Verdict: carrot for a book that’s not SA Lit, but that holds lessons for SA and all countries that hold freedom of speech dear, as Maureen Isaacson explains:
A mother of two, the daughter of Russian diplomats, Politkovskaya was born in America but lived in the Russia she adored, and was shot dead on October 7, 2006.
Politkovskaya’s murder has not yet been resolved. It is believed to have been possibly related to an article about torture that she was preparing, and which she had announced on Radio Liberty two days before her death.
The fragments from eyewitness accounts of torture, in this newly published collection, Nothing But the Truth; Selected Dispatches (Random House), are difficult to countenance, as is much of the violence she stares down, clear-eyed.
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Verdict: gothic carrot
White is for Witching a.k.a Pie-kah is Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel. I have been stimulated by and enjoyed reading her The Icarus Girl (Mmegi, 7th April 2006). It was hailed as an extraordinary work of imagination about the three worlds – this, the spirit and the bush. Jess is haunted by being the twin that is alive. It was published by Bloomsbury when she was 18, having written it while doing her A-levels, making her their youngest author.
Oyeyemi’s second novel, The Opposite House (Mmegi, 17th October 2008) was set in London, Lagos and Cuba, with a fourth leg in Emily Dickinson (who lived in her family’s opposite house in Amherst, Massachusetts) and a somewhere house of Oyeyemi’s creation. In it she continued her exploration of the role of spirits in our lives.
In White is for Witching Oyeyemi’s exploration of the unknown (bordering on magic realism or gothic tales) is carried even further. She had gone to Paarl, South Africa, as a volunteer in a centre for young children living with HIV and AIDS. She says: “’I was staying in the dark wing of this house with the woman who helps the volunteering agency out and I started reading Dracula quite closely and intensely, probably more intensely than usually done, and I started thinking about the vampire novel and what it is, about monstrosity and what it means, and I thought it seemed to be about fear of the foreign and unnatural appetite” (Untitled Books blog Issues 18 December 2009).
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Verdict: carrot
Bookworm with a View gives a carrot to Isla Morley for her novel Come Sunday which has made it onto the 2010 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Shortlist.
Isla Morley grew up in South Africa during apartheid, the child of a British father and fourth-generation South African mother. During the country’s State of Emergency, she graduated from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth with a degree in English Literature.
By 1994 she was one of the youngest magazine editors in South Africa, but left career, country and kin when she married an American and moved to California. For more than a decade she pursued a career in non-profit work, focusing on the needs of women and children.
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Verdict: carrot
It is hard for me to understand why others enjoy Coetzee. This is not to say he is not great – I think his writing is wonderful.
In this, well, book – for it is neither novel nor autobiography but some new genre he invented – he writes about Calvinia. My grandfather was born in that small Karoo dorp, as was his before him. So the writing speaks personally to me, to my ancestry; I feel I know Calvinia quite well.
But why do others feel the intimacy?
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Verdict: carrot
In Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume, protagonist Jean Baptiste Grenouille is born on a stinking hot day in July, 1738, under a gutting table in a fish market in Paris. Abandoned amid the swarm of flies and offal and then orphaned, he subsequently legs his way through a succession of wet nurses, each of whom, in turn, refuses and rejects him in disgust because he “doesn’t smell human.”
According to the composite profile we get in Summertime, deceased writer “John Coetzee” gives off much the same inhuman whiff. The novel, about an academic, Mr. Vincent, who is undertaking research for a biography of Coetzee, consists primarily of interviews with five people – friends, lovers, cousins, colleagues – those Vincent deems “important” to the deceased during the 1970s.
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Uitspraak: wortel
Lesers moet soms Alfred Schaffer se gedigte weer en weer lees om sy bedoeling te snap, maar eindelik is dit die moeite werd, want Schaffer se beelde bly in die leser se kop draal.
Joan Hambidge skryf in ‘n resensie van Schaffer se bundel, Kooi, op Die Burger se Boekeblok dat Schaffer se gedigte bepaalde eise aan die leser stel. “Die leser word dus ingetrek by die skryfproses…En tog lees ons die gedig en skep ons eie verbintenisse met die beelde voor ons.”
Volgens Hambidge is dit ‘n “onthoubare leeservaring”.
Alfred Schaffer het bekendheid verwerf as ’n mede-samesteller van Nuwe Stemme (met Antjie Krog) en hy het indertyd rubrieke (soms omstrede) oor die Afri kaanse digkuns geskryf en sy spesifieke sienings van bewegings, modes en vernuwings aangestip. Hy was en is dus die blik van buite.
Die taksering van ’n bundel buite ’n mens se taalgemeenskap is altyd ’n ingewikkelde en terselfdertyd opwindende leeservaring. Die leser moet deur verskeie (lees)versperrings werk, soos taal- en tradisieverskille, ’n ander poëtika, Nederlands en Afrikaans se dikwels ooreenstemmende woorde waarvan die betekenisse subtiel verskil, en so meer.
Boekbesonderhede
Verdict: carrots
This meaty sequel to Nervous Conditions takes Rhodesian teenager Tambuzai from her village and conflicted family into an elite mostly-white high school for girls, where she wades to A-Level via a swamp of academic and personal struggles, often hilarious, always vivid, while mortar bombs in the bush war disturb the nights.
With counter-knowledge seemingly the flavour of the decade, it’s good to come across a book that resoundingly debunks theories which are seriously considered – even by some intelligent people – as well as exposing many blatant hoaxes that are accepted as historical fact.
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Verdict: carrots X 4 from New York, Washington, Seattle and Los Angeles
Great men in the winter of their lives often treat the writing of their memoirs as a kind of victory lap, but whatever J. M. Coetzee is after in this third volume of his genre-bending auto biography, it is not self- congratulation. The first two volumes, unadornedly titled “Boyhood” and “Youth” (and, in contrast to this one, labeled nonfiction), were marked by Coetzee’s decision to write about himself in the third person. In “Summertime” he takes this schism one bracing step farther, by imagining himself already dead. The book is nominally a kind of rough-draft effort by Coetzee’s own biographer, an Englishman named Vincent, to build the case — through transcribed interviews with lovers and colleagues and other figures mentioned by Coetzee in his “posthumously” opened notebooks — for the years 1971-77 as an especially formative period in the late author’s life, “a period,” as Vincent would have it, “when he was still finding his feet as a writer.”
Few writers are as puzzling as John Maxwell Coetzee. His works are, in turns, brilliant and brittle; his stories, as wise as they are maddeningly self-absorbed. If he is the most cerebral of South African novelists, he is also the most visceral. When he speaks — if he speaks at all — it is in infuriating riddles. And yet, despite those contradictions — despite the critics who see his achievements as decidedly suspect — he has managed to produce masterworks of post-colonial literature that have earned him considerable praise: two Bookers, a Jerusalem Prize, the coveted Nobel. Now, with his new novel, “Summertime,” we learn that no one finds that approval more suspect than Coetzee himself.
The novel begins and ends with a group of “Notebooks” which reveal Coetzee’s uneasy relationship with his ailing father while they are living in a ramshackle cottage near Cape Town. The core of the book, however, is the series of crucial exchanges between a biographer, Mr. Vincent, and five people who knew the enigmatic writer during his supposedly formative years (1972-1975). The interviews, which often blur the line between fact and fiction, take place over eight months, from late 2007 until mid-2008, in Canada, South Africa, Brazil, England and Paris. In the process, the biographer creates an unflattering but apparently authentic characterization of a composite Coetzee.
Fortunately “The Tempest” has no sixth act. What could Shakespeare have made out of Prospero after he broke his wand and renounced his magic? Just another pensioner with nothing to do but hang around, rehash old miracles, talk about himself.
J.M. Coetzee, after a string of severe, demanding, sometimes parched, often-brilliant novels, has been turning inward. Two years ago, the journey led to “Diary of a Bad Year,” whose central character, C., is barely even the writer’s alter ego (strike the “alter”). Odd, and in some ways awkward, the novel is wonderfully serious fun: Coetzee alternately wrestling with and laughing at himself.
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Verdict: carrot that looks, at first, like a stick
LET’S deal with the criticism first. This isn’t “the story of African football” as the subtitle claims, but a series of extended, largely country-based, essays. Much of their focus is on international competition. A chapter on South Africa, misleadingly titled “Burial of the Springbok”, shows a dismal understanding of its football history that confuses terminology, events and eras with gay abandon. Meanwhile, the main town of QwaQwa, Phuthaditjhaba (predictably misspelt), apparently suffers from the “fierce rain of the lowveld [and] its beating sun”.
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Verdict: carrot
“Summertime” continues the story into the early 1970s, with the methods reversed: although most readers will assume the book is autobiographical, it’s clearly labeled fiction, and the author, both as “John Coetzee” the character, and as omniscient narrator of that character’s story, is dead. Literally. The intriguing book we have in our hands is a collage. Fragments from Mr. Coetzee’s (or “John’s”) notebooks bookend five interviews conducted some time in the future by a young biographer, whose name is given only as Mr. Vincent, with five people who knew Mr. Coetzee (or “John”) around the time he was living with his retired father in a Capetown suburb, teaching English, and writing, unbeknownst to most who knew him, his first two novels.
So what kind of a man was the secretive young writer? To his former lover Julia, he was “not fully human,” “like a glass ball,” sexually “autistic” — creepily, he insists that they make love by acting out the instrumental lines of Schubert’s string quintet. His earth-motherly cousin Margot, with whom he shared an intense childhood bond, describes him as cold, possessing a “Mister Know-All smile” and uses an Afrikaner vulgarism meaning lacking in determination.
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