I welcome every Susan Fletcher novel with open arms. Let Me Tell You About a Man I Knew is her sixth. It completely delivers on the promise of its predecessors. Set in the Provencal town of Saint-Rémy where Vincent van Gogh spent a year of his life in an asylum and painted some of his most widely recognised works, the novel tells the story of a local woman whose life is disrupted by the arrival of the Dutch painter. Jeanne Trabuc is the wife of the asylum’s warden. In her fifties, a mother of three, she goes about her daily routines, remembering her adventurous youth and watching out for the mistral, “wind of change, of shallow sleep.”
Something about her husband’s latest patient unsettles Jeanne. Her curiosity about the man who is known for having harmed himself and for having appeared naked in public leads Jeanne to break her husband’s rules about not visiting the asylum or engaging with any of its patients. She goes to meet the fascinating stranger and a tentative friendship develops between them. Jeanne makes it possible for Vincent to leave the asylum to paint: “And he walks, Jeanne thinks, as reapers walk back from their trees: a sense of a day’s work done. And does he glance at the white-painted cottage as he goes? Jeanne likes to think he does. A glance, as if in gratitude. This newly untethered bird of blue overalls and gold.” She recognises his talent, believes in his sanity. He in turn reawakens her senses and long forgotten dreams.
Jeanne thinks of her grown-up sons who are making a way in the world for themselves and her friend Laure whose desire for freedom had led her to abandon her husband. She recalls the crippled woman who took care of her when Jeanne’s mother died after giving birth to her. And her loving father whom Jeanne nursed towards the end of his life after he’d suffered a stroke.
As a young woman, Jeanne had “been bold, reckless. Not caring for rules.” She’d once stood half-naked in the yard, “her wet hair, like a wing”, and understood the freedom and power of such exposure. Now, her body ageing, her marriage empty of tenderness, she realises that there is still something that she wants from fate, and it is not what she has, “a little life of washtubs and duty.”
Let Me Tell You About a Man I Knew is a story about change and courage, about breaking silences and not being afraid to reach out for what we expect from the people we share our existence with. Fletcher’s portrayal of Jeanne’s awakening is subtle and profoundly moving.
Fletcher’s prose is mesmerising, seductive. There is no other way of putting it. She paints emotions with sensitive strokes, but in bold colours. As she caresses language, words glow under her pen. Her work is full of light and nuance. Let Me Tell You About a Man I Knew is a joy.
Review first published in the Cape Times, 19 August 2016.
Throughout the years, few oeuvres have enriched my intellectual life as much as the works of the Welsh philosopher Mark Rowlands. At some stage, we are all confronted with the question of what makes life worthwhile, how to make the time we have on this planet meaningful. Unfortunately, not enough of us ask how to live in such a way as not only to enjoy the journey, but simultaneously do as little harm as possible to our fellow travellers, whether they be other humans, animals or the environment. We all muddle on. Rowlands does not claim to have the answers, but his attempts at approaching possible conclusions are fascinating to engage with.
It is December 1907 in Tsau, Bechuanaland, after the Herero and Namaqua genocide perpetrated by the Germans occupying German South-West Africa, today’s Namibia. The Herero couple Tjipuka and Ruhapo have survived “the scattering”, but lost nearly everything in the process. When we first encounter them, they are together, but terrifyingly estranged. Tjipuka traces her husband’s body, trying to remember all that she’d loved about it, but the memories are overshadowed by his distance and the blood and cruelty of lies which haunt them: “Being dead made a lot of things uncertain.”
Neighbours: a word loaded with connotations. The biblical instruction of “love thy neighbour”, Verwoerd’s “policy of good neighbourliness”, Robert Frost’s “good fences make good neighbours”, and the usual neighbourly mistrust, animosity, even prejudice come to mind. Yewande Omotoso quotes Simone Weil for her epigraph: “The wall is the thing which separates them, but it is also their means of communication.”
The title of Nthikeng Mohlele’s fourth novel delivers on its promise. Pleasure is a mesmerising, unusual book. At times I was hesitant to call it a novel. The story of Milton Mohlele, his dreams and musings, which he attempts to distil into writing, reads like a meditation. As literary history echoes in his name, Milton could be an alter ego for most writers seeking to find not only meaning but pleasure in the written word – to capture that elusive something which makes us sigh deeply with content when, if ever, we truly encounter it.
Reading dead authors is not unusual, but opening the late Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air feels different. He wrote it knowing he was dying and it was published by his widow a year after his death. The immediacy of the knowledge is uncannily palpable. For me, the experience was even more intimate on two different levels. Firstly, I also had a cancer scare recently and Kalanithi was my age when he died. In retrospect, his memoir made me count my blessings, again, as I am healthy and have escaped with just a fright. Secondly, like me, as a young person he struggled to choose between two vocations: medicine and literature. Unlike me though, he chose medicine. But literary longings had never left him and when life became unbearable, like many of us he found some amount of solace in the written word.
Every new book by Niq Mhlongo is literature to my ears. His three novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004), After Tears (2007) and 
The 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.
Karina Magdalena 