fully transformed woman has emerged from the cringing figure in the supermarket scene. Like the novel Cronj has written, she is warm, articulate and completely unafraid.
Louise Viljoen lectures in the department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of Stellenbosch. She recently compiled, with Ronel Foster, an anthology of Afrikaans poetry since the Sixties called Poskaarte.