A house robbery “gone bad” is sadly not an uncommon occurrence in South Africa, in reality or in fiction. The one with which NR Brodie’s debut thriller Knucklebone opens seems routine enough: two young men try to break into a home in Johannesburg; one escapes but is eventually caught, the other one is shot dead by the owner. But here, nothing is at it appears.

Old colleagues, Ian Jack and Reshma Patel, meet on the scene of the crime. Ian is a former police officer who now lectures at the university and is present because he’d accompanied the armed response team on their call for his research. Reshma is investigating the case.

It all looks simple in the beginning, but then there is something unusual about the shot wound of the victim, and the strangely unperturbed woman who killed him is definitely not who she claims to be. Born in Romania, Eva Lecca runs a thriving enterprise as a taxidermist, but it soon transpires that she has lethal secrets to hide. Did she fire her gun in self-defence or did she have a completely different motive? “Eva stepped closer to him, her shadow making a grotesque short shape against the wall. Ian pressed his back against the brick, trapped between the building and the woman. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t understand why, but every nerve in his body screamed danger.”

When unexpectedly the apprehended robber, Njabulo, has a diabetic fit in the interrogation room, collapses and ends up in a hospital, things go from strange to otherworldly and then to outright scary. It becomes clear that there are other thieves involved who deal not only in house break-ins, but also animal poaching and trafficking. Soul kidnappings or demon possessions are also not beyond them.

A monkey’s paw leads Ian and Reshma to a much more gruesome find in a hidden warehouse. A collection of one-cent copper coins are found during an autopsy. Demons are on the loose. And a friend goes mysteriously missing. Reshma and Ian do not really know what or who they are dealing with and they have to keep their minds open to face the eerie challenges of this case. They seek the help of a sangoma and a coven of witches to understand and survive the forces they are trying to bring to justice.

Ian has a personal history with Reshma and encountering her again brings back memories of their failure at a relationship while they were still working together in the past. His hope for another chance is rekindled when she responds positively to his invitation to dinner, but is her returned interest real or is she under the influence of some sinister power?

Knucklebone is set in an African metropolis where people from all over the world live and practice their rich and intriguing beliefs. Brodie brings them seamlessly into the story. Reshma finds out about a “Witchcraft Indaba” – “Africa’s first multi-national conference dedicated to sharing knowledge and information about magickal [referring to real magick] practices around the continent!” – and gets in touch with the organisers to help her solve the uncanny puzzle of her case. Ian does not know what to believe when he witnesses an exorcism – which is one of the best scenes of the novel, Brodie’s descriptions making you want to scream and run and simultaneously keep you glued to the page:

“Njabulo arched his neck, his mouth falling open in a wide grimace. He started breathing harder, his breath coming in laboured pants. His features were so swollen that it was hard to make out any expression on his face.

“Ian was about to ask if he should get help when he saw something.

“A fingertip emerged from the inside of the boy’s mouth.

“Then it was joined by another, waving from the cavity between his teeth. The two fingers, edged with blackened nails, curled around the outside of Njabulo’s lips.”

When Ian questions what he saw, the sangoma performing the ritual, MaRejoice, tells him: “Everything is real, Mr Jack. It all depends on what you want to see”. I don’t believe in witchcraft, but I find the way Brodie writes about it and weaves it into her storyline fascinating and wonderfully convincing. You see magic or spiritual and religious practices at work through the eyes of her characters and even though you might not think any of it possible, it seems quite real in the most ordinary way within the context of the narrative. While reading, I often found myself thinking of The X-Files UFO poster displayed in Agent Mulder’s office, stating: “I want to believe.”

Brodie is an established journalist and the author of five successful non-fiction books, among them one about the Mother City and one about Joburg – its history, places of interest and people. It is thus no surprise that the Joburg of Knucklebone is as vividly portrayed as its striking characters: “The eastern part of town had once been the heart of the city’s garment district. Now it was a mix of semi-abandoned industrial buildings and offices as it bled from City and Suburban into Jeppestown and Troyeville. The noise from the highway rumbled down through concrete, to where the traditional Mai Mai market carried on its business just a few blocks away from the new hipster cool of the Maboneng precinct.”

Brodie’s crisp writing, her short chapters which often end in nail-biting cliff hangers and a great plotline drive the narrative along. She brings all its strands together in a stunning magical finale which I found highly satisfying.

This is Brodie’s first foray into the thriller genre. Her take on it is very refreshing. I don’t read thrillers often, and I am usually not too keen on fantasy either, but I found Knucklebone’s pace and imaginative prowess invigorating and could not put the book down. A sequel is something to be wished for.

Knucklebone

by NR Brodie

Macmillan, 2018

Review first published in the Cape Times on 16 February 2018.

Looking forward to this special event:

I have been away.

It wasn’t easy – nothing that takes three years to do is – but I finally made it: I got on a flight to Europe and came back.

The last time I was in Europe, I was married and my world seemed like a safe place. During our return flight on 6 February 2015, my husband André passed away while we were flying over Brazzaville. And I became a widow. The memories of that day have haunted my attempts at flying for the past three years. I have managed – with more or less success – a few short local flights, but all attempts at the Big One had failed until now.

The occasion for trying to fly long distance again was of high importance: Miś, aka our mother, was celebrating her 70^th birthday this month and all she wished for was to have both her children in the same room. For most mothers this is no problem whatsoever, but for our mother – with me living in South Africa and my brother’s itchy feet – the two of us in one room is a rare occurrence. She lives in Austria. The last time she was in the same room with both her children was in Cape Town three years ago when she was here to take care of me after André’s death. But she couldn’t stay here forever.

Miś bought a new house in Upper Austria almost two years ago, but until this month, I only saw it in photographs. I keep in touch via Skype and letters, but that precious thing – one another’s company – seemed impossible for such a long time because I feared getting on a plane for twelve hours. Before that fateful day in the beginning of 2015, I used to visit regularly, three or four times a year…

A kind travel agent in Cape Town explored all the possible routes for me and we settled on one which felt safest: Cape Town – Johannesburg – Munich. My family lives nearby, next to the border between Bavaria and Upper Austria. I wanted the long leg of the trip to take me directly to Miś, so that no matter what happened during the flight, I would land in her waiting arms, in her new home, where she sits every day at the table which used to stand in my kitchen when I still lived in Austria.

And now, finally, we sat there all together as a family and ate the traditional Sacher Torte and celebrated Miś’s 70^th birthday for an entire week. It snowed. There was water. And my favourite beer, Uttendorfer. To welcome me, Miś prepared the special dish I always ask for when I visit. We spent a few days around her birthday – one of them was the anniversary of André’s death – in Bad Ischl. Thermal springs, a hike on the Katrin, the Zauner restaurant, and the ghosts of the imperial past lingering everywhere. The birthday dinner was a Hauben-delight.

We lit a candle for André and remembered.

During my visit, I had lots of coffee with Miś who is solely responsible for my addiction; had long chats with Krystian sitting next to him and not in front of a computer screen; saw old friends and knew exactly why they have always been so dear; in my mother’s attic, found the small green fork I used to eat with as a child; walked along my beloved Mattig; spoke German; sat quietly in my mother’s guest bed in the mornings when everyone else was still asleep and read Rehana Rossouw’s latest novel, New Times, set in Cape Town, in preparation for my interview with the author in March at the Woordfees in Stellenbosch. And no matter how glad I was to be back, to be able to celebrate this very special occasion with our mother, to have flown to Europe again, I knew two things. The first was that, most likely, my life would have been good and meaningful if I had never met André and moved to Cape Town to be with him, but it would have been nothing in comparison to what it became with him. The second was that even if he was no longer alive, I understood and felt – unequivocally – where I belonged, where my home was: in Cape Town.

Like most readers across the world, I first became aware of the South Korean writer Han Kang when she won the Man Booker International Prize two years ago for her phenomenal novel, The Vegetarian. It was recommended to me by a friend who bought it because of the award. Since then, I have read Han’s other works translated into English: the harrowing Human Acts and her latest, The White Book.

The Vegetarian tells the story of a woman who, after years of obedience to repressive societal norms and expectations, decides to defy them by first becoming a vegetarian and then insisting on her complete independence to become who she wants to be. She undergoes a haunting, intimate transformation, and in the end, demands her right to make the ultimate choice – how and whether to live or to die. It is an astounding portrayal of a woman’s emancipation and its possible consequences. The main character is South Korean, but the power of her story lies in the fact that most women can identify with her.

Human Acts, although it focuses on a specific historic event (a brutally supressed student uprising which took place in South Korea in 1980) is just as universal. Told from the perspective of a few people affected by the horrific violence, it narrates a story of suffering and survival. Its descriptions of the massacre made me think a lot about the brilliant English title (which is different to the original, translating directly as The Boy Is Coming) and how the words ‘human’ and ‘inhuman’ can be misleading.

In comparison to her previous novels, the recent The White Book concentrates on another intensely personal story which hints at grand historical narratives of death and destruction, as well as renewal. The book opens with a list of white things, ranging from swaddling bands to a shroud. The narrator writes them down in the hope that the process “would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed.” At the centre of the story is loss. As she moves to a new home in a country she’s never visited before, the narrator recalls her older sister’s death: “My mother’s first child died, I was told, less than two hours into life.” She understands that she was born and grew up “in the place of that death.” Thinking about this fate, she wanders the streets of her new home which had been nearly wiped out of existence by Hitler’s military campaigns and rebuilt after the war. She realises that nothing in the city “existed for more than seventy years”. Everything had been “faithfully reconstructed” and stands on the ghostly remains of the past. When the narrator compares herself to the city, the personal becomes universal in a passage which gave me goose bumps when I first read it: “A person who had met the same fate as that city. Who had at one time died or been destroyed. Who had painstakingly rebuilt themselves on a foundation of fire-scoured ruins. Who was therefore something new. Who, some broken pediment having survived, has ended up bearing a strange pattern, the new distinct from the old.”

There is a story about a man who believed that the soul of his brother, who died very young in a Jewish ghetto, lived inside his own and communicated with him. The narrator contemplates whether her own sister might have “sought her out” in a similar way, but having been only an infant when she died, the little one had no knowledge of language: “That some vague sensation I had known as a child, some stirring of seemingly unprompted emotion, might, unbeknown to me, have been coming from her. For there are moments, lying in the darkened room, when the chill in the air is a palpable presence… Turned towards indecipherable sounds laden with love and anguish. Towards a pale blur and body heat. Perhaps I too have opened my eyes in the darkness, as she did, and gazed out.”

Han’s exquisite words look fragile and small on the pure white pages of The White Book. They are accompanied by black and white photographs and film stills by Choi Jinhyuk. Together they evoke feelings of pristine melancholy. I was particularly touched by the series of images of a white pebble. In one of the photographs, the pebble is covered in salt and lies in the palm of a hand. In another, it is being washed tenderly in a bowl of water. The third image is a close up of the rinsed pebble. The narrator considers the phrase “to pour salt on a wound” and makes us wonder what happens when wounds come in contact with the “white things” of her list, when the narrative itself is a cleansing process. There is pain and healing in reflection.

In interviews, Han confirms that the book is autobiographical; her parents lost a daughter, and Han was born soon after. We have an identical, uncanny story in our family: my father was born on the exact day of the first anniversary of his elder brother’s death. The fact always haunted my imagination, but that is by far not the only reason why Han’s confrontation with her parents’ grief and her own, the sense of loss and the miracle of revival in The White Book strike such a deep note in my own soul. Mourning is as much an individual as it is a communal process, and both aspects of it are of great importance to our perception of who we are as people and nations. Han’s narrator reminds us “of certain incidents in her own country’s history, the country she had left in order to come here, of the dead that had been insufficiently mourned.”

It is seldom that a text reads so flawlessly that it brings tears to my eyes. I was moved by the perfect construction of the novel and the seeming ease with which it is executed. Han’s translator, Deborah Smith, has been accused of not being faithful enough to the originals, but she works closely with the author and has her approval. I cannot compare the two versions myself, but I delight in Smith’s interpretation of Han’s prose. And the contents of Han’s books feed my imagination and mind like few other contemporary authors. The White Book is sublime. I look forward to rereading it before the next title by this remarkable author is available in English.

The White Book

by Han Kang

Portobello Books, 2017

Review first published in the Cape Times on 9 February 2018.

“The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.” Nelson Mandela’s famous words echo the understanding that we can be judged by the way we treat the most vulnerable members of our communities, whether these are children, the elderly or the differently abled. Reading Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, we are reminded how we fail to protect those who need our care. The story she outlines is set across the two Americas, but it resonates with so many other tales across all continents where displaced people are escaping horror or looking for decent opportunities to build their lives.

As a volunteering translator at the federal immigration court in New York City, Luiselli has witnessed and given voice to some of the most terrifying stories about unaccompanied migrant children coming from Mexico and many countries south of its border into the United States, seeking refuge. She recounts only a few of these heart-breaking cases in her book. The questions of the subtitle are the ones asked of the children when they are apprehended and handed over to officials. The main question of the title is asked by one of Luiselli’s own children: her daughter wants to know how the story of the migrating children ends. There is no easy answer.

“The whole thing is a mess,” Luiselli writes, “a puzzle impossible to piece together using common sense and logic. But this much is clear: until all the governments involved – the American, Mexican, Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan governments, at least – acknowledge their shared accountability in the roots and causes of the children’s exodus, solutions to the crisis will be impossible.” We are speaking about thousands upon thousands of children making their way across the borders to either be reunited with the families already living in the US, or searching for ways out of impossible conditions at home, or both. They are running from poverty, abuse, trafficking, gangs, or military conflicts. Their perilous journeys often end in tragedy, and miraculously arriving in the US is often only the beginning of another ordeal which under the current Trump administration will see them most likely deported again.

Luiselli describes the challenges the children face, often despairing at her own inability to assist in more productive ways. But she points out that “perhaps the only way to grant any justice – were that even possible – is by hearing and recording these stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

Luiselli does not look away. Driven by “a combination of anger and clarity”, she allows the reader to share in her emotions and thoughts about one of the most distressing realities of our present.

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

4^th Estate, 2017

Review first published in the Cape Times on 2 February 2018.

Despite her impressive résumé, I had not heard of Jesmyn Ward before her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, was recommended to me by two local booksellers in the beginning of December. But I am thrilled that I finally came across her work. Ward is an American novelist and the first woman to win the prestigious National Book Award twice. This is no small feat, as she has only turned forty and Sing, Unburied, Sing is only her third novel. She received the National Book Award for it and its predecessor, Salvage the Bones (2011), but already her debut, Where the Lines Bleed (2008), was highly acclaimed. Ward is also the author of a memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), and the editor of an essay and poetry collection, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016). Her potential has been recognised with the famous MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the “Genius Grant” ($625,000 – allow a moment for this number to sink in) given to individuals residing in the United States who exemplify “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction”. I look forward to exploring more of her work, past and future.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is the story of a mother and a son and the people who shaped them. Leonie is thirty; she gave birth to Jojo when she was only seventeen. The two of them are the main narrators of the story. The third, Richie, is a ghost whose violent death is a mystery which has to be resolved for those who are still alive to find peace. Jojo first encounters him in Pop’s (his grandfather, Leonie’s dad) recollections of Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary, where now Jojo’s own father, Michael, is also serving a sentence. Leonie is black, Michael white. This is present-day Mississippi where these facts define everything about their lives. Leonie remembers when they met and Michael “saw” her: “saw past skin the colour of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the colour of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.”

But Michael’s parents refuse to have anything to do with Leonie, her family, and their own flesh and blood, Jojo and his baby sister Kayla. Leonie thinks of her home as her “death-crowded household”. Mam, her mother and only grandmother her children have ever known, is dying of cancer. Her knowledge of plants and healing cannot save her life, but she has her spirituality to guide her through the darkest hour.

Given, Leonie’s only brother, was killed in what was officially described as a hunting accident, but was clearly murder. What makes the coming to terms with his death even more complicated is the fact that it was Michael’s cousin who pulled the trigger of the shotgun that killed him. Given’s ghost cannot rest and appears to his sister whenever she gets high. Drugs offer her escape from her obligations as a mother to her two children who share a bond of trust and care she can’t help being envious of. It is Jojo, not Leonie, Kayla turns to for comfort every time the little girl is distressed. Perhaps more than his mother, Jojo, although only on the cusp of adolescence, understands about the necessity to face the ruthless realities of life and its harsh responsibilities.

The novel opens early in the year with Jojo helping Pop slaughter one of the animals on their farm: “This spring is stubborn; most days, it won’t make way for warmth. The chill stays like water in a bad-draining tub.” The brutality and tenderness of the scene is overwhelming and sets the tone for the entire story. Ward’s stunning prose draws you in, makes you look, feel, as Jojo narrates his own emotions: “I don’t want him to read my slowness as fear, as weakness, as me not being old enough to look at death like a man should”. It is the day of Jojo’s thirteenth birthday and Leonie’s failure to celebrate the occasion as it should be makes her son remember how he stopped hearing the word “Mama” in his head in reference to her a long time ago. He calls Leonie by her name. In her insecurities, regrets and her ever-present anger, she does not know how to reclaim her true status in her children’s life.

Michael is about to be released from prison and Leonie decides to take Jojo, the baby and her friend Misty on a road trip to pick him up. Jojo is reluctant to go, but he has to take care of Kayla. As their car moves away from home, he takes heart from Pop “with his straight shoulders and his tall back, his pleading eyes the only thing that spoke to me in that moment and told me what he said without words: I love you, boy. I love you.” For most of the road trip, the narrative lacks the emotional intensity of the beginning and ending of the book, but my persistence to the revelations and beauty of the final pages was richly rewarded.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is set in the twenty-first century, but everything that happens to these characters is the result of hatreds and injustices going back to the horrors of the first ships crossing the waters of the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas with their human cargo on board. The layers of racism and violence resulting from these events of the distant past are congealed under the everyday of the present and constantly erupt to the surface, wanting to be acknowledged.

Pop tries to explain to Jojo how that passage, its waters, still move inside people, and eventually the young man understands “that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.” It is the sea and the suffering of its ghosts that flow through the hauntings of Sing, Unburied, Sing. What happened to Richie at Parchman lies at the core of all stories and reveals how the most terrifying aspect of violence is that sometimes it manifests as kindness. The elements of magic realism in Sing, Unburied, Sing echo one of greatest novels of all times, Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved, and the songs of Ward’s title resonate with the literary giant’s own. Jesmyn Ward is well poised to follow in her footsteps.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Bloomsbury, 2017

An edited version of this review first appeared in the Cape Times on 26 January 2018.

Beyond Power: An Interview with Lyndall Gordon

 by Karina M. Szczurek

In 1915, Virginia Woolf emerged from a mental breakdown only to witness the madness of the Great War’s senseless slaughter. As a woman opposed to violence, she felt she had no country to call her own. Disillusioned, she encouraged women to form “the outsiders society”. Woolf is one of the women Lyndall Gordon includes in Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World.

The inspiration for the book came to her in 1975 on a train journey to Reading, where Gordon was to give a talk on D.H. Lawrence. “It was early morning, a beautiful day,” she remembers, “I suddenly thought I wanted to write a book about women through the generations, and the kind of ideas they had about how the world could be.” The creative seed for Outsiders was planted, but Gordon went on to author six individual biographies – of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Dickinson – as well as two memoirs before embarking on the envisaged project.

Gordon’s entire oeuvre, however, makes it clear that the vision from the train did not remain dormant. Even when writing the two men’s biographies, she focused on the women who shaped their creative consciousness. Daring to conceptualise a contrasting reality to the insanity of our present, she is drawn to women who, like James’s Isabel Archer “affront their destiny”.

It is late morning when we meet in her light-flooded flat in Sea Point. Her permanent home is overseas but she always returns to the Cape with longing. An ardent writer and, in person, also a compelling storyteller, she enriches the conversation with her remarkable memory as luminous literary quotes and insights soar from her lips.

Looking out to sea from where we sit, it is easy to picture Woolf’s “fin of a submerged form lurking in the waves.” Much is at risk. Outsiders, a “dispersed biography”, is unlike Gordon’s other work. She recalls her apprehension before it went to print. A culmination of four decades of meticulous consideration, the book is a record of revolutionary outlooks. Interweaving the intellectual and creative work of “prodigy” Mary Shelley, “visionary” Emily Brontë, “outlaw” George Eliot, “orator” Olive Schreiner, and “explorer” Virginia Woolf, Gordon shows how these “outsiders” imagined a new world order into existence. By staying true to themselves, the five defied norms and expectations.

“I wanted to show how these women looked at what is crude, ugly, abusive, dismaying in human nature, but then found a voice that was a different strain in civilised men and women: Mary Wollstonecraft spoke of ‘tenderness’ and George Eliot of ‘sympathy’.” Each rebelled against inequality and misogyny. “Power is rotten,” Gordon says, appalled at the hunger for it, in men and women alike. “I feel like an outsider as a feminist because I don’t think power is a good thing.” At the very core of this book is what Gordon refers to as “an alternative to power”. The Brontë sisters were criticised as “brutal, unwomanly” for exposing domestic violence in their novels, she points out. “This speaks right to this time when there is a tsunami of public opinion sweeping everywhere with the #MeToo Campaign.” The challenge of silence surrounding victims of power persists.

Gordon quotes the young Jane Eyre: “Speak, I must.” For the five writers speaking was a “creative and moral act”. Gordon herself believes in “being a moral being” and explains: “The moral being inside me is responding in a small way to the gigantic moral being in all these writers.” They wanted to be seen for who they believed themselves to be. Their legacy endures because of the intellectual and emotional potential they unlocked for us to recognise. It dazzles in Outsiders.

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the Sunday Times on 21 January 2018.)

Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World

by Lyndall Gordon

Virago, 2017

Review by Karina M. Szczurek

In the epigraph of her Outsiders: Five Women Who Changed the World, Lyndall Gordon quotes one of the subjects of the book, George Eliot: “Souls live on in perpetual echoes”. The four other “outsiders” she writes about are Virginia Woolf, Olive Schreiner, Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley. Another great literary soul looms large in the lives of these writers – the formidable women’s rights champion Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother who died shortly after giving birth to her. Schreiner described her as “one of ourselves”.

In 1787, Wollstonecraft famously proclaimed that she was “the first of a new genus”. She unmistakably was, and the five remarkable women on which Outsiders focuses clearly belong in the same novel category. Because of their ingenious outlooks and their bold defiance of norms, they were all outsiders in their societies in one way or another: “In a period when a woman’s reputation was her treasured security, each of these five lost it. Each endured the darkness of social exclusion.”

In her foreword, Gordon specifies why she has chosen these five “outsider voices rising in the course of the nineteenth century: a prodigy, a visionary, an outlaw, an orator and an explorer. To my mind, they came, they saw and left us changed.” I remember what discovering Wollstonecraft and these five writers she inspired meant for me as a young woman and as an aspiring author. Even if we might not realise it, we owe many of our freedoms and rights to these pathbreakers. When Mary Shelley ran away with the still then married Percy Bysshe and soon after published Frankenstein (first anonymously in 1818), which was to become one the best-known novels of all times, respectable women obeyed their fathers and “did not indulge in a public arena”. To speak out as a woman was seen as “unnatural”, to publish an aberration. William Makepeace Thackeray admired Emily Brontë’s writing, but “thought it driven by a spinster’s ‘hunger’ for a man. If she had a husband, he said, she’d have no need to write.” This attitude persists and will be familiar to modern women writers and intellectuals. Back in the nineteenth century, “Emily’s unsociable habits and unwillingness to please must be seen in this gendered context, which makes her no freak: rather a woman courageous enough to resist absurd norms.” Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf thought her “gigantic”. Her Wuthering Heights (1847) endures through the ages, engaging generations of readers in myriad ways.

Genius cannot be explained, Gordon notes. It often refuses to be silenced, even if it can only be articulated in private. The subjects of Outsiders joined the fictional heroine, Jane Eyre, in emphatically stating “Speak I must.” Whether it was in public or in their intimate communications, they wrote against their silencing, and their voices continue to resound.

Denied proper education, which was usually reserved for the men in their families, these women were mostly self-taught. They sought out the company of those who recognised their brilliance and in some cases entered relationships with the men who truly saw them for who they were, with whom they could “communicate with unlimited freedom”, as Mary Shelley felt she could with her husband or George Eliot did with her lover, George Lewes. But Mary Ann Evans (which was the given name of the author of Middlemarch), first “glimpsed the possibility of being a different sort of woman” in her uncle’s wife who was considered “strange” in her time when she became a Methodist preacher; her “candour” and “sympathy” for the young Mary Ann inspired the future novelist, editor and essayist.

Like Mary Ann and the Brontë sisters, Olive Schreiner ventured into the publishing world under a male pseudonym. She published The Story of an African Farm as Ralph Iron. However, when her true identity surfaced, it became “an asset with the rise of the New Woman in the 1890s.”

It was Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont who “dreamt up in her night-time confab with Shelley: ‘a subterraneous community of women’.” And it is this community that has been sustaining the “outsiders” through the ages until they could reclaim their rightful place. “Schreiner’s voice is a link in the chain coming down from Mary Wollstonecraft, whose watchword was ‘tenderness’, and George Eliot, whose watchword was ‘sympathy’.” Both Schreiner and Wollstonecraft “want to elicit what is distinctive in women’s experience with a view to constructing a different world” and the former strongly believed that “there lies something deeper” for women to attain beyond the vote, independence and education.

Since the publication of her first biography in 1977, Gordon herself has been considering these ‘depths’ in the biographies and memoirs she has published. Life writing is a way of seeing, recognising. Nowhere is it as evident as in Outsiders, this “dispersed biography”. Gordon reminds us of Woolf’s essay “The Art of Biography” (1938): “a biographer, she says, ‘can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection’. A biographer can give us rather ‘the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders’.” Outsiders thrives precisely in this kind of terrain and continues to examine Woolf’s question about “the true nature of women”.

The writers Gordon depicts fought for equality but not at all cost; they understood the corrosive quality of power. For Eliot “imagination” and “imaginative sympathy” were to “replace ill-feeling, scoring, greed, all base forms of aggression.” She and the other “outsiders” sought something different, a way of being beyond power and violence, especially when it manifests as, in Schreiner’s words, “the bestiality and insanity” of war. Today, Schreiner’s “dreams of women to be are like dispatches from an unmapped land, a country everyone knew existed, but still unseen.”

Lyndall Gordon’s mother named her after Schreiner’s protagonist from The Story of an African Farm who believed: “Men are like the earth and we are like the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don’t see it – but there is.” Indeed. By recalling and amplifying these voices from the past, Gordon is addressing our present. Through her five subjects’ lives, their genius and creativity, she allows us a glimpse of a world without the abuse of power, one without violence – a world at peace. What saddens me is that I will probably not live long enough to see this alternative vision become reality. It remains, however, up to us to nourish the dream and for future generations to realise it.

(An edited version of this review was first published in the Cape Times on 29 December 2017.)

To all writers:

On 18 December 2017, I sent the following letter to Darryl Earl David, the eThekwini Municipality, the eThekwini Municipal Library, the Essence Festival, the Book and Art Fair ARTiCULATE Africa, and the UNESCO Creative Cities Network:

At the end of August 2017, I was invited by the eThekwini Municipality and the eThekwini Municipal Library to Durban to participate in the city’s second Book and Art Fair, ARTiCULATE Africa, as part of the Essence Festival. Hosted by the eThekwini’s Parks, Recreation and Culture Service Unit between 28 September and 1 October, the fair offered a platform for local and international writers to speak about their work. The invitation was sent to me by the curator of the Book and Art Fair, Darryl Earl David, and offered the following: a return flight to King Shaka International Airport in Durban, accommodation for the duration of my stay, transport to and from the airport, and an honorarium for my participation. After I accepted the invitation and confirmed my attendance, I was asked to invoice the Essence Festival for my participation and to supply other supporting documents – which I did. I was told that all my documents were in order and that I would be paid soon after the festival. It is now two-and-a-half months later and I – and, as far as I could establish, all other participants (apart from two who insisted and received an advance of 50% on their fee) – have still not been paid despite repeated assurances from officials that the matter was on the verge of being resolved. I am not only concerned by this unacceptable delay of payments, but that we might not be paid at all. I was informed that participants of the first ARTiCULATE Africa suffered a similar fate, and since 11 December none of the people responsible for this year’s payments have been replying to my letters. This is no way to treat anyone under any circumstances, but especially not writers by a city named as the first UNESCO City of Literature in Africa.

My experience and concerns are shared by the following local and international participants who asked their names to be added to this letter: [names of half of the participants].

We would like to urge you all to make sure that all the participants of ARTiCULATE Africa are immediately remunerated for their work.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Karina M. Szczurek

The first payments were made to a few participants within a few hours of my letter being sent. This might be a coincidence but, under the circumstances, I doubt it. On 20 January, a Durban-based journalist investigating the story wrote to me and asked for comment. It might be another coincidence that my own cheque was deposited into my account that day (but was cleared by the bank only in early January, three months after my attendance of the festival!). Nearly every day, I keep receiving letters from other participants who have still not been paid (one just came in while I am typing this text), despite several further interventions by them and Darryl Earl David. No official apology was ever issued by the people responsible for the fiasco. No one, apart from the woman responsible for depositing the cheques and David, has acknowledged the letter above. I doubt I will ever be invited back, but it does not matter, because after all this humiliating begging for what is owed to us – payment for our work – I cannot imagine going through this process again. I am putting this on my blog to warn other writers: should you be invited, please demand to be paid in advance – don’t go otherwise. It is actually not worth it. I have been to numerous festivals and book fairs and have never been treated in such a way before. I had a great time while in Durban, but all my memories of the event are soured by the experience of what happened afterwards. It is simply unacceptable.

Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg is only her second novel, but it feels like the work of a much more seasoned writer. After her highly acclaimed debut, Midwinter (2016), which chronicled the grief and survival of a Suffolk farmer’s family and was set in the UK and Zambia, Melrose returns to the country of her birth and locates her latest story, as the title suggests, in the City of Gold on a very specific day in history, 6 December 2013. Melrose seems to be a fearless writer; her imagination leads her where surprisingly few dare to go and she gives credible and moving voices to characters of all backgrounds. It is the hallmark of a true writer. As is her literary scope. Melrose is not afraid of intertextuality, allowing Johannesburg to beat with the heart of a few literary giants, Virginia Woolf most prominent among them, but the storytelling rhythm is entirely Melrose’s own.

6 December 2013 was the day we all woke up to a world without Nelson Mandela. “It had been a bad night for nervous dogs. Thunder, and rain, terrible and hot, had drenched the city”, read the opening lines of Johannesburg. The story of the day which followed is told from the perspective of several characters. They come from all walks of life. For each of them, while they are all mourning Mandela’s passing in different ways, this day also marks a different kind of threshold as they navigate the restless metropolis which is their home: “Towers of glass and everywhere more being built – banks, law firms, mining houses, the great and the good of a bygone era still standing despite a crusty patina of blood and guilt.”

September lost everything after being shot at during miners’ protests on the (aptly renamed for the purpose of this novel) Verloren koppie. He spends his nights on flattened cardboard boxes in a garden and haunts the streets of Joburg during the day, begging and wanting to be acknowledged. He makes his “pilgrimage to the Diamond, the home of the mine bosses, the killers of men” and remembers the senseless violence that brought him to this place. His sister Duduzile tries to take care of him, but “his life rested like a bundle of jagged rocks on her back.”

Inside the Diamond, Richard knows that what happened at Verloren will not be ignored. He dreams of his summer beach holiday when he can shed all responsibility and become a castaway: “Seagulls, sky, perhaps the call of children as they ran back from the water’s edge as heavier waves barrelled in. That was all. And that was everything.” He realises that at sixty-four he is already three years older than his father when he passed away, and he remembers his wife Anne who died three years earlier. He still feels lost as he contemplates whether a gift is required as he prepares for a friend’s birthday party that evening.

The party is in celebration of Neve Brandt’s eightieth birthday. Her daughter Virginia, or Gin, arrives back from New York to organise it at her mother’s home in Joburg. She is convinced that “it would all fail, her party, her preparations. And she would be judged by everyone who sat there and, of course, by her mother.” The relationship between Gin and her mother is fraught with what remains unsaid between them. Neve is deeply unsettled by the birthday and the idea of the party: “She had no interest in feigning delight and gratitude, for she felt neither.” She has little faith in her daughter, despite her assurance that she will take care of everything. Neve’s attitude is crushing: “A party. What could be worse? It was the most miserable possible outcome for any birthday.” Her toxic scepticism causes Gin “to bruise, in that acrid yellow and black way.”

Their domestic worker Mercy observes the two women and their cutting misunderstandings while trying to catch any news of Tata Mandela. Peter, the man Gin once had a relationship with, sees her visit as an opportunity to make amends for their failures of the past, but is incapable of decisive action. Gin “demanded that all of it, life and death, look her square in the face and he, all the while, was softening, losing his nerve, turning away.”

The city – “the practised master of the endless hustle” – is, as the novel’s title boldly declares, the protagonist of the story. As its inhabitants struggle with missed opportunities and silences, the tensions gradually become unbearable. Something has to give. Death is omnipresent in obvious and more subtle ways. And then, while mourners gather outside the president’s residence and the skies above the city prepare for their usual cleansing, Neve’s dog goes missing and September knows that it is time to make his protests properly noticed. Gin feels that her lot is “too much. Too much was needed from her. And everything was wrong. Everything was too much for just one day.”

From the beginning of Johannesburg, it is clear that the “bad night” of the first sentence will permeate the “skinless” day of the novel and shift the characters’ lives into a different gear. For most of the time, Melrose commands the multiple narrative strands with great aplomb. There were only a few moments in the story, specifically in the passages centred on September, where I found myself wishing for tauter editing. But the novel left me feeling enriched, as if my own life had somehow been transformed by these fictional recollections of a day which is still very fresh in my memory.

The epigraph of the novel comes from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: “Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.” Johannesburg pays homage to the timeless classic, adapting some of its key elements and structurally following in its footsteps. Readers familiar with Mrs Dalloway will delight at the various references to Woolf’s writing, but Johannesburg can be enjoyed purely on its own terms. Melrose’s novel is inspired, never dominated by her sources. To my mind, two other local greats echo in the pages of the book: Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavić, the two “novelists of Johannesburg and historians of its streets”, as the writer and literary critic Michiel Heyns referred to them in one of his reviews. With Johannesburg, Melrose enters a widely travelled literary territory and makes it her own. It is a fine novel and Melrose is fast on her way to establishing herself as one of the most fascinating, versatile novelists of our time and place.

Johannesburg

by Fiona Melrose

Corsair, 2017

An edited version of this review appeared in the Cape Times on 22 December 2017.

In no particular order, nor according to any genre categories, these are simply the books I enjoyed reading – for whatever reasons – the most this year. Some of them were not published in 2017, but I only got around to reading them now. This list excludes some recently released treats which are still waiting for me during the festive season.

I read just over sixty titles in the past twelve months. Not my best achievement by far, but I find that every year I get better at choosing what to read to avoid disappointment.

The six books published in 2017 which provided me with most joy were Ingrid Winterbach’s The Shallows, Hedley Twidle’s Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, Sara-Jayne King’s Killing Karoline, John Maytham’s Rapid Fire: Remarkable Miscellany, Anne Fadiman’s The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir, and Lyndall Gordon’s Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World.

Next year promises to be an exciting one in literary terms and I hope to make it to my usual eighty books in a year. Wishing you all happy reading and kind and peaceful holidays!