She now lives in France, but Marita van der Vyver is still writing about South Africa Jane Rosenthal Marita van der Vyver has been writing since her late teens and has been hugely successful from the start – her first book, Griet Skryf +n Sprokie, caused something of a stir. Her novels are unabashedly focused on the white Afrikaner community (-you write what you can write about+) and indeed she reflects the way most South Africans still experience life, still very much in the little hokkies defined for us by apartheid. Her new novel, Breathing Space (Penguin), just out in English translation, takes an unpretentious look at -alternative+ Afrikaners who were thirtysomething between 1985 and 1995, and who had escaped the clutches of religious and political tradition. When asked, she distances herself from recent manifestations of Afrikaner identity crises, notably the hostile reactions to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the renewed taalstryd. On the latter, she is -deeply cynical about it all+ and says, -The aggression it brings out does more harm than good at this stage.+ Breathing Space, first published in Afrikaans as Wegkomkans, started off, she says jokingly, as a sort of -Boere Big Chill+. She decided to extend it to deal with a group of 10 friends who meet annually, for a -breathing space+ weekend, over a 10-year period, producing a long and satisfying exploration of friendships, marriages, love affairs and life in South Africa in those extraordinary years of transition. It is easy to read, engaging and authentic; though the characters are mainly Afrikaners, any middle-class South African will find points of indentification in it. The novel begins with a still from the cinematically written story, a group photograph taken in 1985, which even in that briefly frozen moment reveals a great deal about the dynamics and tensions between members of the group. -The only indication of the story she would eventually see – when it was too late to write it down because reality had exceeded her wildest imaginings – is the way in which one of the characters looks away. Like bloody Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper, Mila murmured through her scarlet mouth when she saw the photo again a decade later.+ Van der Vyver says this novel has been 13 years in the making, but was set aside while she wrote several other books. Eventually, she says, -these characters were becoming more real to me than my real friends+, and that her -social life tended to interfere with my writing all the time … Then I decided it would be good to just take myself out of the situation physically.+ She went to France on a writing sabbatical and to travel before having to settle down for the schooling of her then five-year-old son. She fell in love with both the country and one Frenchman in particular. Now, living in a large rented house in a small Provenal village with her partner and their four children, the youngest being eight-month-old Mia, Van der Vyver cheerfully remarks that she has -learned to live with a certain amount of chaos+. She says she -battles to find time+ to write, but has -been forced to become disciplined+; when she gets a few hours in which to work, she has learned to -switch on immediately+. In fact Van der Vyver seems pretty switched on at all times; she expects living in France to have a positive effect on her creativity and has spared herself the trauma of emigration. -I+m still writing in Afrikaans, still a South African taxpayer, still have a South African passport and still write about this society.+ She raves about the benefit of the Internet, which allows her to -read the Mail & Guardian every day, read Afrikaans newspapers, see what the weather is like in Cape Town, keep track of what is happening in the Afrikaans literary world+. Without this she would be -bitterly homesick by now+. Being in France also gives her a -wide-angle view+ of South Africa while, at the same time, -I+m secluded, anonymous, there+s no pressure on me.+
Of her success she says, -I think writers are deeply insecure human beings and success just makes you more insecure because the pressure gets more, expectations get higher, the pressure you put on yourself gets higher. I+m more insecure now than I was when I started writing.+ This, too, can only be good for her work; she mentions apropos of other South African writers that she admires JM Coetzee+s work, most recently Boyhood and Disgrace, because, she says, -I like a writer to show his own vulnerability.+