Novelist Eben Venter emigrated to Australia, but still writes in Afrikaans.He spoke to Jane Rosenthal
Eben Venter is small and wiry, intense and direct; he has been living in Australia for 13 years but sounds as if he has just driven down in his bakkie from Burgersdorp, where his parents farm.
Before the interview gets under way in a Cape Town coffee shop, he has a couple of questions of his own: can I actually read/understand Afrikaans? And why did my review of his previous novel focus on a relatively unimportant part of the book? That is, why did I home in on an incident in a platteland co-op and ignore the illness and death of the main character in Australia?
Venter funds periods of writing time by working in a seafood restaurant, and has previously owned a macrobiotic caf in Melbourne. His new novel, My Simpatie, Cerise (Queillerie) is set entirely in that city and is his fourth published work of fiction; two previous novels, Foxtrot van die Vleiseters and Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe each won the WA Hofmeyr Prize.
Venter started out life on a course ordinary enough for the average boerseun: Grey College in Bloemfontein and military service as a radio operator in the airforce. (“Poor Angola,” he says. “Such a ridiculous war to get involved in.” And, after a pause, “The reports one now hears coming out of there …”) But, inspired by an aunt with European connections, he had his sights fixed beyond Africa.
A detour via Potchefstroom University turned him into a thinking person. Although initially enrolled in the theological school, he ended up doing philosophy and speaks fondly of his lecturers there as “lewensmentors”. He left the country in 1986; by that time he hated the government of the day and the narrowness of South African society. Finally, a new set of call-up papers to do camps settled the matter, and he left, describing a return to military service as “impossible”.
He and his partner now live on eight and a half acres outside Melbourne, of which four are indigenous eucalyptus bush, complete with koalas and wallabies, and a beautiful wooden house in which they cater for special functions.
Despite his enthusiasm for life in Australia, Venter volunteers the observation that “What I experience in Australia does not have such a sharp, focused impact as my experiences here.” This intense awareness is something he enjoys.
And perhaps that is why the platteland co- op incident in Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe seemed to me so significant: it was both satirical and funny, with a depth of underlying love and knowledge which I find lacking in his writing on Australia. And this has something to do with the fact that, as he returns to Australia with an “unbearable” load – he smiles as he says this – of Afrikaans books, and keeps a sharp eye on the South African literary scene. His highest praise here is for Marlene van Niekerk and, especially, Karel Schoeman.
My Simpatie, Cerise is “baie aktueel” – that is to say, Melbourneans and those in the know will recognise certain of his characters, notably Roland and Cerise Cox, a powerful nouveau riche couple. Although much is already known, through the press, about Roland’s shady deals with the government, it is the seamy private side of their life which Venter reveals through their gardener, Robert Mackie.
Cerise is eccentric, ditsy, extravagant, but the brutal and unattractive Roland can and does destroy employees and small contractors. The gardener, a complex Irish fellow, and the garden itself, provide some light relief from the unrelenting sterility and materialism of the Coxes, and the obsessive resentment which they evoke in Mackie.
The final scenes of the novel revolve around a huge party set in the garden – probably destroying it – in which a floor of mirror tiles underscores the fragility of the Coxes’ position while threatening to reveal too much from below, and a row of newly bought espaliered orange trees speaks not only of elegance but also of unnatural restraints and contortions all for the sake of show.
Though Venter has been at pains to expose the monstrous Roland, to “get him”, as it were, there is always a sense of the desperate meaninglessness of the Coxes’ lives, where money and power are nothing without love, or even just common decency.