by Jani on September 3rd, 2010
There are many names for the “sacred nether region” of women. Maritze Breitenbach decieded to de-mystify the topic somewhat with her book The Cookie Book: Unveiling the Women’s Secret. Oliver Roberts spotted an opportunity and read the book, discovering things teenage boys surely wish they knew. It took a second glance to realise what was what though:
“When it first arrived on my desk, I believed it to be a recipe book punctuated with stylised pictures of flowers and strangely shaped vegetables. Do not be fooled as I was. Philosophical, humorous and sometimes grimacingly clinical (I grieved over the chapter entitled Vaginal Infections), it’s a tome that admirably attempts to unravel and ponder the history, impact and beauty of the vagina.”
Here’s Roberts’ review of The Cookie Book:
It’s a complex thing, the vagina. At least that’s what I’ve heard. It’s delicate and unpredictable and requires all kinds of maintenance and check-ups and you have to be mindful of it before you enjoy something as simple as a bubble bath.
Imagine, then, how intricate an object the vagina is for someone who doesn’t own one. It can be intimidating at times. All those folds and layers. There are hidden spots inside, too, that are so embellished by mythology and magazine columns written by gynaecologists named Electra that you’re half excited/half afraid about what will happen to the woman in front of you should you actually find one of them.
Book details
Image courtesy the Sunday Times
» read article by Jani on September 3rd, 2010
Verdict: stick en stokkie
THERE are many ways to polarise a country, and the work of André Brink may well be one of them: those who “get” it, and those who don’t. His latest trilogy of novellas, Other Lives, first published in Afrikaans in 2008, and now on the shelves in English, is surely a case in point.
Since the demise of apartheid, his work has swung toward mythography, and with Other Lives, set in present-day Cape Town, he infiltrates magical realism and phantasmagoria. In itself, this would be a welcome development, but he doesn’t use them to explore new themes, but rather locks himself into another genre knocking on the same divisive doors of race and gender.
The book is billed as “a novel in three parts”, but it would be more accurate to call Other Lives an anthology of paranormal tales, yoked together by theme and characters but in dire need of an overarching design.
The first novella, The Blue Door, features David, an amateur painter who hides from his wife, Lydia, in a not-so-secret studio in Green Point. One afternoon David pops down to Giovanni’s delicatessen to pick up supplies. When he arrives back at the blue door to the studio, he is embraced by a woman, “dark of complexion”, whom he has never met, but is by all accounts his wife and the mother of his two children.
Despite not having a clue what is happening to him, David pursues her physically, and a cringe-worthy sex scene follows. An attempt to find his “real” wife, Lydia, at their Claremont apartment becomes an Escher-ish nightmare that has David trapped in a building with no exits.
He and Lydia are meant to be entertaining the building’s architect and his wife, Steve and Carla, that evening, and here starts the first transmission between the novellas: Steve is the protagonist in the next story. Here also starts one of the reasons this book falls short. Brink introduces irony, coincidence and an intriguing element of psychopathy in all of the novellas, but fails to bring any of it to a dénouement.
A line from The Blue Door, part of David’s reflections on his failure to make good on a previous adulterous entanglement with “a meid”, as his then wife refers to her, aptly describes the predicament of the book: “I had made a move, but not far enough. I had never arrived ‘on the other side’ of whatever it might have been.”
Mirror, the second of the series, is the most frustrating of the three. In a bizarrerie that sees white architect Steve wake up black one morning, Steve undergoes a transformation presumably intended as parody, but the opportunity to smile never presents itself.
No one but a bergie, and his children’s German au pair, seems to notice that Steve is now a black man and the metamorphosis seems to be mainly in his mind. No problem so far. But Steve hasn’t been black for a day before he is consumed with rage, as if he has been persecuted his entire life, sexually attacking the au pair after she tells him: “Your skin. I like how it feel, how it look.”
“If this is what you’re after, this is what you’re going to get. F***ing little white bitch”, Steve thinks to himself. In a scene that should probably not be reprinted here, Brink employs the fatal tradition of stereotyping, insulting black men, Germans and women in one fell swoop. The black man is a furious rapist, the German au pair has a proclivity for black men, and actually enjoys the ordeal, reviving the myth of black men as predators and women as wanton scrubbers.
Later that evening, Steve and his wife, Carla (who is also apparently a frustrated nymphomaniac waiting to prey on like-minded men), are dining out when the restaurant is besieged by gun-toting robbers and the diners locked in a storeroom. Carla, apparently for the first time, notices her husband is black and implores him to reason with the bandits: “You’re one of them. If there’s anybody here they may listen to, it’s you.”
Also at the restaurant that night is musically and sexually frustrated Derek, and the object of his desire, soprano Nina, who has so damaged her previous lovers she now refuses any. This provides the link to the final narrative: Appassionata.
Saturated in pretentious conceits of art, music and wine, Appassionata is an overloaded cliché that cranks up the sex but thankfully gives racial contemplation a breather. Despite Nina’s warning that she has been “consorting with ghosts”, Derek is desperate with desire for her and this brings the conclusion to a climax in a most unusual way.
Other Lives is a lumpy porridge – too much starch and no milk, sugar or butter. Ultimately, you can eat it but it is likely to give you indigestion. Had it been published a decade ago, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so tiring and so testing.
- This review first appeared in the Cape Times and is reprinted with permission
~ ~ ~
Die tweede resensie deur Marius Crous is in Afrikaans:
Sedert sy debuut in die 1950’s publiseer André Brink feitlik elke twee jaar ’n nuwe roman en dié roman word dan ook in Engels vertaal en oorsee versprei.
Die Afrikaanse voorganger van die roman onder bespreking het in 2008 as Ander lewens verskyn.
Die eerste deel van die roman wat hier aangebied word, The Blue Door / Die blou deur is ook apart uitgegee.
Book Details
» read article by Jani on September 3rd, 2010
Uitspraak: wortel
Hier is ’n besonder opwindende en boeiende boek, een wat beur teen voorspelbaarheid, sê Thys Human.
Die debatte en doemprofesieë wat van tyd tot tyd oor die sogenaamde “nuwe stemme” in die Afrikaanse letterkunde opklink, berus dikwels op die (aanvegbare) aanname dat slegs jong stemme in aanmerking geneem moet word.
Met sy debuutroman, Die begunstigde, bewys Dirk Winterbach (76) dat ’n mens beslis nie jonk hoef te wees om as ’n nuwe stem gereken te word nie. Op behendige wyse slaag hy daarin om vir hom ’n baie unieke plek in die Afrikaanse prosa oop te skryf.
Koerantberigte rondom die verskyning van DJ Winterbach se debuutroman, Die begunstig de, het ons vertel dat hy ’n neef van die bekroonde roman skrywer Ingrid Winterbach is en ’n geoloog van opleiding wat vantevore al toneel stukke en poësie geskryf het.
Belangriker as hierdie ge gewens is egter die roman self wat vertel wat gebeur wanneer die mens verhinder word om die donker kant van sy of haar psige te erken.
Die roman se ryk ver wy sings veld word alreeds gesugge reer deur die Griekse titels gegee aan elkeen van die ses afdelings.
Boekbesonderhede
» read article by Jani on September 3rd, 2010
Uitspraak: wortel
DIE uitreiking van ’n debuutbundel is ’n besonderse oomblik. Dit is wanneer die digter die eerste keer sy/haar verskyning maak en wys watter bydrae daar binne ’n kanon gemaak kan word. Dikwels kan ’n mens terugskouend al die temas terugvind in die debuut wanneer ’n digter verder ontwikkel.
Melt Myburgh se Oewerbestaan is ’n bundel wat die jeug in ’n gerepresseerde en rassistiese bestaan sinkopeer met die leefwêreld van Lorca. Dit is uiteraard ’n ambisieuse opset, juis omdat Lorca so ’n groot digter is. Die besoek aan Lorca se leefwêreld in die Andalusiese dorp Fuente Vaqueros in Granada is die oerbron waaruit ander gedigte waaier.
Lorca was ’n komplekse figuur en hy is veral binne die gay wêreld ’n ikoniese figuur. Die digter is wel bewus van hierdie problematiek, want hy vra: “hoe skryf ek, dierbare frederik, hiérdie landskap vir jou oop // sonder om reëlreg my eie graf in te loop?” (16)
Boekbesonderhede
» read article by Jani on September 2nd, 2010
Verdict: stick for the Guardian First Book Prize longlistee
Nadifa Mohamed’s ambitious first novel tells the story of a Somali orphan’s odyssey from Yemen to Djibouti, onward to Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, Marseille, Hamburg and Wales — and ultimately to an epiphany in London. Toward the end of this trek, the hero meets up with an old friend, with whom he competes “over who had walked the farthest, starved the longest, felt the most hopeless; they were athletes in the hard-luck Olympics.” Earlier, at a bus stop in Gaza, the hero comes across someone who is everything he doesn’t want to be: Musa the Drunk, a homeless Somali man, “the poster boy of failed migration.” Both moments reveal the weaknesses in this young novelist’s phenomenal, fast- forward story.
Book Details
» read article by Jani on September 1st, 2010
Verdict: carrots from the UK for the book that VS Naipaul was writing, apparently, when he visited SA.
In 2001, when the Swedish Academy awarded Sir Vidia Naipaul the Nobel prize in literature, it described him as the heir to Joseph Conrad: “The annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings… the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.” There are plenty who would have begged to disagree, for Naipaul has regularly attracted criticism, from Edward Said among others, for his dismissive remarks on the cultures of his native Trinidad, on Islam, Pakistan and more.
The Masque of Africa is his latest – quite likely last – full-length work of non-fiction. It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the “heart of darkness” mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad’s best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as “toxic”.
V S Naipaul’s father was once forced to sacrifice a goat to the Hindu goddess Kali. In June 1933, when Vidia was still a baby, Seepersad Naipaul had written an article in the Trinidad Guardian criticising Hindu farmers who ignored government regulations and inoculated their cattle with religious rites.
His angry opponents threatened him with a poisoning curse unless he appeased the goddess. He refused at first but soon relented: wearing trousers rather than the traditional loincloth (his small rebellion), he offered up a severed goat’s head on a brass plate.
Book Details
» read article by Jani on September 1st, 2010
Verdict: carrot
The irrepressible Tony Sutton, a Brit in Canada via South Africa, an eternally optimistic socialist and one of the globe’s great magazine and newspaper designers also publishes the online mag coldtype.net.
As proof that print isn’t dead, Tony occasionally bangs out the best of his contributors and colleagues in the printed form which is how I had the great pleasure of reading Radical Middle, Denis Beckett’s account (and, yes, he is related to THE Beckett) of setting up a radical magazine in South Africa as the apartheid regime was going full tilt at the ANC.
A dreadful title but a wonderful read. The sub-title is barely better: ‘Chasing Peace while Apartheid Ruled’ but it does get to the nub of Beckett’s mission: to change South African society through a hard-hitting, news-sharp magazine which provided a platform for all sides while promoting the then outlandish notion of ‘one-man-one-vote’. Funny, how many people in the publishing world are driven by goals way, way beyond pounds, shillings and pence. Or rand for that matter. Which was just as well for Frontline publisher and founder Denis Beckett — Tony did the groundbreaking layout to match the iconoclastic message of the mag — as this labour of love rarely broke even.
Book Details
» read article
Feed
