Category Archives: What I’ve Read

Review: Sea Star Summer by Sally Partridge

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The award-winning YA author, Sally Partridge, has been writing about the trials and turbulences of growing up since her debut novel, The Goblet Club, in 2007.

Partridge’s latest novel for young adults, Sea Star Summer, is her seventh and tells the story of the sixteen-year-old Naomi on holiday with her parents in Jeffreys Bay, where all she wants to do is enjoy some solitude and read good books. Yet, a dashing but dubious local surfer, another unusual and wonderful holidaymaker called Elize, and her intriguing brother, have other plans in store for Naomi. There is nothing more magical than falling in love for the first time. Equally magical can be reading about it in a novel when the book manages to capture, as Sea Star Summer does, that unforgettable and intoxicating mixture of wonder, revelation, anxiety and possibility that is young love.

“There’s only one person out there, a dark-haired girl about my age, kicking her feet through the incoming tide. The way she’s laughing and shrieking, clearly in a world of her own, makes it look like she’s having a great time. I envy her lack of inhibition. If it was me, I’d be worried about who’s watching.” This is how Naomi first encounters Elize. Meeting her sets in motion a chain of events and discoveries that allows Naomi not only to find herself and what she wants, but also to find the courage to proclaim it, even if only softly, to the world.

“Even the sea and sky seem larger, more real than before, like I’ve been walking around half asleep this whole time and have only just woken up.” The sea moods and beach adventures of Jeffreys Bay are vividly portrayed in this sensitive and empowering story that will appeal to young people and those young at heart alike.

Sea Star Summer

Sally Partridge

Human & Rousseau, 2020

Review first published in the Cape Times on 14 August 2020.

Review: Leaving Word by Steven Boykey Sidley

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As Steven Boykey Sidley says in the acknowledgments of his latest novel, Leaving Word, it is true that “writing a book with a fiction editor as its main protagonist is asking for trouble, on many levels”. Writing a book about the publishing industry as a whole might be asking for even more trouble. But, if anyone can pull it off with aplomb, it is Sidley. And Leaving Word, his fifth novel, is a rollicking read because of it…

Continue reading: LitNet

Leaving Word
Steven Boykey Sidley
MF Books, 2019

189

Review: A Poor Season for Whales by Michiel Heyns

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42It is a poor season for just about everything, but not for reading if you can manage to keep enough headspace intact to engage and enjoy it. And the latest novel by Michiel Heyns, his ninth, is pure literary delight. “Margaret Crowley, handsome, clever, rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly fifty-six years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. It was therefore hardly to be foreseen that in her fifty-sixth year she would kill a man with a kitchen knife.”

And so begins A Poor Season for Whales, taking you straight to the heart of the “last outpost of the white middle classes”, Hermanus, where Margaret Crowley has moved after an amicable divorce to start a new life away from her usual social circles in Cape Town. One day, while she is walking her dog Benjy, her canine companion gets into trouble and is rescued by Jimmy, a mysterious stranger, who takes an unsettling interest in Margaret and her life.

At first grateful for his assistance, ambivalent about her own reactions to the young man, Margaret cautiously allows Jimmy into her home, while he does everything he can to become indispensable to her. Her friends and her grown-up children are not impressed, and there are moments when she also suspects ulterior motives, but Jimmy intrigues her beyond the initial hesitation. And when her ex-housekeeper, Rebecca, demands her assistance in providing her with a home, and her over-the-top sister-in-law decides to descend on Margaret and her children for Christmas, Margret does not feel that she has a choice but to allow Jimmy to help her handle the situation.

As you joyously and nervously turn the pages of A Poor Season for Whales, the question throughout persists, of course, about who is going to end up with a kitchen knife in his back, especially after the said knife appears on the set like a Chekhov’s gun. The title suggests that whales might also make an unexpected appearance. Or not.

The plot is carried by pitch-perfect dialogue. Imagine Jane Austen meets Before Sunrise and Heyns’s own A Sportful Malice. The running socio-political commentary felt spot-on. Heyns has a beautifully wry sense of humour and I found myself laughing out loud every few pages. After Jimmy’s condemnation of Margaret’s cooking skills, I might never be able to allow iceberg lettuce into my kitchen.

On a more serious note, the novel also reminded me of The Talented Mr Ripley and perhaps a lesser known but stunning novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, Falling. The way Heyns depicts the relationship dynamics in his novel made me think – with discomfort – about a few people in my life who have the tendency to push one into previously unimagined corners and get away with it. But a kitchen knife is seldom an option.

A Poor Season for Whales

by Michiel Heyns (2020)

Review first appeared in the Cape Times on 15 May 2020.

Review: Three Bodies by NR Brodie

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Three BodiesThe second Reshma Patel and Ian Jack thriller by NR Brodie, Three Bodies, is here and, if you enjoyed the first one as much as I did, you can get excited. Yes, it’s also available as an ebook and Brodie has announced on social media that she will be donating all her royalties from the sales during the lockdown to the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce supporting sex workers in this time of crisis when they are at risk more than ever.

In Three Bodies, the risk to the three women who are discovered dead in different bodies of water around Gauteng comes from a dark source. At first, the cases seem unrelated and, when Ian Jack comes across the first one during an investigation in which he helps to trace a security guard gone missing, and his partner Reshma Patel discovers a severed finger and a stash of money and guns next to two corpses deep underground in Johannesburg’s tunnels while also pursuing a missing person case, they find it difficult to connect the dots. Both finds are accidental, but Reshma’s has immediate consequences for her career when she takes a bold step behind her superior’s back and contacts another unit to investigate the gruesome crime scene she stumbles upon.

As in Knucklebone, the first book in the series, Brodie offers a cast of fascinating characters. Is Myburgh, the ex-cop turned head of security for a group of housing estates, past his best? Despite his impeccable credentials, can Super Sobukwe be trusted after it comes to light that he might have put Reshma and her new colleague, Wayde Claassen, carelessly in lethal danger? And who is the fierce Angela de Bruyn from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin trying to protect? Do mermaids exist?

It was good to see MaRejoice from Knucklebone return with all her wisdom and intuition. And Joburg is there in all its gore, grit and glory again. Having written a lot of non-fiction about South African cities, Brodie knows a thing or two about how to portray a metropolis like Johannesburg with aplomb. There were a few descriptive passages of characters’ comings and goings when the writing slowed down to a pace that reduced the impact of the narrative, but the vivid cash-in-transit heist scenes and the final showdown of the novel made up for a lot in the page-turning department.

Knucklebone does not have to be read before you can dive into Three Bodies, yet the private and professional relationships between Reshma and Ian are better understood if you know how they have developed since the spectacular ending of Brodie’s debut novel. The magic realism elements of the first book are toned down in the latest, but are used to a great effect towards the end of the novel, allowing us to wonder at the reality we think we know.

Three Bodies

NR Brodie

Macmillan, 2020

Review first published in the Cape Times on 8 May 2020.

Review: I Wish I’d Said…Vol. 2 edited by Johann de Lange and Mandla Maphumulo

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I Wish I'd Said

‘…A similar sentiment is captured in two exquisite lines of “Two images, after a call” by Nick Mulgrew: “The gentle go gentle. Even in daydreams you cannot wound,/ more the way you left your book unread; cold tea on the table.” The same way these images of loss spoke directly to my innermost thoughts and feelings, there will be numerous others that each individual reader will find touching. Across the different languages, the poems illuminate the universality of grief. And we live in a time of worldwide loss, not only because of the threat to the welfare of the people we know and love, but because our entire way of being is changing on a seismic scale as we enter a period of global transformation and have to cope with the grief that goes with the gradual vanishing of security and vision.

A broken tree, a pillar falling, a mountain collapsing, loved ones going to sleep – these are metaphors often referring to our demise; a “human library” departing features in “It’s time” by Moses Seletisha (second place winner in Sepedi), and life is described as a “paper fire” in “That’s life, my child” by Nolusindiso Mali (original in Xhosa). I suspect that a lot of the beauty of many of the poems’ original rhythms and imagery is lost in translation, but numerous sparks of uniqueness shine through the layers of various languages, as in this delicate line: “Sleep when wounded and accept,” with which Neliswa “Sange.M” Sampi-Mxunyelwa ends the fourth-place contribution in the Xhosa category…’

To read the entire review, please see: LitNet

I Wish I'd Said_excerpt

I Wish I’d Said … Vol. 2

Edited by Johann de Lange and Mandla Maphumulo

Naledi, 2019

Review: The Upside of Down – How Chaos and Uncertainty Breed Opportunity in South Africa by Bruce Whitfield

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bruce-whitfield-the-upside-of-down

I’d never thought that a radio show about business news could be of personal interest to me, but I have been enjoying Bruce Whitfield’s clear and accessible Money Show for a few years now. Whitfield’s The Upside of Down is the last book I bought at a bookshop before the lockdown, but it is also available as an ebook. Although written just before the pandemic hit South Africa’s shores, it is an astoundingly fitting and inspiring read for our terrifying times.

The title alone already feels like a reassurance. The same clarity with which Whitfield presents his show can be found in his writing. One doesn’t have to be an economic and political fundi to follow the arguments presented in The Upside of Down. And after failing miserably at the quiz included in the first chapter of the book, I happily absorbed the knowledge and ideas that followed.

There is no way of assessing our current economic situation without wanting to weep, and Whitfield presents us with a sober picture after the looting of the Zuma decade, but he steers his readers towards the positive stories of entrepreneurs, big and small, succeeding against all odds. These are extremely empowering. He also outlines the basic traits that visionaries and companies require to thrive in an unstable environment as well as what socio-economic factors could contribute to stabilising it in order for the desperately-needed growth to follow and employment figures to increase.

Opportunities arrive all the time but, because of a persistent atmosphere of doom and gloom, not enough of us dare to dream. Whitfield understand the power of storytelling in channelling positive energies towards turning those visions into reality: “It’s in the very crisis in which South Africa finds itself today that there lies an enormous opportunity for renewal, growth and optimism.”

The Upside of Down: How Chaos and Uncertainty Breed Opportunity in South Africa

Bruce Whitfield

Macmillan, 2020

First published in the Cape Times on 24 April 2020.

PS This is Salieri, taking the title seriously and seeing the world from a different perspective.

108

Review: J.M. Coetzee – Photographs from Boyhood, edited and introduced by Herman Wittenberg

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JM Coetzee Photographs from Boyhood

“What struck me most about the book is that along with the aspiring artist’s curiosity and professionalism, it conveys, perhaps even unintentionally, a certain kind of vulnerability that probably should have been but wasn’t immediately obvious in my thinking about the author and his writing. This is a young man who was still searching for his medium of expression, watching – often unbeknown to his subjects – and recording them in a soul-searching, piercing, yet seemingly detached manner that reflects later in his writing. And this is a boy trying to define for himself what it means to be a man in the world.”

To read the entire review, click here: LitNet

J.M. Coetzee: Photographs from Boyhood

Edited and introduced by Herman Wittenberg

Protea Book House, 2020

Review: South African Writing in Transition, edited by Rita Barnard and Andrew van der Vlies

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South African Writing in TransitionIt has been a while since I’ve read, edited or contributed to an anthology of theoretical essays on South African literature. But, occasionally, I still have academic longings; therefore, I approached South African Writing in Transition, edited by Rita Barnard and Andrew van der Vlies, with great anticipation, and found the collection most engrossing. The individual contributions focus on a fascinating and relevant selection of primary sources, mostly novels and short stories, reaching as far back as Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930) and incorporating contemporary texts into the diverse readings of the South African literary canon. The work of other South African literary greats – Njabulo S Ndebele, Zakes Mda, Mongane Wally Serote, Nadine Gordimer, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavić among them – is discussed along with an array of new, equally exciting voices, exposing striking continuities and departures.

By its very nature, theoretical writing takes time to compose and publish. South African Writing in Transition is the result of several international conferences which took place between 2012 and 2017 in South Africa and overseas. Most contributors are not based locally, which perhaps limits the scope of the inquiry as a whole, but the collection testifies to South African literature’s continuous appeal to international scholars. Also, the anthology’s topics are pertinent to our present in highly productive and sometimes uncanny ways. As Barnard writes in the introduction to the book: “[I]t is now time to consider the many loops and twists, the stasis and acceleration, the paralysis and hope of postapartheid experience.” We find ourselves in an unprecedented global reality in which the interest in world literature, its contributions and theories, will become more significant than ever, and understanding the South African experience, past and present, socio-historical and literary, as part of it could be of notable value.

Continue reading: LitNet

Review: Notre-Dame – A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals by Ken Follett

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Notre-Dame“Something priceless was dying in front of our eyes. The feeling was bewildering, as if the earth was shaking”, writes Ken Follett about watching the Notre-Dame Cathedral burning on 15 April last year. Not an expert on cathedrals, but known across the world for his The Pillars of the Earth, a novel about the construction of a cathedral for which he did an enormous amount of research, he became the media’s go-to person for commentary about the Notre-Dame fire and, together with his French publisher, decided to write Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals to support the reconstruction efforts of the architectural treasure after the catastrophe. All the royalties generated by the book go to the charity La Fondation du Patrimoine.

Follett’s brief account of Notre-Dame’s eight-centuries-long existence is informative and touching. “Notre-Dame had always seemed eternal, and the medieval builders certainly thought it would last until the Judgement Day; but suddenly we saw that it could be destroyed”, he writes in the opening pages of the book. The history of this popular site of pilgrimage is astounding. “How did such majestic beauty arise out of the violence and filth of the Middle Ages?” Follett asks and illuminates the cathedral’s many wonders. It was built before standardised measurements, modern mathematics, efficient tools, and with hardly any safety regulations. Women and foreigners played vital roles in the construction – it was an international effort of note. And literature – novels like Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) – spread the building’s fame across the world. In 1944, it was the backdrop of a “masterpiece of political theatre” as General de Gaulle ended a victory march at the cathedral.

The slim, beautifully produced book conveys Follett’s passion for the subject matter and explains why so many of us wept when we saw Our Lady of Paris burning.

Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals

Ken Follett

Macmillan, 2019

Review first published in the Cape Times on 27 March 2020.

Review: The Book of Gifts by Craig Higginson

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The Book of GiftsAs readers, we turn to specific authors when we don’t want to be disappointed. The internationally acclaimed writer, Craig Higginson, has become one of these for me. His latest novel, The Book of Gifts, is another gem in his impressive oeuvre. It begins with a family trip to uMhlanga Rocks and radiates from this particular moment into the past and the future, gradually piecing together the puzzle of the intricate – often toxic – relationships that play out during the holiday in KwaZulu-Natal. At the centre of the unfolding story and the complex familial constellation are the two half-sisters, Emma and Jennifer. Emma is a successful sculptor and mother to Julian, at the time of the holiday an eleven-year-old boy who falls in love for the first time with an enthralling, slightly older Clare. Jennifer is a teacher at Julian’s school back in Johannesburg where they all live, and wife to Andrew, a psychologist struggling to find his professional and personal bearing.

“A gift is never a destination in itself,” Andrew tells one of his patients, “but a means to an end – a stepping stone towards somewhere else.” Every chapter of The Book of Gifts is told from the perspective of one of the main characters and contains a mention of a gift that one of them gives to another with diverse intentions and consequences. The gift that stands out throughout is the one of life, whether it is the life a parent gives to their child or the life that an artist gives to their creation. Emma continues asking herself whether she is capable of managing both these callings, as a mother and as a creative person, and experiences guilt that allows a potentially lethal gift, “the poisoned apple”, to threaten her and her son’s well-being.

In a world where everyone has a secret and integrity is torn apart by betrayals, the gift of truth has the biblical potential to set one free, but speaking up takes courage. When Julian ends up in a comma after a mysterious fall, the adults in his life have to dig deep in order to comprehend – and perhaps finally accept – their responsibilities towards the conflicted young man and towards one another. But not all of them are ready for the effort involved.

Higginson explores how an act of creation can also reshape reality in order to reveal or disguise culpability, which adds another fascinating dimension to The Book of Gifts that made me reconsider my own understanding of the relationship between truth and storytelling. This finely layered, mesmerising novel will cement Higginson’s position as one of the most gifted – yes, that word again – writers in South Africa and beyond. His ability to shine a light into the darkest places of the human heart and confronting them with empathy is remarkable: “This is where life begins, he thinks, as he takes another step into the dark.”

The Book of Gifts

Craig Higginson

Picador Africa, 2020

Review first published in the Cape Time on 20 February 2020.