Privileged and published

As I was I about to compile my best reads of 2009 I got a rather grumpy email from a Zimbabwean writer. ‘I just saw your review of my book. Wow,” it began.

‘The way you read it, especially contrasted with the way you read [Chimamanda Ngozi] Adichie’s latest book, confirms yet again for me that critics are simply readers who are privileged to have their opinions published. And like all readers, they, and we, all have our own different ways of reading.”

I wanted to write back and explain, but what would I say? If it had come from a fellow reader I would have written back, explaining why that particular book didn’t quite work for me. My critiques are never personal; I don’t know or want to befriend most of the writers whose works I review.

For, as a character says in The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (Picador), the worst thing about being a critic is ‘you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, though treasure it may be, destroys your critical sense.” I must add quickly that readers’ criticism is always welcome; it’s always exciting seeing reader comments next to your story. As the writer of the email correctly stated, I am just a reader — perhaps an avid one.

I shall begin my round-up with the offending book, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate). Adichie is perhaps the best African writer of her generation. Whenever I’m asked what book to give as a present, I invariably recommend this short-story collection. In my review earlier in the year, I said that the stories in the collection ‘are told by a crisp-voiced narrator; sentences unwind languidly yet steadfastly, every story always moving towards a climax”.

We Are All Zimbabweans Now (Umuzi), by the American writer James Kilgore, is one of the most important books about Zimbabwe. It tells of an American historian, Ben Dabner, who is beguiled by the nationalist revolution led by Robert Mugabe, and goes to Zimbabwe. He soon becomes disillusioned by what he sees.

Novel approaches to history continue to fascinate me in the books coming out of Zimbabwe.
Becoming Zimbabwe (Jacana), a history book edited by scholars Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, caught my attention. A tome containing essays by Zimbabwean historians, it wades into the country’s murky, complex history. It is immensely readable, quite rigorous and expansive (it covers the period from 850AD), and one wishes that it had been longer than its 260 pages.

The publication of Native Nostalgia (Jacana) by historian and columnist Jacob Dlamini confirmed him as an irreverent and insightful native son, asking his compatriots difficult and uncomfortable questions. The premise of the book could be stated as: what does it mean when a black person says he had a happy childhood before democracy in 1994?

Alternatively, what does it mean when a disillusioned African pensioner says life was better under apartheid? It’s not a defence of apartheid; it could never be. The book is much smarter and subtler than that. Dlamini’s work is really concerned with finding and recording those small private spaces that apartheid was never able to police, in which a certain order prevailed, hence
the nostalgia.

Enough of history. The most important addition to literature in the past few years has come from the late Chilean-born writer, Roberto Bolano, described by one ecstatic critic as ‘literature’s new patron saint”. And three books particularly stand out, the magisterial and posthumous 2666, the peripatetic The Savage Detectives, and the small masterpiece Amulet (all published by Picador).

The novel, 2666, is the one that all novels should aspire to be. A devilish smirk on its face, blood and gore slowly dripping from its pages, it’s everything a novel could possibly be. The New York Times lauded it as ‘a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form”. Apocalypse, philosophy, celebrity, history and literature happily meet in a secluded downtown alley in a one-off tryst.

The Savage Detectives and Amulet are principally narratives about ­Mexico City’s poetry scene. While Amulet is content to concern itself with the quotidian yet poetic details of the forlorn city, The Savage Detectives takes a detour and goes around the world in a mad rush that includes unforgettable encounters in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In South Africa among the most significant books that came out this year is JM Coetzee’s Summertime (Harvill Secker). John Maxwell Coetzee is dead and an English biographer is going around the world interviewing people who knew the old master. But the Coetzee they are looking for is not the reclusive, award-winning writer. It’s Coetzee between 1972 and 1977, before he became famous.

By turns hilarious and introspective, it’s Coetzee armed with a big serrated knife dipped in some caustic acid that he mercilessly and repeatedly uses against himself (mostly) and his Afrikaner volk.

Yet another highlight from South Africa was Antjie Krog’s Begging to be Black (Random House Struik), a philosophical work of non-fiction. In a world where apartheid morality is discredited, how does one establish a consensus of morality?

Troubled by the void that was left by the collapse of the apartheid edifice, Krog goes in search of an alternative morality. This quest takes her back to 19th-century Lesotho, battling a colonial onslaught, and right to Germany, in the centre of Europe, trying to shake off its murderous Nazi past.

Thando Mgqolozana is perhaps South Africa’s most significant new writer from 2009. His moving novel, A Man Who Is Not a Man, is about a botched circumcision. In the narrative Mgqolozana portrays with tenderness a ritual that is eating up the boys it is supposed to make into men.

That’s the year in books for me. I am sure some writers will send emails, querying why I didn’t include their works in my best reads of this year. Perhaps they shouldn’t. After all, these are just readings by someone who is privileged enough to have his opinions published.