The recession (receding at a snail’s pace), continued VAT on books and having only a few thousand real book-addict-type readers in South Africa might have made things in the book world slow down, but they have not deterred the writers and publishers at all.
Books in all categories continue to appear and there is a new trend — publishers who previously eschewed short stories seem to have had a rethink. This year several collections have come out in South Africa. Perhaps they took heart after Alice Munro, the great, seemingly unstoppable, short-story writer won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. This is such good news for those who like to write in this form and three of the best local collections are Homing by Henrietta Rose-Innes (Umuzi, 2010), The Mistress’s Dog by David Medalie (Picador Africa, 2010) and Exposure by Shaun de Waal (BookSurge, 2010).
Munro’s Runaway had a marvellous introductory essay by Jonathan Franzen and many of the creative writing students of André Brink and JM Coetzee had a professorial push by way of cover shouts on their first books. Medalie is himself a professor of literature and his stories come sandwiched between a foreword and an afterword on ‘the state of South African literature” by Michael
Titlestad. These are a great bonus for those whose interest goes beyond whiling away the hours, or summer days; they are clear and readable (no heart-stopping heavy theory) with a few pointers on transition, transnationalism and transculturalism.
It must be said that Medalie’s stories do not need any buttressing. They are an absolute pleasure, finely crafted; good champagne with an incisive aftertaste. The first and title story, The Mistress’s Dog, is a gem of precision, combining sadness and gentle irony, although the reader is not really surprised by how things turn out. In Tussenfontein, Medalie captures the narratives of the emigration/transnationalising experience in the past and present, for those who leave and those who visit them.
He is particularly acute in depicting the intersecting and often disjunctional planes of relationships, held in place by delusions and illusions. Although set in South Africa these stories are so close up and personal that the political context melts into background.
In the 15 stories in Rose-Innes’s collection, Homing, she skilfully evokes the city of Cape Town in many of its manifestations, from the public library on the Parade to a beach that could be Noordhoek, a neglected little park. Almost all these stories deal with people in situations of some crisis, some dis-ease, where usually by their own agency they achieve a resolution or way to move on, a way to feel at home with themselves.
The title story, Homing, tells of a suburban couple whose modest view is invaded by a massive new walled hotel. The wife finds a way to do as the pigeons do and simply makes herself at home on both sides.
But the final story, Poison, set in the future in Cape Town after some unspecified but massive explosion, is less hopeful than the others. In this Lynn, the protagonist, is both pragmatic and brave, but her instinct for ‘homing” might not be appropriate at this point when everyone else is fleeing the city.
In the ‘queer fiction” stories in De Waal’s Exposure one hears that inimitable, self-deprecating, dryly modest but lethally well and widely read SdW voice that readers of the Mail & Guardian’s movie reviews will recognise. There’s lots of sex and De Waal explores with great subtlety the difficult-to-breathe-in areas between not only his gay characters but also in the straight-gay interface.
The stories run from light and ironic to bleak and unsettling, covering situations from encounters in the sauna and shower areas of the gym to a weekend away in a holiday chalet — two couples, one gay and one straight. De Waal, in a cool and detached manner, offers these for consideration — long and difficult love affairs, casual sex, drugs and disintegration, all in a South African setting. It all seems so familiar, same old heartbreak, same old dysfunction, we are all in the same boat. A really interesting and revisitable read.
Another set of stories by yet another professor, Marlene van Niekerk, is Die Sneeuslaper. In 192 pages there are only five stories, all of them interconnected. This remarkable and beautiful book is set in Amsterdam and Stellenbosch and in it Van Niekerk has combined a thread of mysterious narrative about writers, photographers and the homeless, with her observations, mainly in the remarks of these characters, on storytelling, novel writing and the creative process in general. Erudite and funny, she often sets up a situation of resistance and reluctance between the storyteller and the recipient or listener. A recurring image or situation is of a relationship between a person who is perceived to be mute or powerless, or an inadequate artist in some way, and someone who cares for them out of guilt, desire or a sense that the silent one has knowledge beyond the grasp of the ordinary.
Layered, dense and magnificent, this book is a distillation of meditations on writing and the creative process, which the five stories generously exemplify as they develop. There are several poems and songs, and, strangely, music in abundance.
When it comes to novels, this year’s wave has laid many good reads on my desk but I have selected five. Two I have reviewed earlier in the M&G: The Long Song by Andrea Levy (Headline Review, 2010) and Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Faber and Faber, 2010). The third, Cactus Letters by Jayne Galassi (New Africa Books, 2010), is reviewed in this Summer Books
supplement.
The fourth is Not a Fairy Tale by Shaida Kazie Ali (Umuzi, 2010). This is a first novel skilfully handled from start to finish. It’s a story told in two halves, narrated by two sisters, and the theme is that marriage is not a fairy tale. In between the events of their lives, with sorties into the marriages of other female relatives, Ali intersperses rewritten versions of well-known fairy tales in which a prince charming rescues and marries the girl and they live happily ever after. This novel is for girls who have ‘had it” with waiting for some fellow to come along, even for Mr Right.
It’s a wake-up call to girls and women that no one has to endure an unhappy arranged marriage, domestic slavery, neglect or abuse. She describes an array of truly horrible men, but there’s a handful of really nice ones too.
And last, there is The Lacuna (Faber, 2009) by Barbara Kingsolver. I have been fairly lukewarm about her previous novels, but this one just swept me away. Set between 1929 and 1950, the first half happens in Mexico, and some of that time in the household of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, works for both of them, and also later for Lev Trotsky, when he takes refuge there. After Trotsky’s assassination Shepherd moves to the United States where he lives a quiet life, though periodically visited by horror over Trotsky’s death. As McCarthyism sweeps the US after World War II, he is hounded for his old association with those comrades in Mexico whom he loved and revered.
Kingsolver’s research seems impeccable, her creation and re-creation of characters varied and deep, her writing fluidly in control of this vast canvas. She shows us much about how opinion is formed and how the media can influence politics (in this case shamelessly unfree) and the lives of ordinary people, all of this certainly still relevant today. A wonderful read with an unexpectedly upbeat ending — in 1959.