Author Archives: Karina

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About Karina

Author living in Cape Town.

Silver linings: Stranger by Sihle Ntuli

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StrangerThe thing with poetry is that it either works for you or it doesn’t. I do not know many people who read it for pleasure. Nowadays, poetry certainly seems to be an acquired taste. I often abstain myself, prose being my staple food. But every now and then a poem or, if I am lucky, an entire volume comes along that makes my heart swell with gladness. Sihle Ntuli’s Stranger is one of those gems. The author asked me to review his debut poetry collection. I do not know why, but I am delighted, and honoured, that he did.

Divided into six parts, Stranger offers a glimpse into contemporary South Africa from the perspective of a keen observer with a distinct, edgy voice. Ntuli might be only in his mid-twenties, but his sense of perception is sharp beyond his years. From the first poem to the last, the reader is drawn into the kaleidoscope of his world and its vivid patterns. In “kwa mashu f section bus stop”, commuters’ souls are whisked away to places where they attempt to make a living, “as billboards block the sun”, feeding their impossible dreams. The distinction between the crushing greyness of daily existence and the possibility of a golden life of opportunity features in other poems, such as “friday”. Here the moving opening lines:

 

in between creases on foreheads

living has folded thoughts

into blankets and sheets

unfolded in dreams

 

to lie down to pillow talk

to walk behind grey matters

to watch brain revolving around desires unfulfilled

 

my grey life upon eyes

the all-seeing eye

 

the sun losing colour when it dies

the aggressive night

black blood protrudes

moon blows cold wind on wounds

the heart weighing tons upon tons

 

living life like it’s golden is expensive

it costs a lot to be virtuous and true

 

Ntuli writes about the reality of the South African township and being a young man in contemporary South Africa, but his vision goes beyond. He captures universal moments of hardship, the kind of poverty which does not only manifest in material lack, but also in the soul, which longs for beauty and is confronted with despair instead. “monday” chronicles the exhaustion and hopelessness of the everyday which is hard to overcome: “the phrase ‘things change’ / speaks only to those who expect to get returns” and the “spoon through your chest” brings out both “blood and beauty / as you love and feel pain in the same colour”.

Violence and loss are linked, the brutality and pulse of street life exposed. Occasionally, to cope you hope for escape, take some pill or other substance: “mind coming to age / life and bland taste / less trouble”. That substance can be love; no matter, as long as it alters your consciousness and your ability to feel. The mind wants to flee the desolate, hostile world. The wish to tell it like it is, though, is clearly there – the need to separate illusion from truth. Ntuli reads the world, its delusions and dreams, and tries to navigate the difference.

At the same time, he offers moments of unbearable tenderness, as in a phrase like “silence in your eyelids”, or my favourite poem of the collection, “the walls”:

 

the everyday

should not seep

through           the walls

 

it is behind these walls

that truth undresses

then lies

 

Grief is palpable in many poems, captured most poignantly in a few lines in the last stanza of “late”: “early morning / dressed in black / the sun rose / our flowers on top of caskets / the late as candles”. His images are striking, definitely not easily forgotten, thus his words do not die on the page but continue a life of their own through the associations they awaken in the mind of each and every reader who immerses herself in them.

The title of the collection resonates throughout, but is most strongly captured in “the stranger”: “towards him / they throw adjectives / the suffocating symphony / the injustice / words slant to one side / lying”. Race, skin colour, otherness, and contrasts between ordinary lives lived in obscurity and silver linings shining on the horizons whether in words or sunsets bring with them a palette of visual impressions which Ntuli makes us reconsider. Nothing is just a colour: “i sit on the side silently / living life like it’s silver / as the lining is blocked by the roof”.

Recurring in the collection are references to music. It is in the rhythm of every poem, “between jazzy notes without words”. Like music, the lines are meditative, haunting, thought-provoking. They help us negotiate the world, “moved by thoughts that have no rhythm”. But unlike one of his narrator’s contemporaries who seem to be more interested in being DJs rather than poets, as many in the struggle were (“gospel gold”), Ntuli carves out his creative space in words. His is a new struggle: for his own voice, for the recognition of his reality and vision.

 

Stranger by Sihle Ntuli

Aerial Publishing, 2015

 

Review by Karina Magdalena Szczurek

Review: The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

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WintersonJeanette Winterson is one of my favourite writers of fiction and non-fiction. Her recent memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011) was a revelation. I was introduced to her work at university with the by now classic novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Her Lighthousekeeping (2004) is one of the most moving love stories I have ever read. Among many texts, it echoes Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The main character Silver reappears in other Winterson novels. As does the line: “Tell me a story.” Winterson is known for her retellings of myths and legends, her writing is rich in intertextuality. I loved her modern rendering of the Atlas myth, Weight (2005).

The Gap of Time, Winterson’s latest novel, is also a cover version of a famous classic, no other than Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It is the first book in a series launched in October last year which aims to reimagine Shakespearean works for our generation. Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name was published last month. Upcoming titles include such promising treats as Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest, or Gillian Flynn’s version of Hamlet.

One does not have to be a Shakespeare buff to enjoy The Gap of Time. For those unfamiliar with The Winter’s Tale, the original is summarised in the beginning of the book. But Winterson’s brilliant interpretation is self-reliant and can be read independently.

“The story has to start somewhere”, but not necessarily at the beginning. The Gap of Time begins in the middle: Shep, a jazz bar owner, and his son Clo witness a murder. At the same time, they discover a little girl “as light as a star” in a baby hatch of a hospital nearby. Because the child reawakens Shep’s belief in love, which he lost when his beloved wife died of cancer, he decides to adopt her.

The story moves back in time to when the ruthless businessman Leo accuses his wife pregnant wife MiMi of having an affair with their best friend Xeno, and of carrying his child. Although both deny the accusation vehemently, Leo attempts to kill Xeno and refuses to acknowledge his daughter when she is born. His rampant jealousy results in a tragedy which leaves no one unscathed.

Years later, fate leads two young people to fall into love, but their respective family histories might ruin their chance at happiness. With great emotional and psychological depth, Winterson’s tale examines the notions of family and what it means to love, “to know something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.” She exposes the foolishness of taking love for granted and allowing chances at redemption to slip us by.

As Winterson writes in the end, the reason Shakespeare endures is because stories of revenge, tragedy and forgiveness are universal. This superb twenty-first century retelling speaks straight to our contemporary, post-Freudian consciousness and touches our ancient hearts which continue longing for the recognition of the magic they are capable of.

The Gap of Time

by Jeanette Winterson

Hogarth Shakespeare, 2015

Review first published in the Cape Times, 1 April 2016.

 

Book mark: The Chameleon House by Melissa de Villiers

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The Chameleon HouseMelissa de Villiers was born in Grahamstown and educated at Rhodes, but she is a citizen of the world. She lives in Singapore, travels widely, and often returns to South Africa. The nine stories in her debut The Chameleon House are informed by migrations. The concept of home is interrogated, as is contemporary South Africa and its difficult past, “old ways unextinguished and forever edging forward, smudging boundaries”. A woman inherits her grandfather’s weekend house and with it the question of ownership. Another is the victim of sly abuse. An illicit couple is caught up in a blackout. Lust and power mingle with loneliness, an “emptiness – desolate and cold – that would claim her should her hold on him flicker and fail.” Loyalties are tested when four friends sharing a house in London unwittingly harbour a traitor among them. This is powerful storytelling from a writer to watch.

The Chameleon House

by Melissa de Villiers

Modjaji, 2015

First published in the Cape Times, 25 March 2016.

Book mark: Unsettled and Other Stories by Sandra Hill

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UnSettledThe feeling one is left with after reading Sandra Hill’s debut story collection Unsettled is reflected in the title of the book. Hill paints vivid portraits of what it means to be a woman in different places and times. It is a finely layered picture of the everyday and the unusual. The mother of one of the characters insists that one should read poetry “slowly, expectantly, the way you eat oysters”, as the “magic…comes after you swallow.” Although every story is a fully contained piece, read together, they acquire that magic of swallowing oysters. Saturated with local flavours, settings, history, Unsettled offers evocative, intimate glimpses of women’s lives – their dreams, desires, worries and regrets – many readers will find uncannily familiar, sometimes perhaps difficult to acknowledge: “Life can take us away from where we belong, but we don’t lose the longing for it… If we are lucky we get to make our way back.”

Unsettled and Other Stories

by Sandra Hill

Modjaji, 2015

First published in the Cape Times, 25 March 2016.

Review: Stations – Stories by Nick Mulgrew

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StationsIt’s difficult to believe that this is only Nick Mulgrew’s debut collection of stories. Stations reads like the work of a seasoned writer. Here is someone with acuity and a perfectly pitched voice. Not surprisingly, his writing is already highly acclaimed.

As the title suggest, the individual pieces in the book take their cue from the Stations of the Cross, in which Jesus’s last steps before crucifixion are commemorated. The dialogue between the structural skeleton of the book and each tale is striking. “Athlone Towers”, the volume’s first story, or “stop on a slow road to purgatory” as the spine of the book professes, uses the powerful image of the demolition of the famous Capetonian landmark to portray the demise of a relationship. At the same time it echoes Jesus’s condemnation to death. In the fourth “stop” of the book, “Ponta do Ouro”, a young man accompanies his mother on a fraught Christmas holiday to Mozambique. His parents are in the middle of a divorce. The corresponding station reflects Jesus’s encounter with his own mother shortly before his death. In “Restaurant”, a hopeful entrepreneur has to close down her restaurant. Her suffering mirrors Jesus’s death on the cross. In all of the stories, the devotional references are very subtle but enrich the reading substantially.

The way the stories engage with their religious context reminded me of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue, the Polish director’s ten films based on the Ten Commandments. What captures the reader’s imagination is the way the teachings are translated into a modern, often secular, narrative that we can all relate to.

Mulgrew’s characters are in transit, on the verge of a discovery or transformation. His stories are set around South Africa and beyond, even in the afterlife. The titular story takes us on a trip through the purgatory, which is reimagined as an alternative version of the Cape Peninsula: “Everything was familiar, but not familiar enough to be comforting… My heart dropped. This place had a geography that had to be relearned.” It is one of the most profound readings of the tensions and dilemmas of present-day Mother City. “Mr Dias”, “Posman”, or “Die Biblioteek vir Blindes”, also grapple with contemporary issues such as racism, affirmative action, or intolerance, but are more preachy and a slightly less successful.

The stories which spoke to me best were of intimate nature, focusing on topics close to the heart: rites of passage, grief, revenge, sexuality, or relationships between siblings, lovers and strangers. It is in these spaces that Mulgrew connects with the reader most poignantly, describing what might otherwise go unnoticed: “You lean to kiss me between the back of my ear and the top of my neck; in that place that doesn’t have a name.”

Mulgrew and I co-edited a book of African short stories. Watching him as an editor was a fascinating experience. His fine-tuned sensitivity and attention to detail are exceptional. He is also a fine poet, a true language practitioner. These talents reverberate in the arresting prose of Stations.

Stations: Stories

by Nick Mulgrew

David Philip, 2016

Review first published in the Cape Times on 18 March 2016.

Review: Mongrel – Essays by William Dicey

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Mongrel EssaysThere is nothing quite as satisfying as an excellent personal essay, and William Dicey’s Mongrel contains six gems of the genre. Dicey has been on my literary radar for a while now. In the past decade, whenever I found myself admiring a beautifully designed local book, Dicey’s name would often feature on the copyright page. His first book, Borderline (2004), a travel memoir about canoeing on the Orange River, is one of those titles readers remember fondly whenever mentioned, but apparently, it is out of print. Fortunately, I found a copy in our library. I have been meaning to read it for years, and Mongrel has finally made me realise that I need to succumb to the longing.

The essay collection opens with four epigraphs which already warn us that what lies ahead will not be as clear-cut as one might assume.

Allow me to quote a few snippets:

– “Fiction, nonfiction – the two are bleeding into each other all the time …” (Geoff Dyer).

– “The writer getting in the way of the story is the story, is the best story, is the only story” (David Shields).

And my favourite:

– “[T]he strays of literature have tended towards the ill-defined plot of the essay” (Hugh Walker).

The tone of the essays ranges from intimate through personal, playful, or analytical, to simply bizarre. The latter becomes immediately obvious when you consider the title of the first piece in the collection, “Miss Meat Festival”, and its first sentence: “Hannes Rheeder, I love you like a fish parcel.”

Dicey and his friend Justin are travelling north to the Hantam Meat Festival in Calvinia, an “annual celebration of mutton and lamb”…

Continue reading: LitNet

Review: Reacher Said Nothing – Lee Child and the Making of Make Me by Andy Martin

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Reacher Said NothingMany of my friends will know this story: last year, after my husband died, reading became one of my grief’s casualties. For weeks, I struggled to open a book. That changed when I turned to Lee Child’s Killing Floor. It was just the right kind of light but intelligent and thrilling entertainment that I needed to get hooked on reading again. In the following nine months, I read all other nineteen novels in the Jack Reacher series, and many others.

Having become such a passionate fan, I was excited to find out about Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me. The author, the Cambridge academic Andy Martin, asked Child whether he could shadow him during his writing of Make Me, the twentieth and latest Reacher novel. He was keen to observe and record Child’s creative process as it happened, proposing “a kind of literary criticism but in the moment, in real time, rather than picking it up afterwards…trying to capture the very moment of creation…you would have someone (i.e. me) looking over your shoulder as you are typing the words.” Five days before the first word of Make Me appeared on Child’s computer screen, he agreed to the literary adventure.

Reacher Said Nothing not only takes us behind the scenes of Make Me’s genesis, but Child’s entire career. It goes back to 1994 and the day when Child bought the paper and pencil with which he wrote Killing Floor, the first in the bestselling series. He now writes on a computer, eating quite a lot of junk food and drinking ridiculous amounts of coffee. With Martin there, literally on the couch behind him, Child attempts to verbalise what happens when a writer picks up a pen, or keyboard, and begins dreaming. In this respect it is as much a book for readers as for writers. When writing, Child thinks like a reader; that’s his thing. But there is no magic formula. Only a lot of doubt, hard work (each Reacher is about 100 000 or more words long), and when you are lucky, a good story to tell. Millions of devoted fans across the world can testify that Child knows how to pick them.

Andy Martin also has a great story to tell. Reacher Said Nothing reads like a thriller. Like a master of the genre, Martin builds up the tension to the moment when Child sits down to write the first sentence. From there, he continues about the power of storytelling – the written word’s extraordinary potentials for both, writers and readers.

“He would have been good around the campfire, Lee – he would definitely make you forget about the wolves or the saber-tooth”, Martin writes. But it’s not only the engrossing plot. One of the things that immediately struck me about Child’s writing is a captivating attention to stylistic details such as word choice, syntax, punctuation – a kind of poetry that I now realise is fully conscious, intentional. “It all mattered, linguistically”, Martin writes. It’s about noticing things. And to see the process unfold is fascinating. Child writes only one draft, but the meticulousness with which he constructs the narrative allows him to.

Martin also accompanies Child to literary events, signings and interviews. He speaks to his fans. They spend a lot of leisure time together, watching football or meeting friends for dinner. I loved the humour of Reacher Said Nothing, the banter between the two authors, and Martin’s often hilarious commentary. An early scene: “‘It’s reverse Freudian,’ Lee said. ‘You’re on the couch and you are analysing me.’ I said nothing. He flexed his fingers. ‘Naturally I’m going to start, like all good writers, by…checking my email!’”

Martin and his subject surface from Reacher Said Nothing as two people who are really passionate about what they are doing, are prepared to work their fingers to the bone in pursuit of their visions, and know how to have fun while doing it: “I live in a permanent daydream. I get paid to daydream narratives”, Child says. Reading the book one is inspired, but also reminded that writing is laborious.

Child’s relationship with his fictional character Jack Reacher is most intriguing, and strangely comforting. Anyone who has non-existent people occupying their heads knows what it’s like. Fiction is a thrill, and all of us, readers and writers alike, are junkies. Together with Martin, Child attempts to unravel the two-decade-old mystery behind his character’s worldwide appeal to men and women alike.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Reacher Said Nothing sparked a craze among authors wanting to have a meta-book written about the creation of their own novels in real time as they emerge on the page. It might become a genre in its own right, but Martin’s and Child’s example will be hard to equal or top.

Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me

by Andy Martin

Bantam Press, 2015

Review first published in the Cape Times on 11 March 2016.

Book review: I’m Travelling Alone by Samuel Bjørk

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TravellingAloneDespite my irredeemable addiction to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, I do not often turn to thrillers or crime fiction for entertainment. But Night School, the next Reacher adventure, is coming out only in September, and since the nights are getting longer, it is nice to have a few good stand-ins in the meantime. Locally, I really enjoyed the recently published Sweet Paradise by Joanne Hichens: tight plotting, great writing, a scary villainess, and a heroine with balls. It surprised me, and that is a quality I truly appreciate in genre fiction.

I remember picking up Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing and realising how it would end just after a hundred pages. For the rest of the book, I had hoped the author would astonish me, but he didn’t. That kind of disappointment is not easily forgiven. But Scandinavian crime and thriller authors have been making huge waves on the international literary scene in the last decade or so. I devoured Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and like millions of readers around the world could not get enough of its intriguing main characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.

It seems that there is a new kid on the Scandinavian crime block, Samuel Bjørk (pen name of the Norwegian writer and musician Frode Sander Øien). His I’m Travelling Alone is making international headlines, reaching the prestigious German magazine Der Spiegel’s number one bestselling spot and selling TV series rights to ITV. It comes with a quote on the cover, warning his compatriot Jo Nesbø to “watch out”. Being unfamiliar with Nesbø’s work, I cannot compare, but judged solely on its own terms, I’m Travelling Alone is a spine-chilling, page-turning novel.

In 2006, a baby disappears from the maternity unit of Ringerike Hospital in Hønefoss in the south of Norway. Half a dozen years later, a six-year-old girl is found dead hanging from a tree. Dressed like a doll with an airline tag which reads “I’m travelling alone” around her neck, the girl is soon believed to be the first victim of a serial killer about to strike again. A race against time begins. Holger Munch is put in charge of finding and bringing the killer to justice. Despite, or precisely because of, being the typical middle-aged, overweight, chain-smoking, sadly divorced, veteran police investigator, Holger is instantly endearing. As is his partner, the deeply disturbed but fascinating, thirty-something Mia Krüger.

In the beginning of the book, Mia is living in complete solitude on an island, drugged and drunk, mourning her beloved sister and awaiting her own death. It takes some persuading from Holger to sway her to postpone her suicide in order to help him solve the case. They both have a troubled past to atone for, and have no clue how it is about to surface to haunt them.

The next girl is found murdered and two more go missing. But then the ruthless killer changes his (or her? the police are uncertain) MO and contacts a journalist writing for a daily, placing him and his editorial team in front of an impossible choice: Who dies next? And when Mia and Holger discover that the next intended victim is someone they both know and care about, the urgency to track down the perpetrator intensifies unbearably. The hunt leads them to a mysterious sect and an old-age home where Holger’s mother lives. What at first seems a dead end reveals itself as a deadly possibility. And the murderer is always a step ahead.

The two investigators, the police squad, and family and friends around them are all well-drawn characters one takes immediate interest in and liking to. They propel the story forward. Additionally, to a certain extent, I’m Travelling Alone felt like armchair travel. I have a very soft spot for Norway, having travelled the country, loved its landscape, read some of its brilliant classics, and made a few Norwegian friends for life. I actually visited some of the places mentioned in the novel, have experienced the weather and tasted the food. Reading all the everyday details of the characters’ lives has brought back many great memories. I couldn’t resist and had some herring again while reading.

I was spellbound almost to the end. However, the last twenty pages let me down. To be honest, I am not sure that I understood how all the puzzle pieces of the story fit together or whether the author managed to tie up all the loose ends, yet it somehow did not matter. I found the ride as far as the last four or five chapters exhilarating and the strangely abrupt ending did not spoil the fun. I sincerely hope that Mia and Holger will return and I look forward to the next Samuel Bjørk crime novel with great anticipation.

Review first published in the Cape Times, 4 March 2016.

I’m Travelling Alone

by Samuel Bjørk

Doubleday, 2016

 

 

Book review: Letters of Stone – From Nazi Germany to South Africa by Steven Robins

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Letters of StoneReading about the Holocaust is never easy. Facing its terrible truths, especially when your own family is involved, is heroic.

Anthropologist Steven Robins had no inkling of what he would unearth when he embarked on a quest to discover more about the three women in an old photograph that had sat in his childhood home for years. He was born in 1959 in Port Elizabeth. He and his brother Michael grew up oblivious to their Polish and German ancestry and to the fates of their father’s relatives during the Third Reich.

The journey Robins takes in Letters of Stone connects “different times and places”. It is a journey that took nearly three decades to complete – between the time Robins interviewed his father in Port Elizabeth in 1989 and the publication of this astounding book. To begin with, Robins had very little to go on. But a series of uncanny coincidences led him further into the labyrinth of the private history of his family, and beyond.

Continue reading: LitNet

The Grandfather Clock

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The Grandfather Clock

The clockmaker came out only at night. He arrived at the young widow’s house shortly after half-past eight. Books and remnants of a simple dinner lay across the table in the sitting room where the grandfather clock had been standing silent for a year. The woman pointed at the ancient instrument in the corner and folded her hands in front of her as if in prayer.

‘Sorry for your loss,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

In the silence that followed, she could feel her heart galloping in her chest.

‘How long has it been now?’

‘A year, today.’

‘Ah. I’m sorry.’

They stood facing each other as time passed in slow motion.

‘So, what would you like me to do?’

She had summoned him earlier in the day, the explanation for the call vague. Something about an anniversary.

‘My husband had always taken care of it. It stopped when he died,’ she said.

‘So there’s nothing wrong with it? You just want me to get it going again?’

‘Yes.’ A prayer. ‘And please teach me how to keep it working.’

He nodded and opened his tool box, trying to concentrate on the task ahead instead of the woman beside him, tense like a coiled spring.

As the clockmaker set to work, she stepped back, watching from a distance. He asked about the key. She did not know what he meant, but eventually remembered the small black handle her husband had used to wind the clock. She was surprised how easy it was to keep the mechanism running.

‘It should be fine for a while,’ the man explained, turning the clock’s hands to the correct time, ‘but I’ll have to take it in for proper servicing soon.’

The clock chimed for the first time in a year. It took all her strength to keep her composure. Time stood still.

 

Before he left, she asked, ‘Tell me, do you think it’s true what they say, about your whole life flashing before you when you are about to die?’

‘I am not sure, dear,’ he said, reverting to the familiar address, not knowing how else to comfort the young woman.

He refused to take money from her. ‘Next time, when I service it properly,’ he said.

She thanked the clockmaker and gently closed the door after bidding him a good night. Alone, she leaned her head against the passage wall and cried.

The clock chimed nine. She counted the heartbeats and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. She walked over to the grandfather clock. It towered above her in the silence of the night. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The stories of a long-lost friend returning home. She listened to the soothing whispers of its hands telling her about the future. They reminded her of violin music announcing a new dawn.