Archive for the ‘Feature’ Category
by Amanda on Jan 6th, 2012
Kathryn White has written a guest post for David Chislett’s blog, offering a glimpse into her writing process. During the effort that brought us her new novel, Things I Thought I Knew, White says she found her characters doing unpredictable things, but learned to “let them do what they want”.
White finds interest in the way that tweaking the imaginary world can lead to the a disruption of the “natural order”, creating drama out of a simple detail – “like the lions that roam the streets after Caeser is murdered”:
This morning I dreamt that a friend and I lived in a marble palace in Paris. To get there you had to walk under a canopy of buildings that crowded into a cobbled passage. The marble was smooth to the touch and warm, like only white marble can be. The surfaces were soft and shined. We lived there, but it was open day and so we joined the people who walked around, moving from one magnificent room to the next. In one room I stopped and looked out and saw acres of green lawn and fountains, a pale blue sky above.
I think this might be where my ideas come from. Not a white, marble palace in particular, but a world that is entirely created, without my input. I am serious about the acquisition of thoughts and ideas – I make sure that my brain is constantly fed and stimulated – but once the acquisition has taken place I trust the ideas will melt into my subconscious and un-conscience. Once there, I have no control over the amalgamation process.
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by Amanda on Nov 29th, 2011
The November issue of Elle features an exclusive short story by Henrietta Rose-Innes, who released her third novel, Nineveh, earlier this year. We first spotted this story while rifling through the very magazine but the nimble Rose-Innes beat us to a blog post with this one.
I’m curious about people in cars. In traffic, I watch them through back windscreens or in my rear-view mirror, doing what people do when they think they’re unobserved: singing, picking noses, gaping at the world. I like to see a driver and passenger, laughing across the space between them. It’s an intimate view, a conversation framed. The travellers are focused on each other or on the road ahead: they don’t feel my eyes sneaking up from behind to touch the backs of their necks.
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by Amanda on Nov 1st, 2011
Below we bring you a second report from the launch of The Tempest Prognosticator by Isobel Dixon at Melville’s Love Books. You can read our original coverage of the event online here.
Katrien Potgieter reflects on the “classy and intimate” affair:
The affair was classy and intimate, with Love Books’ owner and old varsity friend of Dixon’s, Kate Rogan, opening the evening’s events after 60 minutes of live whale song (appropriately and purposefully chosen, I was soon to discover).
Having Dixon present to read from her own work was quite something, as the literary agent from Cambridge has been busy promoting South African writers in London and selling rights all over the world. She started by stating that the tricky title serves to lure the unsuspecting reader into an all-too-familiar world, one that many modern urbanites might have started to drift away from. In this world, nature’s inhabitants and artistic representatives come together as Dixon cleverly and carefully draws on personal and intertextual webs of reference to tell all sorts of revelatory and celebratory tales. As any tale starts with a solid and captivating beginning, our introduction into the a collection must be centred on the question: what or who is a ‘tempest prognosticator’? By asking this question, we are doing exactly what Dixon wants us to; we are engaging with her text in an immediate and personal manner, right from the start. I was interested to find that a tempest prognosticator is a 19th century invention by George Merryweather, in which leeches are used in a barometer to warn of approaching stormy weather. The Leech Barometer (as it was also known) worked on the principle that 12 leeches, kept in glass jars inside the device, became agitated by approaching stormy weather and would attempt to climb out of the jars, triggering a small hammer, which would, in turn, strike a bell. The likelihood of a storm was indicated by the number of times the bell was struck. The title also refers to a poem in which Dixon performs her seemingly effortless craft of overlapping and intersecting modes of being. The natural and the social, the familiar and the strange, the real and the surreal all become interwoven into a rich textual fabric that is complex and compelling, yet striking and simple. This, I would venture to say, is one of the most striking features of Dixon’s writing.
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by Amanda on Oct 28th, 2011
In a cerebrally stimulating interview with LitNet’s Bibi Slippers, Leon de Kock deconstructs the themes and undercurrents in his latest novel, Bad Sex, of which the initial print run has nearly sold-out. De Kock discusses the politics of sexual exchange and the various meanings behind his book’s title – from the operational definition (as in, “that was really kak sex”), to the theoretical (“the moral problematisation of pleasure”).
De Kocks says he thinks an understanding of sexual politics is vital for human relationships. He says “without good, real, strong intersubjectivity, we’re basically fucked”:
At the launch of Bad Sex at the Open Book Festival, Ashraf Jamal referred to the sensuality of your work, as opposed to the “sexlessness” he perceives in English literature in South Africa. Are you deliberately writing in against the grain of this “sexless” literature, or is this sensuality something inherent in your writing?
I hesitate to use the word “deliberate”. All I know is that when I found myself writing this kind of voice into this particular space of human engagement I realised that there wasn’t a lot of it in South African literature. I must say, though, that just about all Nadine Gordimer’s serious fiction deals substantially with sexual leverage between consenting adults, except that her political disposition means she uses the sexual negotiation as a set of signifiers for real-world political orientations. My work declines that gesture, and sees sexual politics as sexual politics, period, situated within the immediate, embodied psycho-sexual-political domain, which I regard as vital for intersubjective human congress. And without good, real, strong intersubjectivity, we’re basically fucked. (We could also discuss JM Coetzee in terms of sexual politics – see especially Disgrace – that would open up a very large area for further discussion.)
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by Amanda on Oct 26th, 2011
Crime writer Jassy Mackenzie spoke to East Coast Radio about her latest book, Worst Case, and plans for her next Jade de Jong thriller, Pale Horses. Mackenzie says a great thriller involves “a fast-moving, relevant plot, an engaging theme, intriguing characters, adrenaline-packed action and the inclusion of interesting facts and details.”:
Being a KZN girl, I thoroughly enjoyed reading such a fantastic thriller based in my part of the world! You wrote very knowledgably about St Lucia. That must have taken a great deal of research?
It did! Writing a convincing thriller is all about research and balancing – making the story convincing and the setting authentic while including fictional elements that do not exist in the real St Lucia and Richards Bay. It is the small details that make the difference and I was particularly fascinated by the amazing story of Huberta the hippo.
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by Amanda on Oct 13th, 2011
London – BlackBerry users across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas were hit with service disruptions to their smartphones for a third day after an unexplained glitch cut off internet and messaging services for large numbers of users around the world.
In South Africa, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout called a press conference to address the crisis which was attended by journalists, all with paper notebooks and pens in hand. The prominent ex-diplomat and social lubricatress reacted with barely concealed glee: “I’m not saying I told you so, as such, but I told you so.”
Mrs Bezuidenhout was referring to her recently published journal Evita’s BlackBessie, a wonderfully colourful depository of common sense, practical wisdom and empty pages where you can enter your contact numbers and other vital networking details where they cannot be wiped out when the magnetic field misbehaves or somebody trips over the wire of some supercomputer.
This book, one of the authoress’s best-selling to date, was published partly for the money to sustain the lifestyle to which Mrs Bezuidenhout has become accustomed as the most famous white woman in Africa, and partly out of compassion with humanity. Evita, who passed Science with a “D” symbol at Bethlehem High, knew that one blast from the sun and all electronic communication would break down.
Evita’s BlackBessie is also available in Afrikaans as Evita se BlackBessie – but NOT in electronic format.
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Since Tuesday, Tannie Evita has been issuing gentle reminders to her followers on Twitter that those who own Evita’s BlackBessie are having “the last laugh”:
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by Amanda on Oct 6th, 2011
In an interview with Diane de Beer, a shy Piet Byleveld reveals his surprise at becoming a household name in South Africa, aided now in part by the success of Hanlie Retief’s biography, Piet Byleveld: Dossier of a Serial Sleuth. Byleveld attributes most of his success as a cop to “old-fashioned police work”, saying he begins every case at the source – by investigating the victim:
How many of us know a cop’s name? Not in the sense of neighbourhood, but famous. When reading Hanlie Retief’s account of Piet Byleveld’s life aptly titled Byleveld – Dossier of a Serial Sleuth, one realises he is probably our only well-known cop in the sense that no one wonders who you’re talking about when you say his name.
“It’s not as if I was out there looking for publicity,” says the almost shy sleuth as we meet at a Pretoria News/WritersSpeak event last week at which he was the guest speaker. In fact, much of Byleveld’s life has been spent zooming in on one crime or another, with very little time or space for any real life.
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by Amanda on Sep 20th, 2011
In the following interview, Diane Awerbuck speaks to Something Wicked‘s Joe Vaz about winning the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for her debut novel, Gardening at Night, and her decision to follow it with a short story collection, Cabin Fever.
Awerbuck says that “short stories feel truer, somehow”, as you can capture “these intense, illuminated moments” more accurately in the shorter form. However, she admits that her next book will be a novel.
You were one of the first South African writers to submit a short story to Something Wicked (back in 2006). I remember how blown away we were by “Entanglement”a (a reworked version of which is in Cabin Fever). Can you tell us a little about the origin of that story?
When I first wrote it, I had just been to the ossuary in Kotna Hora, as well as a pop-up Banksy exhibition in someone’s garage in London. The ossuary was as it appears in the story: thousands of skeletons dismembered and rearranged in this impeccably styled and often quite funny way. The monk who had begun the work clearly had a sense of humour – which you need when you deal with real death, the real ending of things (as opposed to Emo), the end of the world that turns out not to be as final as they said.
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by Amanda on Aug 19th, 2011
In an interview with Foyles, Alastair Bruce discusses the influences behind his novel, Wall of Days, which recently appeared on the Guardian‘s “Not the Booker Prize” longlist and has been scheduled for publication in the UK. Bruce reveals that he developed the story’s themes of silence and isolation in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His fascination with the discovery of the Tollund Man and other “bog bodies” also came into play:
What was the starting point for the development of the story?
A long time ago I wrote a short story about a man living in a cave. One day he spies another approaching across the desert floor below. The man does not speak and his silence creates unease in the cave dweller. The story ends with the killing of the cave dweller by the stranger.
When writing the novel I developed the story’s themes and ideas around silence and isolation and probed further the question of why both of these men found themselves in such an isolated place. When I started the novel, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission was winding down and the country was grappling with collective historical guilt and forgiveness and that’s reflected in the novel.
Another influence was that I was fascinated by the Tollund Man and discoveries of other ‘bog bodies’. The way they are perfectly preserved by nature over thousands of years and the debates over how some of them met their ends is intriguing.
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by Amanda on Aug 15th, 2011
Books LIVE recently caught up with two of South Africa’s most vibrant authors, Diane Awerbuck and Henrietta Rose-Innes, to steal a look at their latest works.
In the following videos, Awerbuck reads from the short story “The Extra Lesson” out of her collection, Cabin Fever, and Rose-Innes reads from her brand new novel, Nineveh.
A prize to anyone who can better Rose-Innes’ use of “gecko ejaculate” in a sentence…
Diane Awerbuck reads from Cabin Fever:
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Henrietta Rose-Innes reads from Nineveh:
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