I really didn’t get on with this, which was a disappointment after how much I enjoyed Eben Venter’s fascinatingly rich novels Wolf, Wolf and TrencI really didn’t get on with this, which was a disappointment after how much I enjoyed Eben Venter’s fascinatingly rich novels Wolf, Wolf and Trencherman. It’s an interesting case: the aforementioned books were first published in Afrikaans, then translated into English; as there’s no credited translator for this one, I assumed it had been translated by Venter himself. But reading through the reviews here, I discovered that actually, he wrote the book in English first then translated it himself for the Afrikaans edition. I wonder if this can account for the general lack of clarity – not just in the language (though there are plenty of mistakes and cumbersome or nonsensical phrases), but running through the whole book, making it a peculiarly muddled story that never seems to settle down and find its groove.
Each chapter depicts an episode in the life of the protagonist, Simon Avend. These scenes are each followed by a supplementary chapter in which Simon meets with his therapist, Dr Spiteri, and discusses his feelings about the events he’s just described. Most of the chapters are about sexual encounters, though some centre on family gatherings, and Simon often returns to memories of his childhood.
Another thing I gathered from reading the reviews was that Venter, by his own admission, has no experience of therapy, which is absolutely no surprise given that Dr Spiteri has to be the most unprofessional and unbelievable therapist I’ve ever encountered in fiction. (Of course, I’m sure the real world is full of bad therapists; the problem here is the way in which Spiteri’s method is presented as both objectively good and helpful to Simon.) Her sermons about Michel Foucault and ancient Greece don’t seem to belong in this story at all, and her apparent attraction to Simon is handled awkwardly.
The narrative’s restlessness makes it hard to feel the reader ever learns anything conclusive about Simon. It sounds an obtuse criticism, but there just doesn’t seem to be a point to this story; it feels more like something the author should have just written for himself. And the subjects of masculinity, sexuality and father/son relationships were addressed far more effectively in Wolf, Wolf.
Cracks is one of five books I picked up at a charity bookshop shortly before lockdown began. It isn't a book I was looking for – I hadn't heard of it,Cracks is one of five books I picked up at a charity bookshop shortly before lockdown began. It isn't a book I was looking for – I hadn't heard of it, or the author, before. Based on the blurb plus a scan of the first few pages, it struck me as something like Picnic at Hanging Rock (the hothouse atmosphere of an all-girls school; an unexplained disappearance) meets The Virgin Suicides (first-person plural narration, dreamy tone). The South African setting also interested me.
The school at the centre of the story sits alone amid the arid landscape of the veld. Indeed, it's so cut off from the world that the fact it's in South Africa is irrelevant in terms of social/political context. When the characters of Cracks are students, in what seems like the late 1950s, the curriculum puts a heavy emphasis on sports, and the girls of the swimming team are perceived as the cream of the crop. At the beginning of the book, 13 former members of the team gather for a reunion. Their memories are drawn back to the year a girl disappeared. The women narrate the story as a chorus; one of them is called Sheila Kohler. (Kohler has said that Cracks is not autobiographical, though she did attend a girls' boarding school in the middle of the veld and received a similar education to the characters in the book.)
In such an isolated location, with no male students or staff, it's no big surprise that the girls develop crushes – or, in their parlance, 'cracks' – on Miss G, their boyish swimming teacher. What is more surprising (and disturbing) is Miss G's behaviour towards the girls. She gives them alcohol, invites them to her room to play inappropriate games, picks favourites, and gives terrible advice. But it's with the arrival of a new student, the beautiful Italian aristocrat Fiamma Coronna, that things really escalate. Miss G becomes so obsessed with Fiamma that her behaviour ceases to be simply strange; it becomes outright stalking and, eventually, sexual assault. The swimming team, neglected by their idol, inevitably turn against the new girl.
Kohler's prose conjures up a beautiful, lucid, lonely world, the air 'sweet with honeysuckle, jasmine and orange peel', the lawns 'incandescent with heat and sheen', and a 'mist like gauze' hanging across the 'star-wild sky'. The narration also works well: the girls share so many experiences and feelings, it doesn't seem unnatural for them to speak as a chorus. The story is not quite as successful. It's believable that the girls would fall under the spell of Miss G as teenagers, but the horrible climax of the Fiamma plot didn't convince me, and nor did the characters' inability to confront any of this as adults. At this point, the lyrical style started to seem less of a considered choice and more like a smokescreen for an inadequate ending.
In the end, it reminded me most of Such Small Hands, and I also think the Virgin Suicides comparison stands... but personally, I didn't like either of those books. It has a bit of the 'author didn't know how to end the story' energy you sometimes find in debuts, though Kohler had in fact published two novels and two story collections before it. Until reading some other reviews I had no idea Cracks had been made into a movie (with Eva Green as Miss G); though I don't think the book is completely without merit, it seems the general consensus is that the film is better.
Like Galgut’s masterpiece The Good Doctor, The Impostor centres on the tense quasi-friendship between two men and has a singular, remote setting. AdamLike Galgut’s masterpiece The Good Doctor, The Impostor centres on the tense quasi-friendship between two men and has a singular, remote setting. Adam Napier is out of work and at rock bottom when he agrees to move into a near-derelict house – one of several properties owned by his more successful brother – in a small town on the edge of the Karoo. Adam passes the days alone, trying and failing to write poetry. Then one day, while shopping, he’s approached by a man identifying himself as Canning, who claims he knew Adam at school. Although Adam can remember nothing about him, he feigns familiarity and starts spending a lot of time with the man, who is incredibly wealthy and lives in an enormous, verdant game park. Adam is slowly seduced by Canning’s lavish lifestyle – and his beguiling wife Baby.
It’s only now I’m looking back over my review of The Good Doctor that I realise how many things the two books have in common: a lonely protagonist in an isolated place, hints of sexual tension between the two male (and ostensibly straight) main characters, a title whose meaning could be applied to several people in the book, a feeling that nobody is being truthful about themselves... I think it’s completely possible that, had I read The Impostor first, it would be on my list of favourites and I’d judge The Good Doctor slightly more harshly. Still, Galgut writes the sort of sentences and scenes that make you feel you are in the hands of a master, maintaining a page-turning mood of suspense even when little is happening. The weird stillness of the setting, a stripped horizon so vast it seems ‘human events were elsewhere’, only adds to that. It’s the kind of book I’d recommend to friends or family who don’t usually read fiction (which sounds a bit like a backhanded compliment; what I mean is that it has the rarer-than-it-should-be combination of being relatively simple yet also intelligent and gripping).
In this novel, the protagonist and narrator is only ever known as 'Mr Field'. (The namelessness is apt, as the man never seems fully present or activeIn this novel, the protagonist and narrator is only ever known as 'Mr Field'. (The namelessness is apt, as the man never seems fully present or active in his own story.) He is a concert pianist who, after a train accident which shatters his wrist, uses his compensation to move – on an apparently random whim – from London to a house in Cape Town. His new home, known as the House for the Study of Water, is a replica of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye built by the South African architect Jan Kallenbach. Field is accompanied by his wife Mim, but the little we see of her suggests she is unhappy there and feels disconnected from her life; eventually she departs. Field, meanwhile, exists in a state of what might be described as detail-orientated numbness. He fixates on small and inconsequential things while the fabric of his life disintegrates.
Alongside the tale of Field's decline, a number of subplots unspool. There's a local man, Curtis Touw, who has a plan to build his own 'House in the Sky' – a tower enclosing a series of small, modular homes – on the mountain behind Field's property. There's Field's burgeoning obsession with Kallenbach's elderly ex-wife, whose voice he often hears in his head, voicing his own thoughts. There's the appearance of a stray dog named Schubert. Like Le Corbusier, Touw says a house is a machine for living in – but in his version of the quote, it becomes 'a machine for living in together'. Left alone, Field begins to come apart.
Things were on the cusp of not being themselves. I had the idea that it wasn't my vision deteriorating but the very glue which held the objects of the world together growing old and weak.
In his loneliness, Field anthropomorphises animals, objects, even body parts. He takes to driving aimlessly each evening, and his wanderings lead him to spy on neighbours and, ultimately, to repeatedly revisit Hannah Kallenbach's home, crystallising an obsession with both the woman and a particular room in her house which seems, for him, to represent an agonising sort of comfort. (Such contradictions are rife here.) Field's excursions do little to disturb the ambience of the text.
Even the fragments of conversation which filtered out from the houses were less the intense and meaningful private exchanges I'd imagined people who knew each other well would have when they were alone than repetitions of well-worn phrases like Uh huh or Let's not argue about that overlaid – as in the rattle of film projectors accompanying old movies – by the tranquil, even-tempered beeps of fax machines and dishwashers finishing up their cycles.
What has happened to Mim – has she left or disappeared? If the latter, why isn't Field doing anything to find her? If the former, why does it seem she has abandoned all her possessions at the house? And does this point us to a sinister conclusion about our narrator? After all, Field himself says:
A person's absence always equates to death.
I always feel like South African novels have so much more going on than meets the eye. I was recently reading back over my notes on Eben Venter's Trencherman and was staggered by the sheer amount of layers a single reading pulled out of that book. I felt similarly about OK, Mr Field – it seethes with possible interpretations, and no doubt there were many nuances I missed. Is it intentional that Touw's design for his tower sounds a lot like a smaller version of Ponte City, or am I just putting unrelated bits of South African knowledge together and making five? As the panopticon-like Ponte and Touw's House in the Sky have their central void, Field's home has its ramp, visible from almost everywhere in the house. Perhaps Field stands for the passive consumption enacted by a wealthy outsider who decides to make his home in a place with the troubled history of Cape Town. Or perhaps that has nothing to do with anything and OK, Mr Field is just ('just') a story about a man's emotional disintegration and the terrifying unpredictability of that state.
If I was to be critical of anything in the novel, it wouldn't be its lack of willingness to provide explanations, but that I was not always convinced by our narrator as a man; there was something slightly off about many of the references to his body and desires. Strange as it may sound, I would have preferred the narrative to give away even less about him.
What is OK, Mr Field? Why is is OK, Mr Field? Maybe these questions aren't meant to be answered. This is a story to be shelved alongside narratives of alienation and delusion such as Keith Ridgway's Animals, Hugo Wilcken's The Execution and Paula Cocozza's How To Be Human. It's not going to work for everyone, but I loved Kilalea's fluid prose and appreciated the story's inscrutability.
I received an advance review copy of OK, Mr Field from the publisher through NetGalley.
Having loved the proof-of-concept short film that was made for Apocalypse Now Now earlier this year, I was keen to check out the original, though it'sHaving loved the proof-of-concept short film that was made for Apocalypse Now Now earlier this year, I was keen to check out the original, though it's not the sort of thing that would usually pique my interest (South African setting aside). It started really well, and I loved Baxter Zevcenko immediately, even if he did feel a lot more like an adult's idea of a teenage boy than an actual 16-year-old. The early chapters about life in Cape Town and high school gang wars were by far the most engaging. After that, it descended into YA fantasy silliness (prophecies and monsters and zombie porn, oh my) and I got a bit bored. I'd still happily watch a full-length film version, though.
Evening Primrose is the journal of Masechaba, a young doctor in South Africa. She sometimes talks about her life – the chronic endometriosis she suffeEvening Primrose is the journal of Masechaba, a young doctor in South Africa. She sometimes talks about her life – the chronic endometriosis she suffered as a girl, her brother's death – and sometimes about her work – the sheer exhaustion of life as a junior intern, the guilt that accompanies her inability to conjure sympathy for every patient. She writes in brief sketches, addresses her journal entries to God, and punctuates parts of her narrative with passages from the Bible.
Within the first few pages of the book, a particular scene had me hooked. As Masechaba thinks back to the day she graduated, she recalls the starry-eyed enthusiasm she shared with her peers:
A rumour had started that car companies would be waiting at the back of the hall after our graduation ceremony, and brokers waiting to give us mortgages without deposits, as our titles were surety enough. Someone else had said there would be financial advisors, too, handing out platinum credit cards with our names already printed on them. I knew this was all nonsense. But I kept turning my head, just in case.
As a working class kid who excelled at school, I had similar thoughts: a degree would be like a golden ticket to a banquet of career opportunities, my biggest problem would be choosing which glittering path to take – I just didn't have a clue. So my heart immediately broke a bit for Masechaba, that naivety and idealism. Such illusions are soon crushed. Hospital work is an endless, thankless slog: she's always tired, always overworked, unable to save everyone. She hates it, then hates herself for hating it. She's disappointed by her colleagues, who are racist towards patients from outside South Africa and disparaging towards white South Africans.
Nyasha, Masechaba's Zimbabwean colleague and flatmate, says black South Africans remain in thrall to white supremacy. Masechaba's mother says kwere-kweres (foreigners) like Nyasha use black magic and will steal everything from her. As the story progresses, instances of xenophobic violence increase, and Masechaba feels their effects reverberating through her life and work. Irritated by Nyasha's prejudice, and simultaneously desperate to prove to her that most South Africans do not condone the violence, she starts a petition to demonstrate her hospital's stance against xenophobia. This brings Masechaba to the attention of the press – and that's when the plot takes a sharp, brutal turn.
Evening Primrose portrays a South Africa in which dangerous tensions lurk just beneath the surface, the country's unrest mirrored in the environment of the hospital. Yet Masechaba's viewpoint is absolutely key – not just as a black South African woman and a doctor, but specifically as a woman with endometriosis. The condition defines so much of what Masechaba feels, and it's even what compels her to become a doctor in the first place. In one scene, Masechaba has to apologise to Nyasha when a colleague says she could get sick if she drinks from the same bottle as a Zimbabwean. Nyasha is nonchalant: [She] shrugged. 'It's just a period South Africa's in,' she said matter-of-factly. 'Growing pains.' Masechaba tries to make a joke, turning the phrase into 'period pain'. But of course, for Masechaba, period pain is agonising, constant, and remains a threat even when she's able to treat her condition with medication. She sees the pain and bleeding as a 'beast' that 'was only sleeping, and could wake at any moment' – perhaps a fitting metaphor for her country's 'growing pains', too. (Underlining the significance of this scene, the book was originally called Period Pain, and it's interesting to see the violent bright red of the South African cover in contrast to the innocuous pale pink of the UK version.)
Masechaba's voice moves from wry and witty to broken and raw. Though this is a slim novella, there's no doubt it packs a punch, and the ending is sure to be divisive (I'm still not sure how I feel about it). Evening Primrose is truly powerful, interweaving the personal and the political to great effect, and I'd particularly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in South African literature.
I received an advance review copy of Evening Primrose from the publisher, Sceptre.
Well, I had a blast with this – the most fun book of its type I've read since Tammy Cohen's When She Was Bad. I'd definitely categorise The ApartmentWell, I had a blast with this – the most fun book of its type I've read since Tammy Cohen's When She Was Bad. I'd definitely categorise The Apartment mainly as a psychological thriller, but it also has elements of horror.
S.L. Grey is the pseudonym of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg, and the authors make good use of their team-up by employing a 'he said/she said' narrative here, with alternating chapters told by a husband and wife. The husband is Mark, a beleaguered lecturer, and his (much younger) wife is Stephanie, a writer and stay-at-home mum. They live in Cape Town with their two-year-old daughter Hayden, and at the start of the book they've recently endured the traumatic experience of a home invasion. Though nobody was harmed, Mark and Steph have been left shaken and paranoid, they're skint after shelling out for a state-of-the-art security system, and their relationship hasn't quite been the same since. When Steph gets fixated on the idea of a holiday to Paris and her parents offer to pay for the flights and look after Hayden, the couple head off for what they hope will be a revitalising getaway – arranging a home swap with a French couple, the Petits, to save on the cost of a hotel.
I loved the characters here. The multiple-narrators approach is familiar from other novels I've read by both Grey (Under Ground) and Lotz (The Three, Day Four), but having just two rather than an ensemble cast allows so much more room for Mark and Steph to be developed. Both protagonists are portrayed with degrees of light and shade, with Steph more likeable and Mark more complex. The back-and-forth between them works well because there are no life-changing secrets here, just the small, ordinary things couples keep from one another. At least at first.
When Mark and Steph reach the Petits' apartment, they anticipate a chic Parisian pad; they get a dirty, run-down flat that looks like nobody's inhabited it for decades. The building is almost empty, with the sole resident an elderly, eccentric artist who repeatedly tells Mark that the apartment is 'not for living'. Her broken English means there's a key word missing from that phrase... and it's not long before things begin to go bump in the night, with the dream holiday quickly becoming a nightmare. Both Mark and Steph make strange discoveries in the apartment; Mark sees visions from his past, or does he?; and the Petits seem to have vanished off the face of the earth.
The bloody conclusion of The Apartment is all the more horrifying for its uncertainty. (view spoiler)[Was there ever a haunting, or are we to assume Mark was driven mad by grief? (hide spoiler)] For whatever reason, this book – not particularly well-reviewed elsewhere – worked brilliantly for me, with everything coming together to create an intoxicating blend of tension, emotional impact, and just the right amount of horror. It's (a very lightweight) Gone Girl meets Don't Look Now meets The Tenant.
(Review originally published at Nudge, now NB magazine, April 2016; removed from their site when they switched domains)
First published in Afrikaans in(Review originally published at Nudge, now NB magazine, April 2016; removed from their site when they switched domains)
First published in Afrikaans in 2006, Trencherman blends a retelling of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with a dystopian vision of near-future South Africa.
Our protagonist, Martin Louw, is nicknamed Marlouw - a nod to the narrator of Conrad's novel. He and his sister Heleen now live comfortable lives as expats in Australia, a way of life that's upended when Heleen insists Marlouw return to the family's South African farm, Ouplaas, to find and bring home her son Koert. It is a mission he immediately sees as inevitable, despite his reluctance to return to his ancestral country. The story that follows is both an apocalyptic fever dream and a psychological journey.
Marlouw's trip 'home' leads him to discover a broken and ravaged country in which poverty is endemic, every commodity is scarce, and AIDS is rife - he is told at one point that four out of every five people are infected. Ouplaas now nominally belongs to the black families who once provided its staff, but is effectively 'ruled' by the ominous, unseen Koert, who, it becomes clear, is the 'trencherman' of the title. (The term refers to someone with a large appetite, but also to a parasitic creature.) Marlouw has a club foot, a disability of which he is always painfully aware; perhaps because he also feels displaced, he strives to do the right thing, but frequently betrays his own prejudices. During the course of the story he descends deep into his own psyche, even seeing an apparition of his late father on the veld. Marlouw must confront the gulf between his own memories and what is now his reality. Ultimately, his greatest challenge is to let go of Ouplaas and what remains of his family's legacy, embodied in the horrifying figure of Koert.
Trencherman is the second Eben Venter novel to be published by Scribe in an English translation, following Wolf, Wolf in 2015. The two books explore a number of the same themes, including the state of modern masculinity, white South African identity, and racism both overt and insidious; they also share a similar voice, making Venter's style distinctive despite a change in translator. This is a story in which language is always significant, denoting both secret codes and lack of understanding between different groups: copious use of Afrikaans and isiXhosa means the glossary at the back of the book gets a good workout, though this is by no means a bad thing - Koert's dialogue, delivered in his own unique combination of languages and slang, is a particular stroke of genius.
Trencherman is a tough, challenging read. It is dark and strange and grotesque, and that grotesqueness often has a scatological edge - I was sometimes shocked by the blunt word choices. Like Heart of Darkness, it makes the reader wait and wait before they are confronted with the figure at the heart of the story, and since this book is not novella-length, the delay is even more agonising, creating a near-unbearable tension. But it is fascinating and captivating too. This is a deeply unsettling and thought-provoking portrayal of an imagined future; it uses its references to Heart of Darkness to great effect, and is a worthy modern successor to Conrad's novel.
--- Additional notes: - The novel's title in Afrikaans is Horrelpoot. According to Google Translate, that translates directly as trencherman, which is apparently an English word, though not one I have ever heard before (upon hearing about this book I assumed it was itself an Afrikaans term). But 'club foot' in Afrikaans is 'horrelvoet', so there's a bit of wordplay/a double meaning that's lost in the English title. - The above also provides another bit of emphasis on Marlouw's foot being a key element of the story, something that's underlined by the sheer amount of times it's mentioned. (And the fact that Koert suffers a similar affliction: his foot and leg have been eaten away by gangrene.) Marlouw's foot is a symbol of what he perceives as his own weakness, imperfection and incompetence, to which - until Koert actually appears - he imagines Koert as an opposite, a sort of corrective: young, strong and powerful. The foot is a painful, constant reminder of Marlouw's inability to fit in anywhere - Australia, South Africa, Koert's empire, the former servants' quarters. There is a scene in which Marlouw has his foot massaged by a prostitute; nothing sexual happens, but the scene nevertheless has a kind of nebulous eroticism to it. 'She rubs it and it becomes deliciously painful... It was a dream, I thought afterwards. I'd never felt like that about my foot before.' - I was fascinated by the parallels between Trencherman and Wolf, Wolf and they made me keen to read more Venter. In Wolf, Wolf, Mattheüs and his father repeatedly clash, with part of their conflict stemming from the fact that Mattheüs is gay and will never be able to carry on the family line; Mattheüs dreams of inheriting his father's money and home, but feels unable even to assume responsibility for his father's car dealership, instead choosing to honour the family name by calling his fast food business 'Duiker's'. In Trencherman, Marlouw cannot accept that Koert is the culmination of his once-great family's legacy. 'The knowledge that he, his kind, were the last of our descendants who remained there - that was the reality I couldn't come to terms with.' When Marlouw has a vision of his father's worst nightmare, it is that Afrikaners, represented by the Louws, will eventually be wiped out, erased from history. The symbolic climax comes not with the last scene on Ouplaas, but with Marlouw's participation in the desecration of the graveyard. Whether he's doing it at the ghostly request of his father or because he has finally become one and the same as those who remained on the farm, he's participating in active rejection and destruction of the Louw name and its legacy. Koert's bastardised speech, his mutilated Afrikaans, is also a symbol of this ('I have devoured you and your language'). 'The horror' in Venter's novel is, explicitly, Koert, and by extension Marlouw... As with Wolf, Wolf, there is simply so much in this book - it's so rich and deep. - What the reader comes to realise, along with Marlouw, is that there is not necessarily conflict between the historic authority of the Louws - the memory Marlouw exalts - and Koert's abuse of power. Both were founded on exploitation, and indeed, Koert's unabashed gluttony is arguably the more honest continuation of that legacy, while Marlouw represents a sort of cringing, apologetic shame which exists alongside an inability to let go of his 'birthright'. Throughout the book there is an uncomfortable duality between Marlouw's inherent belief in his own superiority and the deference he tries to show to the former farm workers of Ouplaas, now its nominal owners. - I loved the surreal veld sequence in which Marlouw encounters two figures: the ghost of his father and an Afrikaner woman on horseback. The latter, in particular, seems to encapsulate the Louws' decline within the space of just one scene: she appears as a beautiful vision ('She sits proudly on the dappled horse... With her bright red riding coat and the pitch-black velvet cap she evokes an era of whisky on the rocks, springbok hides on polished stoeps') and becomes gradually shabbier the more Marlouw looks at her ('The tips of the gloves are threadbare and the shoulders of the riding coat perished... Her back is bent... Her horse stumbling along'). The impression given is one of disintegration happening right before one's eyes. - I need to watch Apocalypse Now - from what I can gather, Trencherman references the film just as much as the original novel.
I received an advance review copy of Trencherman from Nudge. I wasn't paid for this review and I was under no obligation to be anything other than honest about what I thought of the book....more
Dan Jacobson’s writing is just so readable. While The Price of Diamonds, a comic novel, has little in common with the tales of psychological suspense Dan Jacobson’s writing is just so readable. While The Price of Diamonds, a comic novel, has little in common with the tales of psychological suspense in The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, all share a brisk, elegant style that makes the prose feel timeless. Here, the focus is on Gottlieb and Fink, two Jewish businessmen in the small South African town of Lyndhurst; their bickering relationship resembles that of a married couple who seem miserable together but couldn’t live without each other. When a strange man turns up at their office and hands a parcel of diamonds over to Gottlieb, he sees it as an opportunity to antagonise Fink, who’s obsessed with the Illicit Diamond Buying (IDB) laws. As time passes, Gottlieb finds endless excuses not to tell Fink about the diamonds, and they become more and more of a burden. The ‘price’ turns out to be nothing to do with the diamonds’ value, but rather their effect on Gottlieb’s marriage, peace of mind, and friendship with Fink. I only picked this up because it was written by Jacobson, and it’s very slow-paced. I liked it a lot, though – the characters and setting are vividly drawn and the book is funny without ever being ridiculous....more
I bought a copy of this on eBay - it's long out of print - after loving Dan Jacobson's first two books, The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, when I read tI bought a copy of this on eBay - it's long out of print - after loving Dan Jacobson's first two books, The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, when I read them in April. Through the Wilderness is more of a mixed bag: many of the stories don't have the visceral beauty of those novellas, and some of the shorter ones are more forgettable. Jacobson is always at his best when portraying the South African veld, its dusty plains spreading on forever and the sun beating down on whitewashed iron buildings. The stories set in England always seem to lack something, to have a feeling of being drab and hemmed in - maybe that's just the contrast in landscapes, maybe it's a reflection of the author's own feelings, maybe it's deliberate.
I didn't make notes on every story in this collection, but these were my favourites: A Day in the Country: A family are drawn into a violent confrontation while driving back from a day out. Only nine pages long, but full of tension. Beggar My Neighbour: A young boy from a rich white family starts giving food to a pair of street children, imagining himself their saviour, and is perturbed when their reaction fails to conform to his fantasy. The idea of doing something ostensibly noble and/to help others (or wanting to be perceived as helping others) for what are in fact selfish and vain reasons is portrayed so incisively here, and feels just as (if not more) timely today. Fresh Fields: Dreaming of literary success in London, a writer goes in search of his hero, but finds the great man disillusioned and lacking inspiration. The Pretenders: One of the longest stories in the book, in which a film is being made about an American who attempted to establish the 'State of Diamondia' during the South African diamond rush. The cast of characters includes a delusional, ambitious wannabe who aspires to be a famous actor, along with a very old man claiming to be the legendary American himself. This story has a lot going on but it all feels beautifully contained, and the characters are particularly strong. Through the Wilderness: Another of the longest, this is also the most similar in tone to The Trap and A Dance in the Sun. A farmer's son, reluctant to take on the duties involved in looking after the family farm while his father is in hospital, is introduced to a persistent Israelite preacher. Perfectly communicating both the oppressiveness and the vast openness of the veld, the story revisits the themes of Jacobson's first novels, especially in the helplessness the narrator feels in confronting cultural differences and his own ingrained racism.
--- My father had bought the farm after one of the wettest years we could remember in Lyndhurst; he had come to it at the end of summer, when the slopes of the veld were covered in grass that was knee-high, green at the stems, and beginning to go to a silvery-blue seed at the tips. Clouds moved across the sky; and the light, when it fell to the earth, seemed to be taken in by the grass and subdued there. The veld was wide and so gentle one could hardly understand why it should have been empty of people. - The Game
[Michael] was not unhappy in his loneliness. He was used to it, in the first place; and then, because he was lonely, he was all the better able to indulge himself in his own fantasies... It was not long before the two African children, who were now accosting him regularly, appeared in some of his games, for their weakness, poverty, and dependence gave Michael ample scope to display in fantasy his kindness, generosity, courage and decisiveness. - Beggar My Neighbour
In England there was a tradition, after all, of high thinking and bleak living; their own poverty could appear to them almost glamorous. - Trial and Error
... He was proud that what he was feeling had come as a surprise to him; that it had sprung entirely from within himself, insread of having been tainted by words in books and magazines, laid down for him in patterns set by others. In comparison with what he felt as a father it seemed to him that so much else in his marriage and work was mere imitation, a mere groping towards states of mind and feeling he wished to have because he had read or been told they were desirable. - Trial and Error
My father's life had been a ceaseless, unknowing, unswerving trek towards these hideous days and hours; they were the summation of his life as well as its undoing. He had moved through time as through a landscape, distracted by a thousand moods, experiences, possessions, achievements, memories, but always, unfalteringly, in one direction only, in this direction. And as with him, so with everyone else who lived, or had ever lived, or ever would. - Through the Wilderness
... The sun was low in the west, red, growing larger; around it were gathering the clouds that invariably appeared in the western corner of the horizon at that hour, after even the most cloudless days. Those clouds, together with the dust that was always in the air, the flat openness of the country, and the strength of the sun, all combined to produce the most spectacular sunsets, day after day: immense, silent, rapid combustions that flared violently into colour and darkened simultaneously. It always seemed suddenly that you became aware the colours had been consumed and only the darkness remained. - Through the Wilderness
I remember how consoling I found the emptiness of the countryside around me, its width, its indifference, its hard materiality. It was there, it would last. That was something to be grateful for, I felt then, not resentful of, as I had always been in the past. - Through the Wilderness
--- List/order of stories: 1. The Box 2. A Day in the Country 3. The Zulu and the Zeide 4. The Little Pet 5. The Game 6. A Way of Life 7. Beggar My Neighbour 8. Fresh Fields 9. The Example of Lipi Lippmann 10. An Apprenticeship 11. Trial and Error 12. The Pretenders 13. Another Day 14. Sonia 15. Through the Wilderness 16. Led Astray...more
Two books in one volume - although The Trap is really more of a short story - Jacobson's earliest works, published in 1955 and 1956 respectively, are Two books in one volume - although The Trap is really more of a short story - Jacobson's earliest works, published in 1955 and 1956 respectively, are 'stories of racial confrontation and social injustice on the South African veld'. In The Trap, a strange series of betrayals between two white farmers and their black staff lead to the main character, van Schoor, being cajoled by his rival and tormentor into unleashing latent violence. In A Dance in the Sun, two students become stranded at an otherwise empty guest-house while hitchhiking. There, they are unwillingly drawn into a long-running family drama from which they seem unable to escape; they become complicit in the owner's deeply entrenched racism, and their attempts to help Joseph, a man who works at the house, lead to disaster. The tables are turned on the young men, and their stand against the owner's prejudice is made to seem increasingly weak and ineffective, more a matter of assuaging their own egos and being seen as different from him (more modern, more forward-thinking) than a genuine desire to assist Joseph.
I bought this after reading Damon Galgut's excellent The Good Doctor - looking through reviews of Galgut's novel, I found one from the Guardian which said that, rather than the more obvious influences of Graham Greene and JM Coetzee, The Good Doctor 'is more reminiscent of Dan Jacobson, in his deadly accurate reading of the South African psyche'. Intrigued, I looked into Jacobson's novels only to find that they all appear to be out of print. I found this 1988 edition on eBay, and what a find it proved to be.
I can very easily see how The Good Doctor was influenced by Jacobson's style in these early novels (which isn't to say that Galgut's novel is derivative; the similarity hasn't diminished it in my eyes at all). The books share a prose style that's simple, graceful, yet complex and loaded with meaning, telling a hundred small stories in one. They share a setting, the sun-bleached, semi-wild veld - surely largely unchanged in the 50 years between the books' original publication dates - and a tangibly atmospheric, almost cinematic, way of portraying it. I also realised that Galgut's protagonist, long-serving doctor Frank, must be a deliberate nod to A Dance in the Sun, which features a medical student named... Frank.
These stories felt so fresh that they could have been written now, not 60 years ago. The style is so crisp, so spare and yet so elegant, that it makes Jacobson's prose feel absolutely timeless. I really want to read more of the author's work, particularly his third novel The Price of Diamonds and some of his short stories. ...more
Following two men working in a rural, near-deserted South African hospital, Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor is an ambiguous story, in which nothing hapFollowing two men working in a rural, near-deserted South African hospital, Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor is an ambiguous story, in which nothing happens, and everything happens; a book of thick and palpable atmosphere. Frank Eloff is the long-established deputy director of the hospital, perpetually waiting for a step upwards to the top spot, a move that has been repeatedly promised, but never quite happens. At the beginning of the story, a new junior doctor, Laurence Waters, arrives - having apparently insisted upon this location, despite the fact that there are so few patients, the existing team find themselves with hardly anything to do. Laurence is everything Frank is not: endlessly upbeat, hopeful and incredibly, perhaps even wilfully, naive. But he also has a sinister streak, and when the two doctors are forced to share a room, Frank finds himself more and more distrustful of Laurence.
The plot also weaves in small stories that build up a picture of the surrounding area and its people. Built to serve the capital of a now-defunct homeland, the hospital is located amongst arid wasteland and an entirely deserted town. It's a setting Galgut exploits to full effect, creating a vivid image of an eerie, empty backdrop perfectly suited to the lost individuals who inhabit it - 'a strange twilight place', as Frank calls it. Secondary characters come into their own as representations of this place's limitations and its chequered history. There's Maria, a local married woman with whom Frank has had a long-running, erratic and distinctly odd affair; Tehogo, a hospital orderly who exerts an inexplicable power over the other staff; and 'the Brigadier', the self-styled former dictator of the homeland, who may or may not still be alive and exists as a shadowy presence on the fringes of both the town and the story.
The book opens with Frank's first impression of Laurence: 'The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last.' Later: 'I wanted to say, you're very young. I wanted to tell him, you won't last.' Yet lonely Frank finds himself unable to reject Laurence entirely - the newcomer is 'like two people', one an unwanted, clingy shadow, the other a much-needed confidant. There is always something vaguely disturbing about Laurence's presence, and always some suggestion he is not quite telling the whole truth about his own past; at other points, there are hints of an always-formless sexual tension between him and Frank. These various suggestions remain, for the most part, suggestions, and The Good Doctor never reaches the simmering pitch of a thriller. Despite that, it's an engrossing story that had me completely captivated from the first page onwards.
Who is 'the good doctor' of the title? It could be either Laurence, with his puppy-dog optimism, or Frank, who is far more down-to-earth, realistic and practical. But the book keeps the answer from us, highlighting the characters' faults - Laurence's damaging and possibly deliberate guilelessness and Frank's jaded, unhelpful cynicism - too clearly for either to be truly worthy of the name. There again, The Good Doctor is also, arguably, an allegory, with the protagonists' attitudes illustrating different approaches to the 'new' South Africa and the flaws within them. Frank is stuck in his ways and resists change, unless it benefits him. Laurence, on the other hand, wants to enable change, but goes about it in all the wrong ways, blindly doing what he thinks is right or useful rather than what is actually necessary or helpful to the impoverished community. Both men struggle to relate to their non-white colleagues, and in the end this will play a pivotal part in their respective failures. Near the end, Frank's boss Dr Ngema confronts him about his innate racism, but he resists, and thereafter the two are simply 'carefully nice to each other' - he still hasn't learned.
I loved the graceful voice and controlled tone of this spellbinding novel. Nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003, it's lost none of its power and feels incredibly fresh. I can't fault it - undoubtedly the best book I've read this year so far....more
I bought this after being wowed by Strauss's second novel, The Curator. His debut is an altogether less sophisticated book, though it tackles many of I bought this after being wowed by Strauss's second novel, The Curator. His debut is an altogether less sophisticated book, though it tackles many of the same themes: South African boyhood; the gradual realisation that one's sexuality is 'different'; the tensions between different communities of white South Africans (English and Afrikaans), as well as the relationships between white families and their black staff. It's the last that really shapes this particular story, as 11-year-old Jack Viljee agonises about 'betraying' his parents' beloved maid Susie. Said betrayal is telegraphed heavily in the blurb as well as the first few chapters, so the plot suffers when it turns out to be nothing much at all, certainly not the life-altering accusation Jack imagines it to be. The most interesting things about Dubious Salvation are its vignettes of childhood and family life in rural South Africa circa the late 1980s. Strauss based the character of Jack on his own experiences, and that shows in the strength of the novel's atmosphere versus the weakness of its plot.
Wolf, Wolf is a lengthy, somewhat convoluted, but highly rewarding story. In simple terms it's about a South African man in his thirties - Mattheüs DuWolf, Wolf is a lengthy, somewhat convoluted, but highly rewarding story. In simple terms it's about a South African man in his thirties - Mattheüs Duiker - and his relationship with his dying father, Benjamin. But it's incredibly dense and frequently strays away from that. It's full of tension, which has no discernible source, and constantly seems to be moving towards a shock that never quite comes. This isn't to say it is in any way disappointing, but it can be an uncomfortable read in an unconventional way. I think the best way to address it is probably by looking at the themes that emerge from the various threads running through the story:
What it means to be a man. The blurb for Wolf, Wolf poses the question: 'how should a man be?' This is a particularly pertinent question for Mattheüs because of his sexuality - not just the fact that he is gay (and the fact that his father has never been able to truly accept this), but also (and, really, more importantly) his addiction to internet porn, which controls his life to such an extent that it frequently takes precedence over his real-life partner, Jack. Mattheüs' obsession is in fact so dominant that, while the porn he watches is explicitly detailed, his actual sex life with Jack is touched on so lightly that I was nearing the end of the book before I realised they actually did sleep together after all. He spends his nights searching for 'sex ever more bent and battered to conform to a closed circuit where only he and the screen in front of him exist', sometimes even seeing his father's needs as distractions from this preoccupation.
As the story progresses, Mattheüs is increasingly forced to confront the realities of manhood as opposed to boyhood - something he has long avoided, apparently spending his twenties doing nothing of note apart from travelling and ostensibly 'having fun', although he rarely seems to have actually been happy. Now back in the family home, he feels infantilised but is unwilling to leave, unable to conceive of a life elsewhere. His lifestyle has been enabled by his father's wealth -a privilege Mattheüs has taken advantage of yet never fully embraced, having rejected the opportunity to take up a role in the successful Duiker luxury car dealership, partly due to a conviction that he lacks an essential masculinity or is somehow just too 'other' to participate in the business, to step into Benjamin's shoes.
The relationship between a father and his son. Both Mattheüs and Benjamin spend the whole of the story on a journey towards accepting and understanding one another. This is not always easy, and nor is it necessarily ultimately successful. Mattheüs has selfish motivations in wanting to repair their relationship - he needs money to start a business, and dreams of an inheritance that will include the family home - and his unwillingness to share his father's care with neighbours or other family members often seems to owe more to this than to love or a sense of duty. Benjamin dotes on his son, but cannot properly embrace who he is, or hide the fact that he is disappointed by Mattheüs' inability to take over the family business or produce children who will carry on the Duiker name. Despite all this, Venter's depiction of the relationship between the two is heartfelt, touching, honest. There is a closeness between them that, while stilted, awkward and sometimes uncomfortable, highlights the real love underscoring their interactions. Mattheüs' protectiveness and devotion to his father's care is a way for him to win Benjamin's acceptance before it's too late.
Throughout the book, the main narrative is punctuated by monologues from Benjamin, messages he has recorded on a tape recorder for Mattheüs to listen to. In these he offers his ruminations on masculinity and is honest about his feelings towards Mattheüs in a way he cannot be face-to-face. Communication (or miscommunication) in general is a theme of its own. Unsure how to cope with Mattheüs' porn problem, Jack takes to Facebook to express his feelings, posting a passive-aggressive stream of photographs and pointed public questions. (In fact, 'facebook' - no capital F - is a verb in this novel; definitely the first time I've come across this in a book.) The couple rarely talk about anything of significance - at one point Jack is driven to ask 'am I in this room for you, Matt? Do you at least know that I'm here?' They don't even talk about Benjamin's reluctance to allow Jack into the Duiker home - this is instead addressed, somewhat surreally, by Jack donning a disguise consisting of a wolf's head mask. Both men know this isn't really stopping Benjamin (who, in any case, has been left blind by his illness) from realising that Jack is there; instead it becomes a game between them, which gives the book its title.
Dreams vs. ambitions; dreams vs. reality. In the first half of the novel, Mattheüs strives towards his dream of opening a takeaway serving healthy fast food. He is obsessed with the idea that his father might write him a cheque big enough to fund the business, but too crippled by uncertainty and shame to ask for it - or even intimate his need for it. Several times, he makes false starts towards obtaining the money elsewhere; when it seems he's on the verge of actually attaining it, he panics, sabotages his own chances, and flees. What becomes clear from all of this is that the takeaway is a dream, not an ambition. Like so many things in this story, it's a symbol. Nevertheless, it does eventually become real, and in naming it 'Duiker's', Mattheüs makes a step towards continuing the family name in his own way. The business represents a compromise between what Benjamin wants Mattheüs to achieve, and Mattheüs' desire to fulfil his father's hopes for him on his own terms.
(An aside: while this doesn't add anything to my review, I couldn't help noticing the parallels between this and The Curator by Jacques Strauss, also published this year. Both are set in South Africa, and focus on male protagonists whose sexuality is key to the plot. In both cases, the protagonist is caring for his ailing father; both books open with a scene demonstrating this. In both books, the son wants or needs a substantial amount of money from his father in order to start a business venture. Both even feature a secondary character who works as a teacher at a boys' school. They do, however, move in very different directions from there, with Strauss exploring the psyche of his character in great detail while Venter focuses more intensely on relationships and family.)
Towards the end of Wolf, Wolf, things become ever more horrible for the embattled Mattheüs, who sinks deeper into failure and despair. The book ends on a poignant note as he resolves to change his behaviour towards Jack, to make up for past mistakes, not knowing that his dreams are - once again - impossible. There are no safe, satisfying conclusions to be drawn from the stories of Mattheüs, Jack and Benjamin. Wolf, Wolf itself, though, is a satisfying novel, a potent depiction of one family that also acts as a broader portrait of contemporary manhood and post-apartheid South Africa....more
In a narrative that shifts between 1976 and 1996, we are introduced to the doomed and dreadful Deyer family, primarily patriarch Hendrik and underachiIn a narrative that shifts between 1976 and 1996, we are introduced to the doomed and dreadful Deyer family, primarily patriarch Hendrik and underachieving son Werner. Living in pre- and narrowly post-apartheid South Africa, they negotiate a changing world with suspicion, hatred and selfishness; the junior and senior Deyers are both devious and murderous individuals, and both are defined by obsession. The story has a wide scope, with its main arc involving the lasting impact of a massacre on the Deyer family, but on a lower level it is concerned mainly with the repulsively fascinating character of Werner and all his idiosyncrasies. The aspiring 'curator' of the title, he nurses an unfulfilled love of art alongside tendencies towards sadism, and these repressed desires will bring him, like his father, to ruin. Indubitably bleak but laced with black humour, this is a book with dark themes - murder, racism and child abuse among them - yet it keeps a surprisingly light tone by centring on Werner. His naivety and self-delusion make him both amusing and dangerous - a brilliant creation - and part of what makes The Curator work so well is its ambivalence towards him. This is one of those books that stays in your head and reveals more layers every time you think about it; I loved it.
--- Unfinished longer review: When we first meet Werner Deyer, it is 1976 and he is thirteen years old. Captivated by a reproduction of Dali's 'Christ of St John of the Cross', he enlists his younger brother, Marius, to help him paint his own version. In the rural town of Barberton, where Werner's parents run an adventure camp for children, a massacre has just taken place; the head of another white family, the Labuschagnes, has shot his wife and children, leaving only a severely injured son and one witness: the family's maid. This opening chapter is short, but it lays the groundwork for many of the major themes that run through the novel - Werner's formative obsession with art, his sadistic tendencies (in a memory of accidentally breaking Marius's arm, the snapping of bone 'sent a shiver up his spine and his breathing quickened'), and the lingering effect of the Labuschagne massacre on the Deyer family.
The next chapter is set twenty years later, and Werner is waiting for his father, Hendrik, to die; in fact he is veritably encouraging him to die. We learn that Werner lives with his parents in a flat in Pretoria, waiting and waiting for Hendrik, who is now bed-bound, to give up on life so that he can claim an inheritance of two hundred and fifty thousand rand. With this money he dreams of opening an art gallery, exhibiting the work of promising graduate students. Werner's life, it seems, has been on hold since childhood. He has denied himself friendships, relationships, and the pursuit of a career he enjoys, or else he believes these to be things he cannot have. He is a pathetic character but not a sympathetic one, not someone to feel sorry for: that sadism touched on in the first chapter is emphasised again when we see him torturing and taunting Hendrik.
By switching between 1976 and 1996, The Curator tells the story of the Deyer family. It is a story of thoroughly unlikeable people; of self-delusion, lust, racism and unfulfilled desire. At the same time, it's darkly funny: an early episode in which Werner invites two Nigerian neighbours to dinner - assuming, with prejudice typical of the character, that they must be drug dealers, and will be able to help him procure heroin with which he will murder his father - plays out as a sort of comedy of errors. It also establishes an aspect of Werner's character, a very naive, clumsy and childlike way of deluding himself, which makes him both amusing and dangerous. This is one of the ways in which the story keeps a light tone despite its very serious themes....more
Moxyland is a wild and sprawling science fiction novel set in South Africa in what I would call ‘the near future’, except that it’s actually now past;Moxyland is a wild and sprawling science fiction novel set in South Africa in what I would call ‘the near future’, except that it’s actually now past; first published in 2008, it takes place in 2018. As it opens, we’re introduced to one of four narrators: Kendra, a likeable character who makes terrible decisions – such as becoming a ‘sponsor baby’ for a soft drink brand, which means she gets to benefit from performance-enhancing technology, but is also branded with the drink’s logo... and becomes addicted to it. There’s also Toby, an insufferable manchild who fronts a vlog with the fittingly Nathan Barley-esque title ‘Diary of Cunt’; adbusting activist Tendeka, who’s the only vaguely level-headed person in the book; and Lerato, a ruthlessly ambitious, misanthropic programmer working for an all-seeing corporation.
The blurb for Moxyland tells us it ‘crackles with bold and infectious ideas’, and it does! It’s uniquely fizzy, incredibly colourful, and Beukes’ imagination is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, the book does not have a plot. Things happen, more things happen, then MORE things happen, and then suddenly it’s over, without any structure ever having made itself known. The title is emblematic of this problem: Moxyland is the setting of a kids’ videogame Toby plays at one point; it doesn’t have any significance in the story. It speaks to the fact that there is no clear hook to hang the whole thing on.
I had fun reading this, and was surprised by some of what hooked me (I disliked Lerato’s chapters at first, but her story, which has a corporate thriller element, became my favourite). It just ran out of steam, or rather I did, when I realised it wasn’t actually going to come together.
Really, I picked this to read because of a recent interest in South Africa, not because I was that interested in the specific story or really wanted tReally, I picked this to read because of a recent interest in South Africa, not because I was that interested in the specific story or really wanted to read a crime novel. I wanted something with a modern, urban setting, I didn't want it to be too difficult or distracting to read; but I also wanted it to be somewhat educational about everyday life, culture and society in an part of the world I'm unfamiliar with, but really interested in learning about. Crime fiction is often the best fit for such requirements, and so it was with this.
I expected the plot to be predictable, but actually, it wasn't; thinking about it, this is probably because - although I tend to lump them together - I've read quite a lot of thrillers but not as much crime. It was a relief to read something that had criminals straightforwardly acting like criminals, and police investigating them, rather than the 'can you really trust your husband/best friend' type of thing that's become the bread and butter of psychological thrillers. That said, I wasn't wholly engaged by everything that happened and sometimes lost the thread of the investigation, and the climactic scene was messy and a bit daft in a way I've often found 'action' stories (films as well) to be: every major character just happens to turn up in the same place at the same time, near-miraculous coincidences abound, there's a confusing shoot-out that's hard to follow, etc.
One thing I thought Mackenzie did really well was her portrayal of the relationship between Jade, the protagonist, and David, her childhood friend/the police superintendent/potential love interest. I can't put my finger on why, exactly, I just feel like it really captured the awkward and tentative back-and-forth of liking someone who probably likes you, but encountering obstacles and not being sure how to make things move forward. Jade's feelings were well-realised as a 'crush' without it ever becoming juvenile. This element also felt very well paced - the author didn't rush into making Jade and David a couple, and the development of their relationship seemed natural and believable.
I wasn't constantly compelled to go back to this and find out what would happen next: I found I could leave it aside for quite a while without feeling much interest in picking it up again. But now I've finished it, I find I'm curious about what's next for Jade, and feel I will probably read at least one of the other books in the series at some point....more