Verdict: carrot for Bregin, but big stick for James Mitchell.
My friends enjoy my little rants, so forgive me for being verbose, but I am very, very irked.
Regular BOOK SA visitors may have noticed my name popping up on the site recently as a contributor. One of my roles is to source recently published articles and reviews that we can highlight on the site, which is how I happened upon this IOL review of Elana Bregin’s novel Shiva’s Dance.
I started reading the review and, reviewer James Mitchell’s unnecessary snark aside, was initially pleased to see Elana quoted from her panel discussion at this year’s Cape Town Book Fair, because I was there and I heard her speak too. I remember it quite clearly.
Yet soon subtle alarms bells started going off. The direct quotes seemed a little too familiar. I flipped open the article I’d written for my web site, brainwavez.org, on that very same panel discussion and went in search of the section that featured Elana Bregin. I had (painstakingly) transcribed some quotes of hers (99% verbatim) from my audio files that I had recorded at the book fair. Now I was curious to compare the text.
Lo and behold, what did I discover? That exact same quote – complete with the same punctuation, which is what I had inserted when I wrote my article as my interpretation of her speaking mannerisms and phrasings. In fact, if you’re interested, copy the quote, put it in to the Google search field, and see what comes up.
So, James Mitchell: show me your handwritten, Twitter, and audio notes from the Cape Town Book Fair, and I’ll show you mine. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to look at the results of my work here… oh, wait, you already have.
Here’s Mitchell’s text:
At the Cape Town Book Fair, Elana Bregin described her novel as being ‘about the politics of being human’.
She went on: ‘It’s about the difficulties of just being here in this existence, born into a set of circumstances that we didn’t choose, born into dysfunctional families – many of us – that load us with baggage that we then carry through the rest of our lives, the difficulties of being part of this moment – not just in South Africa but in the world – where we have so little power to change things…
‘And then what it’s really about is the need to rise above all of that and find some kind of transcendent picture for your life.
‘So the girl in the story encounters a Buddhist monk and he’s the one that helps her kind of reassess where she is. So you can say it’s about a girl, it’s about a dog, it’s about a Buddhist, it’s about a boy, it’s about a motorbike, and a whole lot of things in between.’
Thank you, Elana Bregin, you’ve just about done this reviewer’s job for him. Except for the ‘whole lot of things in between’.
Those things are what make Shiva’s Dance far from a saccharine formula of redemption. Instead it develops from a story of frightening self-destruction into one with a universal application.
Gerry Aarons is not your average Durban Jewish school-girl. Instead she’s unwanted in the most frightening, horrible way, and she knows it.