If Dorothy Parker and the rest of the Twenties’ New York literary set were transported to contemporary Johannesburg, they would hang out at the Irish (née Linden Bowling) Club. You may sneer and claim your watering hole has a better claim to be Jo’burg’s Algonquin Round Table. But does your local pass this simple test: has its literati ever produced a book?
The Irish Club’s is titled Viersprong, and is available at Cresta’s Exclusive Books, Estoril and elsewhere for about R135.
When new drinking buddies Vincent Pienaar and Nadia de Kock proudly showed me the first offspring of their publishing venture, Sewe Kleure Boeke, and invited me to Viersprong‘s launch at Linden’s Gooseberry guesthouse, I immediately agreed.
“What’s this book about?” I asked, looking at the cover painting by Susan Coetzer of a couple of topless angels.
On sober reflection, the statement “it contains no straight love stories” does not mean lesbian erotica. But, after too many Guinnesses and unable to clearly hear what my new friends were saying above the band Dalriada playing Irish rebel rock, I somehow got the notion it was about hot girl-on-girl action way too literary for my taste. This misconception seemed validated when I arrived at Gooseberry and saw what looked like fairies dressed as fairies streaming in.
So there I was expecting an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It turned out the fairies were actually young Christians dressed as angels to consecrate a chapel.
The last fancy do I’d dressed up for was the opening of my sister-in-law, sculptor Isolde Krams’s art exhibition at Absa gallery. Even with Justice Albie Sachs giving the opening address, it only attracted a fraction of the crowd at Viersprong‘s launch. The entertainment here included Dalriada’s Eliot Short on fiddle and Mick Matthews on guitar giving a stunning rendition of Fields of Athenry.
I wish I could have bought an autographed copy of the book, but as a newspaper writer, I am not permitted to read books. In our profession, every sentence you read becomes one more sentence you can never write. If the elders of my tribe saw me anywhere near a book, they would start baying “Plagiarist!” and “Fairy!” and then the rest of the pack would tear me apart like rabid wolves. I was taking my life in my hands by attending a book launch.
In compliance of the strict aliteracy demanded by my profession, I reviewed Viersprong without reading it. Instead, I interviewed half its contributors at the Irish Club during a Dalriada performance without taking notes.
It’s an anthology of 29 short stories written by Annemari Coetser, Anel Heydenrych, Trisa Hugo and Nadia de Kock, spanning the gamut from cybersex to one story with some lesbian erotica in it — so I wasn’t completely wrong.
The cybersex story is titled Rofl jy Stoffel. Sixty-year-old women’s fiction writers know Rofl is an Internet acronym for Rolling On Floor Laughing, but journalists like me think it’s an Afrikaans word we haven’t come across before.
Many of the stories are true, with names and places changed to avoid embarrassment. For instance, there really was a 70-year-old woman whose main concern in wording personal ads was that they would attract men who could still rise to the occasion. The publication used in Die Bus na Hart-se-loop was Landbou Weekblad, but perhaps it was some other magazine in reality.
Some of the stories are autobiographical. To make ends meet as a single mother, Nadia moonlighted as an IT specialist for correctional services over weekends. The job involved working in the death row of a women’s prison, an experience she recounts in Die Gang. She was there when Theresa Ramashamola, one of the Sharpeville Six, got a reprieve 48 hours before her date with the hangman.
“Theresa was this ordinary 24-year-old waitress — not somebody you would ever think belonged on death row,” Nadia told me. “When she heard about the reprieve, she asked me for some needle and thread so she could crochet. That was how she wanted to celebrate being allowed to live.”
Other stories sound dark and Gothic — especially Anel’s, which is based on her time working as an events coordinator in a British mental asylum. “No, they are funny,” Anel said. “The patients I worked with were potentially dangerous and had been committed for a reason, but they still had a sense of humour.”
Sex and fun seem to be the dominant themes of the anthology. Nadia described the first book her venture has published as aimed at women over 40 who are “free-spirited, independent, adventurous, sassy” and not preoccupied by menopause.
Even if I were allowed to read, as a male preoccupied by menopause I’m not in Viersprong‘s target audience. Fortunately, the strictures of the newspaper writing cult allow me to listen to music, so I bought an autographed copy of Eliot Short’s new CD The Soulfood Sessions. It’s great. Get it.