The versatile American artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a literary legend. For his hundredth birthday last year, Faber & Faber published a beautiful hardback edition of his latest work, a memoir in verse titled Little Boy. The cover and the first few pages lured me in at the bookshop; I couldn’t wait to take it home.
Unfortunately, after the enticing lyrical beginning, the book descends into a mostly opaque and often unpalatable dissection of the writer’s life, his troubled home country, and human experience as a whole that would need months of research to be properly understood. An enterprise that is contrary to Ferlinghetti’s self-proclaimed desire for accessibility, and I suspect that the attempt would feel like a waste of time in the end. Which is a great pity, because there are passage in the book that testify to the possibilities of Ferlinghetti’s talent and vision: “And looking back over the lost terrain the great / misrememberer with myopic vision sees only himself / in the shorn landscape of half-overturned vehicles / of desire and misread signs at country crossroads / pointing different directions …”.
If only such lines could have been rescued from the rest of the book. It might be Ferlinghetti’s last, but Little Boy will not diminish his significant contribution to all the arts he made his own. Gems like these will continue to shine: “it is the time of final reckoning of the / never-ending end of night to get real after a / lifetime of illusion and evasion …”.
Little Boy
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Faber & Faber, 2019
Review first published in the Cape Times on 24 January 2020.
There are numerous writers out there who understand the complexity of the present. Many can also clearly convey their insights. But few do it as strikingly as Rebecca Solnit. I have discovered her work only recently, but have read and loved all the books she has authored by now. Her latest is another intellectual delight.
For obvious reasons, I chose to speak about a few of the women in my life who shaped my creativity and were instrumental in paving my way towards a career in writing, editing and publishing. It was impossible to honour all of them in a short time, but these are the women who featured in my talk yesterday: my grandmother, Babcia Marysia, and my Mom, both of them nurtured my creativity in indirect but significant ways; Mrs Nellie Fahy, the librarian who awakened my passion for reading; Nadine Gordimer, whose writing brought me to South Africa for the first time; Maureen Isaacson, who first gave me the opportunity to hone my craft as a book reviewer when she was book page editor of the Sunday Independent; Lyndall Gordon, whose work and friendship showed me how to continue being a writer in the world when I was doubting that I could; Rachel Zadok, who believed in me as an editor and through work kept me sane when my world lost nearly all connection to sanity; and Joanne Hichens, who was a stranger when I asked her to visit me in an hour of utter despair nearly five years ago, but we became friends and are now co-editors of an anthology of short stories we published together: HAIR: Weaving and Unpicking Stories of Identity.
During the book club reviewing session, I also briefly spoke about the book I had finished reading that morning: Desiree-Anne Martin’s remarkable 
When a doctor pushed a shunt into her “unborn baby’s thorax to save his life from a deadly condition called hydrops”, Olivia Gordon and her husband had no way of knowing what other challenges would await them and their son before or after his birth.
The first in the Intimate Geographies series, Cape Town: A Place Between by Henry Trotter is a thought-provoking, genre-crossing book that will intrigue locals and foreigners alike. Incorporating elements of memoir, guide book, socio-political history and travelogue, Trotter tells a compelling story and captures the essence of what makes the Mother City so irresistible on the one hand, and so impossible to grasp on the other.
Whether it is ABBA, Pippi Longstocking, Scandi noir, Swedish massage, Volvo or IKEA furniture, these famous Swedish exports usually evoke positive connotations. We often associate Scandinavian countries in general and Sweden in particular with innovative ideas and socio-political stability. Award-winning Swedish author, Elisabeth Åsbrink, decided to test these assumptions about her country and ask herself the following questions: What are the real Swedish values? Who is the real Swedish model?
Friends Neha, Devon, Shejal, Janine and Kumari live in the Indian suburb of Lenasia and spend a lot of time together. It is the early 90s, just before the first democratic election in South Africa. The country is preparing for change when the teenagers witness a terrible crime on one of their outings in the township. Their sense of belonging and identity is shaken as they embark on the rough path to adulthood after this lethal incident. Alongside them, South Africa is also trying to come into its own. This is the premise of Nedine Moonsamy’s beautifully crafted debut novel, The Unfamous Five. Although clearly echoing Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five novel series, Moonsamy makes this story completely local and her own.
“Whoever heard of a group of people marching from place to place with a dead body?” It is precisely such a journey that is at the centre of Petina Gappah’s latest novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light. Two decades in the making, the book tells the story of the sixty-nine men and women who decided to carry the body of Bwana Daudi – the Scottish physician and explorer David Livingstone – across the African continent after his death, so that his remains could be interred in his own country.
There is nothing to be done. We are coming too late to the party, allowing doom and gloom to persist. It’s easier to remain in a state of stupor than to take up the torch of an eco-warrior. Looking around, you will be forgiven for thinking that the war is already lost anyway. And there is no doubt about it: we are the bad guys on the wrong side of history. We are destroying our environments with ignorant dedication at a mind-boggling speed. The results are undeniable and crushing.
Karina Magdalena 