Mail & Guardian reviewers Jane Rosenthal and Percy Zvomuya talk about their favourite books of the year.
Jane Rosenthal
This year many good biographies or at least semi-biographical novels came my way.
The first was Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies (Faber and Faber, 2005), which begins with this darkly comic statement: ‘I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn —” Despite the ridiculously youthful and suave author photo, Auster was born in 1947, which makes him one of the ‘old toppies” now. This novel’s protagonist is somewhat wearied by the life he’s lived — former wives, adult children and so on. He invents a little project to wile away his last days, but before long ‘lost” members of his family find him. It’s amusing, wry, warm and sane.
Another American, much more ancient, was Kurt Vonnegut who died this year, aged 84. His last book, A Man without a Country (Seven Stories, 2005), is truly vintage Vonnegut. In this collection of memoirs, anecdotes and ‘lectures” (as in harangues and rants), he has lost none of his caustic fire. If anything he is even more angry, but as ever he delivers, with deadpan simplicity, some plain speaking on the state of the world. He has his say about our destructive addiction to the drug of fossil fuel, ‘transportation whoopee” and similar matters. But he also gets in some good words for humanists and kindness, jokes and music, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln. A gem, for dipping into on dark days.
It’s 17 years since I lived in Johannesburg so I was amazed at the tenderness and pure happiness I felt while reading Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys (Umuzi, 2006). It is not only a remarkable portrait of Troyeville, Jeppe and Kensington, but also of the people who make those areas what they are. There are many thoughtful references to the nature of memory, our existence in urban areas, our narratives to ourselves about our spaces and our fellow denizens. This memoir is full of anecdotes, portraits of friends and family, little fictions, references to other writers and visual artists — if you haven’t read it yet, now is the time. It does for the literature of Johannesburg what Kentridge has done in the visual arts; at the same time Jo’burg and what-what (its subtitle) is more lyrical and forgiving. And funny too.
The first French woman writer to be given a state funeral was the much loved, and frequently reviled, Colette. Judith Thurman’s biography, Secrets of the Flesh, A Life of Colette (Bloomsbury, 2000), is erudite, detailed and written with a combination of passion and detachment that I believe Colette would have enjoyed. In 500 pages Thurman explores the friendships and lovers, marriages and many works of this versatile woman. It is also a study of her relations, often far from ideal, with her mother and daughter, both of whom she loved and often neglected.
Then there are three South African novels that stand out for me. Flyleaf (Penguin, 2007) by Finuala Dowling, narrated in the first person, has the feel of a memoir. It is a most accomplished work in which Violet tells of a marriage fallen apart and the putting together of a life after that. A wonderfully light and clever read; Dowling might be the Nancy Mitford of Hout Bay, acute social observer as well as mistress of farce.
The already much-praised Coconut (Jacana, 2007) by Kopano Matlwa is light and sassy; it illuminates the lives of two very different young black women in Johannesburg, one born to breakfast at ‘The Silver Spoon” coffee shop, and the other a full-time waitress at the same establishment. These women have opinions and aspirations. Predictably, given the title, issues around race and identity are scrutinised.
But the novel that has really established a place in my mind is Room 207 (Kwela, 2006) by Moele Kgebetli. It evokes the lively and dangerous city of Egoli in its pacy, stylish and often heartbreaking sortee into the lives of six young guys who share a bachelor flat in Hillbrow. It is quite shocking in places, but so is life for these men.
Finally, I found the time and brainspace to read Orhan Pamuk’s novel, Snow (Faber and Faber, 2004). This extraordinary work is set in Turkey, in the city of Kars, during a short period when it is cut off from the world by excessively heavy snowfalls. An intricately complex plot revolves around a journalist in Kars to investigate the high suicide rate among Muslim ‘covered” girls. He inadvertently gets involved in a coup, staged (literally) by some secular-minded actors. Pamuk creates a cast of wonderful characters whose religious views, politics and daily lives swirl around as densely as the snow. It is not an easy read in that Pamuk sustains his slow and relentlessly detailed style throughout, but it is hugely exhilarating nonetheless. And Orhan himself features as the narrator.
Percy Zvomuya
Chinua Achebe was once asked what was his favourite among the books he’d written. Deftly avoiding giving a direct answer, he argued that the question is ‘fully comparable with asking a man to list his children in the order in which he loves them”. He said one way of avoiding the pitfalls associated with such a question was to discuss the ‘peculiar attractiveness of each child”.
Certainly among the most memorable books is Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (Kwela Books). In my review, carried by the Mail & Guardian earlier this year, I described the book as an ambitious, intelligent and disturbing read. I could add that it is one of the most riveting books I have read this year. It is a fictional take of Sila van der Kaap, a Cape slave woman, who was condemned by the 19th-century courts to die for the crime of infanticide. ‘It was a story I couldn’t resist,” the author said of the book. A sentiment those who have read it will certainly share.
Yet another book that stands out is Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (Jacana) –a youthful voice to the ‘black skins, white masks” debate. Despite faults that more rigorous editing and time for more reflection could have prevented, I maintain that Matlwa is the most significant arrival on the South African literary scene this year. She might have arrived with the pomp, drumbeat and the timbrel of the Europena Union Literary Award — but that shouldn’t distract us from straining our ears to hear the chord she has begun strumming.
This year Zakes Mda gave us another instalment on Toloki, introduced in Ways of Dying, a novel on a funeral follower set in South Africa. In the new book Cion (Penguin), Toloki learns that he could not have introduced the concept of professional mourning — a practice in the old Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern worlds. He thinks he has a chance to introduce the concept of the ‘itinerant mourner” and finds himself in Athens County, Ohio, in the United States. Cion is an unusual book, with moving scenes, elegant descriptions and wailing tones that evoke slavery — perhaps the worst institution invented by men.
Dictatorship is several rungs lower on the same scale, a preoccupation of Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men (Penguin). It is the first book I have read by a Libyan and is of the kind that evokes a certain place at a certain point in time. This year’s winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, it evokes a Libya that is full of men: bad and good, ridiculous and ludicrous, those who are guarding and those who, in the parlance, are selling out the revolution. Yet another revelation was Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa, author of The Book of Chameleons (Arcadia Books), which has been described as ‘elliptical and charming”. It is a tome that is at once humorous but uses the art of storytelling to convey weighty topics.
Arguably the premier African literary prize, the Noma Award, went this year to Shimmer Chinodya’s Strife (Weaver Press). Chinodya’s seventh novel, it is about a Gwanangara family, with an aggrieved ancestor in its midst: Mhokoshi. Mhokoshi is a hunter who lives alone in the forests. When he dies, his corpse festers unburied on the savannah plains. His roaming spirit, failing to find rest in the netherworld, comes back to haunt the living. Strife is a compelling read about the struggle between modernity and the past. The book, for better or worse, chooses to be oblivious of the larger strife that has rocked the country from the arrival of Mzilikazi and the destabilisation of local tribes, Cecil Rhodes and his Pioneer Column, the war against Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, the killings of Gukurahundi and the present crisis.
The same can’t be said about Judith Todd, daughter of reformist prime minister Garfield Todd, who finally came up with the most authoritative memoir this year, perhaps even since the Zimbabwe crisis began. Through the Darkness (Zebra) makes use of letters, journals and documents at her disposal and her personal knowledge of the nationalists to come up with a colossal read. This book, with its sometimes dense cast, is essential (I would even say mandatory) reading for anyone who wants to understand Zimbabwe’s strange brand of politics.
Perhaps it is a measure of how much I like the next book that I bought Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) for a friend who was celebrating her birthday at the beginning of this month. My friend, you see, doesn’t read a lot of fiction; and I felt that Adichie’s account could win her over to book reading. This year’s Orange Prize-winner, it is a beguiling account of the civil war in Nigeria. There are no gratuitous gory details, the author is acutely aware of the humanity of her protagonists and the devastation that war brought to the young nation.
This book reminded me of Ian Rankin, Britain’s bestselling crime writer, who was asked how his publishers would react if he were to deliver a novel like Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. ‘I think my publishers would sweat,” he said. Anyway, he explained that was unlikely as he prefers ‘novels that tell stories”. The beauty of Ngozi’s book is its ability to win over (what we now call crossover appeal) non-literary people, while it retains its allure for those who enjoy the kind of literature taught at universities.
The non-fiction works I have read include Omar Nasiri’s Inside the Global Jihad (Jacana), a chilling and revealing portrait of life in Afghan jihadist training camps. Herbert Krosney’s The Lost Gospel (Krosney Productions) is an engaging account of the journey that Judas Iscariot’s gospel travelled through Africa, Europe and the Americas. Certainly one of the most important books I read this year was Stephen Grey’s authoritative and lucidly written Ghost Plane (Jacana) about the CIA’s secret rendition programmes. Grey was the first journalist who got the CIA’s flight plans.
At the time of writing this piece I was reading Allan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (Faber and Faber), the witty book that makes a case for reading. One of the characters there, the queen in fact, routinely meets writers whom she has not read and because of this the meetings turns out to be rather staid affairs. An aide tells her that someone ought to have briefed her on the books these authors had written. The queen replies: ‘Briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.” With such an impassioned advocacy for reading from the queen, what more can the plebeian say?.