A tenuous grasp on reality: All My Friends by Marie NDiaye

Oh my.

I was looking for a short story collection, something that might fit neatly into the Women in Translation theme that is guiding the reading of many of my fellow bloggers this month. Having heard so much about French author Marie NDiaye I decided to have a look at her collection All My Friends. What I found was a portal to a bizarre, surreal, mildly horrific literary Twilight Zone. If you like your stories neat and clear cut this is territory best avoided. If you enjoy challenging tales peopled by troubled characters who stretch the boundaries of reality, fueled by obsessions, fantasies and psychoses, well, step right in.

All My FriendsThe final heartbreaking, but relatively straight forward story, is very short. The four stories that proceed it are long, convoluted and slippery. The reader really has to surrender him or herself to the experience, to the strangeness and stunning evocative beauty of the language. After finishing this slim volume I had a glance at a number of other reviews and was surprised how differently others saw or interpreted the stories. And perhaps that is the ultimate power of this collection.

The title tale, “All My Friends” is narrated by a school teacher whose wife and children have left him. He leaves his house like a museum and hires a former student, Séverine, to work as his maid. His attraction to her is complex, a curious blend of obsession and loathing that extends back to the days when, as a beautiful student, she resisted his charms and his efforts to impart knowledge on her. She is, however, married to another former student, an unassuming Arab that the teacher can barely remember. And then, to add to this peculiar triangle (quadrangle?) is Werner, yet another former student from the same cohort who went to Paris to better himself and returns, wealthy and well educated, to win Séverine’s love. Complicated? Definitely, especially because, so far as I could tell, Séverine herself is portrayed as a rather cold, obstinate creature and it is hard to imagine what sort of appeal she holds over all the men who are drawn to her.

Two of the stories revolve around celebrity. In “The Death of Claude François”, the passing of a famed singer devastates the women of a housing project. As the story opens, Dr Zaka meets her former best friend, Marlène Vador, after a 30 year separation. Marlène has remained on the project, nursing it seems, an undying love for the long dead hero. Dr Zaka never shared the depth of that affection:

“How ridiculous, she told herself, all that sniveling, all that sweat, all that sorrow simply because a man has died, a perfect stranger to every one of the women on the lawn, although dearer to their wanting hearts than the many children they’d borne, than the husband who had begotten them, whose eyes stayed dry on the death of that luminous, splendid stranger, so French, so blue eyed, so blond-headed.”

However, if the death of the French idol failed to move her, Dr Zaka has conceived a most unusual “gift” for her friend, presumably to make amends for leaving so many years before. In the longest story, “Brulard’s Day”, an overtired, psychotic woman has retreated to a resort town in the mountains. She is clinging to the idea that she was once a famous actress although the true extent of her acting career is not clear. She has left her husband and daughter and is awaiting funds she expects from a mysterious lover. In the meantime she is haunted by visions of her younger self, mortified by the fact that she is reduced to wearing – gasp – loafers and attempting to perform an appearance that befits her image of herself. When her husband appears on the scene it begins to become evident that neither have more than a desperate desire to be more than they are or have ever been.

Finally, the story, “The Boys”, reads like a dystopian tale in which poor rural families seek wealthy women to purchase their sons. A family fortunate to have a son handsome enough to fetch a price as a sex slave will stand to benefit from the income. As the Mour family pass their handsome son on to his fate, René, a poorer boy from a nearby home who picks up odd jobs with the family but is otherwise allowed to disappear into the shadows, watches and comes to decide that he too would like a ticket out.

“He’d always known he could make a gift of himself. Assuming someone would take him, assuming someone was eager to have him, a colorless boy named René, he could subjugate himself to the will of anyone at all. Little matter if he was purchased or picked up for free.”

Tightly paced, haunting and deeply disturbing, this is perhaps the strongest entry in the entire collection.

witmonth15Born in 1967 to a French mother and Senegalese father, NDiaye trained as a linguist at the Sorbonne. She was was playing with form and style at an early age and her first novel was published when she was only 18. In 2013, at the age of 45, she was long listed for the International Booker. This collection was originally published in 2004. The English translation by Jordan Stump was published in 2013 by Two Lines Press.

You can’t go home again : Lost Ground by Michiel Heyns

On one level, Lost Ground sets itself up as a crime novel where the elements of the conventional police procedural are bound with deep echoes of the tensions and realities of the new South Africa. But in the skillful hands of Michiel Heyns it evolves into much more – a heart stopping rush headlong into a series of events that will leave its erstwhile hero irrevocably changed.

lost groundIt is a murder that draws Peter Jacobs, an ex-pat South African, back to his hometown of Alfredville, a sleepy little village in the Little Karoo. A freelance writer living in London, he has been away from his native soil for over 20 years. His father’s British citizenship afforded him the option to pursue studies abroad and thus avoid conscription. What finally draws him back is his writer’s sense of a good story. His own beautiful cousin Desirée has been murdered and her husband, the black police Station Commander, is under arrest. This is, Peter believes, the entry point for an examination of the complicated dynamics of post-Apartheid South Africa and, in his neatly planned agenda, a story that he imagines re-envisioning as a New Yorker friendly exposé drawing allusions to Othello. What it opens, in the end, is far more personal and devastating than he can even begin to imagine when he first returns to his hometown.

It is clear from the beginning that Peter is carrying more baggage than the basic wardrobe he itemizes. James, his partner of five years, a Jamaican actor, has just broken up with him and he is not entirely certain how he feels about it. As he settles into his hotel, old locations and familiar faces naturally trigger memories – of school days, childhood adventures and the awkward fumbling of youth. Then, he discovers that his best friend Bennie is also back in Alfredville. He is now a police officer, temporarily the acting Station Commander,  and married with two children. Their reunion is awkward and tentative at first but it slowly warms, reawakening a flood of memories of a past that Peter believed he had, with time and distance, left behind.

Heyns’ gift for language and dry wit bring a rich and detailed world to life. He deftly captures the village and surrounding farmland wilting under the extremes of summer heat and the distant sensations they evoke:

“I open the door of my room and go out onto the balcony. Victoria Street is empty at this hour, but the sullen air is teeming with the smells of a summer night – exhausted vegetation, wilting flowers, wet soil from the gardens being watered, heated asphalt. The blend hasn’t changed in twenty years. To smell it again is to remember not so much individual incident as the tonal value of those summer nights, the vague ache of an imperfectly articulated desire.”

A wide range of colourful characters and personalities pass through the pages, described with the precise care and attention befitting his detail oriented writer narrator. Some are ghosts from Peter’s past, others, like the elegant black female psychologist who becomes his challenger and confidant and the handsome vet who seems to have cast a spell over the bored housewives of Alfredville are either new or passing through. But it is the nostalgic revisiting of his youth, inseparable from the memories of his friendship with Bennie, that anchors the novel, creating the emotional texture and complexities that will ultimately leave the reader gasping for breath as the end nears.

This was, for me, my first read following a significant health scare. It was everything that I could have hoped for at this moment – a smart, well written and tightly paced story woven with literary allusions, significant observations about the current state of South Africa, telling observations about the risks inherent in returning to the past and an unobtrusive but entertaining gay subtext. By turns humorous, heart breaking and dark it was the perfect prescription.

* Published by Jonathan Ball, Lost Ground is one of Michiel Heyns’ books that is fairly easy to access outside of South Africa, at least through special order distributors.

Easing back into reading

As soon as I was coming around a few days after my recent near death encounter (and I don’t mean that in any mystical tunnel of light sort of way) I told my kids that I wanted them to bring me books. I could barely stay alert long enough to get an entire sentence out but I wanted books. They obliged me. Wisely I asked for one of the few books on my shelves which might count as a mystery – Lost Ground by South African author Michiel Heyns – which has proved to be fine company indeed though I have only been able to read attentively for a few days now. They also brought along one of my endless stream of incoming purchases, a gem from Twisted Spoon chosen for Women in Translation Month – Primeval and Other Times by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. A surreal and fantastic work it looks good but I may have to push it a little further down the month. Reading is tough work after cardiac arrest. Go figure.

Now that I am at home, facing three blood tests each week and a host of other medical appointments all over the city when I have been told I can’t drive for 6 months, I find myself reading and re-reading my discharge report. I am living on warfarin – rat poison – afraid of bleeding too much or worse, clotting too easily and having a stroke. The devious little pulmonary embolism that triggered this whole adventure (a likely souvenir of a hellish 24 hours of flight time packed tightly into 28 hours on my recent return from Cape Town) is still sitting in my lung and will, they say, eventually be absorbed. My left leg is swollen and bruised due to a hematoma, a probable complication of the resuscitation process. I watch people jogging by outside on this hot summer day and feel like some sort of Frankenstein creature, dragging this heavy black and blue leg around.

Even though my friends have been amazing – I had a steady stream of visitors throughout my hospital stay and have no shortage of offers for rides around town – I feel a despair settling in. I don’t know where to turn, where to dig into the towers of books surrounding me. I wonder what would have happened had I slipped off this mortal coil two weeks ago. What would my family say about all these books on which I have squandered my limited funds? For heaven’s sake my open shelved coffee table loaded with books and stacks of journals – Granta, Paris Review, Music & Literature – came apart when the paramedics tried to pull it out of the way. I feel overwhelmed rather than excited about diving in to all the new books I have acquired in the past month. I had to buy an extra bag, after all, to get my haul of books home from South Africa and now they too sit on the shelf taunting me.

Will the magic of reading come back with my health?

2015-08-09 17.37.38I have also wondered if this experience is that final kick in the behind that I need to get serious about my own writing. I’m in my mid-50s. I’m not getting younger. Coincidentally while in the hospital I signed my first contract for the publication of an essay in a book coming out next Spring. It is a niche project – a collection aimed at gay, bisexual and transgender men – but my first professional publication credit all the same. So how much life with all its mess, joy and agony does one have to drag his or her sorry self through before there is enough fodder for a story? I wrote throughout my youth, being a writer was always my dream, a strength in every course I completed in university and every job I have ever held. But when it came down to creative writing I always insisted that I had to live a little first.

At this moment I feel that I lived so much that I don’t know where to begin. And now I have almost died too.

One miserably roughed up ghost, rising from the ashes once more

Sometimes you fool yourself. You believe that you are invincible. You know that bad things happen to good people. You know that they have even happened to you. But time and time again we are caught off guard reminded of the wisdom of Monty Python’s idiom: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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Copyright JM Schreiber Storm clouds over the Reservoir, Calgary, AB

If I had had more experience traveling I might not have made the mistakes that may very nearly have cost me my life this past week. I thought that by focusing my first visit to South Africa to longer stays in two areas, I would limit my travel time. But instead I ended up with long plane flights and interminable bus trips. Next time, and I definitely hope there is a next time  – *the hematologist looks at me askance* – I hope to take longer and fly between major centres once I get to South Africa. The buses have a certain charm and I definitely got to meet and talk to people in a way I might not have otherwise, but to top off my three week excursion with a three leg flight home with very short turnarounds was a major miscalculation  on my part. It sounded great. But I had no idea exactly how tight a three hour stop over is, especially if you have to clear customs. Longer stop overs would have helped. Baby asprins, compression stockings. Everyone has recommendations now.

Yet although I was tired and swollen upon my return, it would take a few weeks before my journey caught up with me. Last Sunday night, or rather, early Monday morning, two and half weeks after I returned home, all swelling and fatigue seemingly gone, I suffered a pulmonary embolism. Well actually, it was not clear what had happened at first. I have very little memory of that day or an evening event I had been to with friends. My 25 year-old son, a creative, troubled but wonderful soul, heard me moaning. Thomas came upstairs to find me disoriented. He called Emergency and started chest compressions.

The kid saved my life. In one of those odd ironies, or twists of fate, toward the end of my time away, Thomas had suffered a couple of acute panic attacks so severe that he twice was taken to the hospital. In the second situation he was referred on to a psychiatric nurse he liked and she suggested a 4 week outpatient program he had just started. Mind you my little detour has interrupted  his plans but they will contact him as soon as there is a good point for him to join back in. Me, I will be in the hospital for at least another week, but the more “functional” I am, the more I can spend time reading.

So good with the bad. Who knows? Maybe the two truly are bound more tightly than we realize.

1914 – Goodbye to All That: Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art, Lavinia Greenlaw, ed.

War and conflict are among the most fundamentally human motivations behind our desire to tell and share stories. Religions, mythologies and histories draw on these timeless themes. And, as human history continues to prove that we have not yet managed to learn from the past; conflicts, ongoing or marked with progressive anniversaries, will continue to to inspire artists and storytellers alike.

greenlaw_2985334aThe centenary of the advent of the “War to End All Wars” in 2014 saw a renewed focus on the contemporary writers and poets of WWI as well as a broader assessment from today’s artists of the lasting influence of that critical event on the conflicts that have followed. An interesting contribution to the discussion arrived in the form of 1914 – Goodbye to all That: Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art, a selection of essays edited by Lavinia Greenlaw which was published in the UK last year by Pushkin Press. This collection will see its release in North America on September 1, 2015.

For Greenlaw, the First World War has a resonance that is not tied to a particular time and place but rather stands as touchstone to “reinvigorate questions we should never stop exploring.” With that in mind a variety of writers were invited to offer reflections broadly inspired by the question: “What does it mean to have your life and your identity as an artist shaped by conflict?” To that end, writers from a number of different countries were recruited.

The final compilation is, perhaps inevitably, uneven. However, the strongest entries are startling and have stayed with me long after the reading. The first essay to catch my imagination was, much to my surprise, Daniel Kehlmann’s “A Visit to the Magician”. Having read his F: A Novel with a measure of disappointment, I was drawn into his account of his own attempt to pursue the experience of being hypnotized after this same novel was released. Because a visit to the performance of a hypnotist sets the stage for the events that unfold in F he decided that he ought to have a go at the real thing himself. The exploration of hypnotism leads to an interesting reflection on the mechanisms that may help motivate individuals to rise, against their better angels, to support dictatorships and even march to war.

“(I)t’s nothing more than the most normal effort to be like everyone else, to experience what everyone else experiences, to behave the way authorities want you to behave. And then of course there’s the desire not to do anything wrong in full sight of so many other people.”

For Belgian author Ewrin Mortier and Slovanian poet and writer Aleš Šteger connections are drawn between the First World War and subsequent conflicts, WWII in the first case, the Balkan War in the latter. In “The Community of Sealed Lips: Silence and Writing”, Mortier concerns himself with the silences that remain unspoken, and the way language and lies are employed to negotiate the complicated way that both World Wars divided Belgian communities and families. His essay encompasses the story of his own grandmother and her beloved younger brother containing the painful truth that he would weave into the fabric to his debut novel Marcel. By contrast, Šteger’s tale, “Tea at the Museum” is unsettling and unusual. When Z, a woman he has not seen or heard from in years, calls and suggests that they meet to for tea he cannot imagine why she wants to see him. She is, it seems, keen to apologize for a wrong she swears she has done to him – in a previous life lived during the First World War. The encounter leads him to confront the memories of individuals and of countries, and reflect upon the way poetic imagination is employed to talk about horrors to painful to face directly:

“Only through literature can we realize how impossible it is to have any true insight into the past, any true experience of it, and what’s more we will become part of some equally incomprehensible past.”

Elsewhere, novelist NoViolet Bulawayo writes about the work of writers from her native Zimbabwe who, through their voices raised in protest in the threat of censorship and imprisonment, served to reconnect her to her community from afar, ultimately leading to a focus and theme in her own writing. Her exploration of her own identity in this context serves as a direct and deeply personal tribute to her fellow Zimbabwean artists. Another striking and powerful contribution comes from UK based Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo. Her account of the experiences and often unfortunate end of thousands of Chinese coolies imported like cargo to dig trenches and lay railway tracks along the front toward the end of WWI is at once astonishing and disturbing.

The collection is rounded out by contributions from Ali Smith, Kamila Shamsie, Elif Shafak, Colm Toibin and Jeanette Winterson. What is most interesting is the varied and diverse ways that all of these accomplished writers respond to the theme presented for their consideration. There is plenty of food for thought here.

* Review copy provided by Steerforth Press through NetGalley.

Last season in paradise: Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren

1951. In an apartment on the Rue Delta in Alexandria, a young boy plays a game to wile the hours away, recording and cataloging the makes and license plate numbers of the cars that pass on the street below. Inside, his mother, grandmother and an assortment of matrons gather and gossip over a game of rummy. Tourists flock to the city, to the beaches and warm waters. A rich mixture of languages play across the tongues of residents and visitors alike. But on the ground tensions are building, political frustrations run deep, threatening to fracture the tentative ties that have bound Muslims, Jews and Christians in this cosmopolitan playground. For thousands of families clinging to a fragile petit bourgeois existence, this may be one of the last glorious seasons of romance, horse racing and cool drinks served by discreet and obliging servants.

“True, Alexandria was rotten to the core, but its rot had roots, was saturated in history. Dig deep through the muck and you’ll find the remnants of a crumbling papyrus, or a lock of hair from the shrunken head of a mummy. Something is rotten, truly rotten in the kingdom of Alexandria. That’s why I love her so much, Alexandria. A city that lets you live like a carefree lord without even being rich. Of course you had to be European, or at least Jewish, and of minimal intelligence, and even that wasn’t always a staunch demand.”

GorenFrom the opening pages of Alexandrian Summer, the newly translated novel by Israeli author Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, the author’s deep affection for the city in which he spent the early years of his life is unmistakable. His narrator makes it clear that the story he is about to share is, in fact, his own. He is that 10 year old boy watching the cars pass. But he debates how best to tell the tale, admitting that he is looking back with the perspective and wisdom of an adult. First person, third person, real names, fictitious identites with the standard disclaimer? He opts to shift his focal length, like a photographer adjusting the depth of field of his lens, moving in and out of a series of scenes that collectively recount the visit of the Hamid-Alis, family friends from Cairo, who have come to spend the summer. Young Robby does not know it at the time but by the winter his family will leave for Israel. It is his mature self who is able to look back and sift through the events of his final summer in this magical city. Through Robby and a colourful canvas of characters – immediate family, extended family, friends and neighbours – he unfolds a story that is at once intimate and personal, and part of a broader political sea change.

From the moment that the Hamid-Alis pull up in their Topolino, an aura of glamour descends on the apartment on the Rue Delta. The father Joseph, a small man with his characteristic fez, is a former jockey who tasted fame and glory until the sudden and tragic death of his beloved mare. But rumours persist that, in his Turkish blood is a Muslim past that he abandoned to convert to Judaism when he fell in love with Emilie, his full bodied and patient wife. David Hamid-Ali, their 17 year-old son, is a perfectly pressed and groomed specimen of athleticism, a rising star on the horse racing circuit who has been groomed to take on his father’s sport. But the dedication is dependent on a strict diet to combat the tendency to weight gain inherited from his mother. And the one true desire of his heart, Robby’s older sister, is playing with his emotions. Finally the youngest son, 11 year-old Victor, is overlooked by his parents, subject to frequent pummeling at the hands of his older brother and, thus neglected, he occupies himself by engaging in sexual play with Robby and his friends. By the time they climb back into the Topolino to return to Cairo, the Hamid-Ali family will be reduced, weakened and irrevocably changed. Before long Egypt and Alexandria will also undergo a revolution.

By evoking small snapshots of the emotions, interactions, observations and events of this steamy summer, Gormezano Goren paints a heartbreaking and tender portrait of family dynamics complete with his own “Greek chorus” of rummy playing matrons. At the core of this story is the racetrack rivalry between David and the lightening fast Muslim jockey Al-Tal’ooni. Although he triumphs in the first race of the season, David’s loss in the second begins a series of conflicts between father and son, and spiraling self doubts and depression in the aging Joseph. Against the backdrop of a legendary city at a moment when the life that the Jewish and other European residents is about to unravel and dissolve, this one last summer blends the nostalgia of childhood with the disillusion of age to create a timeless tale, beautiful and sad.

Originally published in Hebrew in 1978, Gormezano Goren worked closely with translator Yardenne Greenspan to prepare this first English edition. In an interesting essay on Lit Hub, he recounts the challenges of preserving the polyglot quality of discourse in Alexandria and the value of being able to revisit the original text after so much time. Alexandrian Summer is published by New Vessel Press.

A Pastoral Dystopia: Trencherman by Eben Venter

“Tears, nearly; heartache that I’m almost able to touch in my chest. Bossieveld stretches around this dorp, as wide as the vulture flies. In rain years the red grass pushes up. The veld surges and flows, with koppies of ironstone and mountains with cliffs where animals find shelter during the cold winters, where ewes search out the warmth of besembos during the lambing season. Elsewhere it breaks open into rivers and streams and vleis full of platannas and bullfrogs and wild geese. But only when the water runs, when the eyes of the springs open. I want to remember it like that one last time.”

I am not typically a fan of post-apocalyptic or dystopian fiction. No matter how intriguing the scenario, I find myself too frequently disappointed with the writing or the realization of the plot, or both. However, when a trusted friend enthusiastically recommended  Trencherman, a harrowing vision of a devastated South Africa by Eben Venter, my interest was piqued in spite of any reservations I might have otherwise held and, quite frankly, I would never have stumbled across this book without her guidance. Even then I was unable to source a copy outside of South Africa so it was high on my wish list for my recent visit to the country. Little could I have appreciated how my experience of this novel would be heightened by the fact that I would read it while my time in the rolling landscape of the Eastern Cape province was still very fresh in my imagination. That is, it happens, where this story is set and, for all the horror it envisions, Trencherman is also very much an evocation to the beauty of the land.

VenterTaking his lead from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Venter imagines his native country at an undefined point in the near future. Years of civil unrest and socio-political upheaval have rocked the nation which never really found its footing. Now a massive explosion in the southern part of the country has destroyed the infrastructure, left a lawless void in which bribes and syndicates are the order (or lack of order) of the day. Drought has wasted the land, AIDS has has devastated the population. Our protagonist, Marlouw (a contraction of his first and last names Martin and Louw) is bachelor living in Melbourne, Australia. Both he and his sister Heleen had rejected the family farm and homeland two decades earlier. Yet for all the financial success afforded by an uninspiring career selling high end cookware, Marlouw is a rather bitter, self-centred man, crippled with a clubfoot. He has never forgiven his parents for failing to secure the surgery that would have corrected the deformity and, despite his denial, the pain and embarrassment of his disability weigh heavily on him. When his sister calls him one night desperately entreating him to return to South Africa in search of her only son, his nephew Koert, who seems to have gone missing in that dark land, Marlouw feels no immediate obligation to assist. When he does finally agree, he tells himself that he is doing so for his own personal reasons. Without fully understanding his motivations he senses that something unfinished lies in the deep recesses of his memory. His journey to unravel his own baggage will nearly cost his sanity.

As soon as he sets foot on South African soil, Marlouw realizes that he has arrived in a country that operates on cryptic and shifting terms. He adopts a heightened almost mystical approach to the task ahead, attempting to open himself to the “guides” that cross his path, but he rocks between selfish irritation and a deepening alienation as his quest proceeds. As a hero he is deeply flawed and deeply human. When he reaches the family farm, the place where he knows that his nephew has taken refuge and built up some manner of hideous power base, he is routinely thwarted in any attempts to make direct contact. The degree to which drought, disease and apparent apathy have wasted the land and the people he once knew is a shock but he is soon swept into their confined and miserable world. Upon his father’s death, he and his sister had passed the once proud farm on to the black families who had worked it for so many years. After twelve generations of Afrikaner ownership, the thirteenth generation had set their sights on foreign shores. But, as Marlouw will soon realize, he still carries a deep ancestral horror in his bones. He will not only have to confront whatever it is that his nephew Koert has come to represent, he will also have to come to terms with his own ghosts.

This is not the first time an author has turned to the Heart of Darkness to explore the dark corners of humanity. The late Canadian author Timothy Findley placed his own Marlow and Kurtz in the halls of a modern psychiatric institution in the startling and disturbing Headhunters. Trencherman skillfully evokes the darkness of the journey Conrad imagined in the depth of another part of Africa and updates it, raising important issues along the way. Venter takes the opportunity to offer harsh indictments on the divisions within his native country, envisioning an outcome that has its roots in a recklessness and disregard for ultimate risks among the privileged classes. This is, of course, a common context of the dystopian novel, but one which is, for me, often too carefully removed or generalized in some abstract future. South Africa offers a more immediate tableau that Venter does not shirk from, perhaps afforded by the fact that he, like his hero, has been living in Australia for several decades. He aims his sights close to home, directly at his own heritage and at the decision he and many other South Africans have made to leave.

Originally published in Afrikaans, the translation by Luke Stubbs is seamless. IsiXhosa passages are incorporated, and unlike some translations specifically aimed at a broader (i.e. US) English speaking market, common South African and Afrikaans expressions and terms are left in tact. A detailed glossary is included. There is a point where the dialogue degenerates into a bastardized English mixed with German that had me curious as to how these passages exist in the original, but that is only because the translation process itself, especially when it is striking and effective, is of particular interest to me. This topic is, I discovered, covered in an interview with the author here.

The memory of a land once rich, the protagonist’s struggle to balance compassion with self preservation, and the truly horrific, yet oddly contemporary spectacle that awaits Marlouw when he finally confronts his nephew combine to create an engrossing read. The closer a reader’s connection to South Africa, the more intensely this book will resonate or push buttons, but even with distance it paints an unsettling portrait.

And so it should.

Note:                                                                                                                                                                         It is my understanding that Trencherman is scheduled to be released in the UK and Australia in 2016. However, my attempts to obtain Venter’s more recent novel Wolf, Wolf which was similarly released earlier this year leads me to believe that rights do not extend to North America. Even so, once there is wider for release for Trencherman outside of South Africa, it will be easier to obtain through UK distributors.

Looking back over my shoulder at three weeks in South Africa

It is coming up on two weeks now since I left South Africa. I was missing the country before I left; I am missing it now. When I passed though customs at the airport the official who stamped my Canadian passport sighed and shook his head. “Everyone is going to Canada these days,” he said. What could I say? Only that morning I had only read a newspaper article about young South African families eager to find a new home abroad – the US, Australia, Canada.

I suppose if I was raising young children in a city where so many single family dwellings have the appearance of bunkers with high walls, spiked gates and coiled razor wire, I too would be looking to distant shores. Over the course of my limited stay in Cape Town I regularly walked between my B&B in Sea Point and the downtown core. The occasional house perched on the slopes of Signal Hill without such enclosures was a source of fascination. What manner of brave or reckless soul lives here?

A sign on a narrow cobblestone street In the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town - Copyright JM Schreiber
A sign on a narrow cobblestone street In the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town
– Copyright JM Schreiber

I can’t say that I felt uncomfortable as I wondered the streets or rode the buses. I did quickly learn to make prudent choices, especially after a couple of unnerving encounters set me off my guard. My bad. I don’t make the same mistake twice. Aside from a night out with a friend in Green Point, my stay in the city was quiet, skirting most of the major tourist sites, sticking to bookstores, museums, galleries. Despite the cool weather tourists flocked to the Waterfront and Table Mountain but no one chanced more than a passing glance while I sat mesmerized by the full 30 minutes of William Kentridge’s installation The Refusal of Time at the South African National Gallery. I seemed to find hollow pockets in the city, safe but open empty spaces. And it felt right. I had come to South Africa, after all, to find myself.

What I found surprised me and is only beginning to take form in my thinking now that I am back home. My interest in South Africa is a curious blend of sociological, historical and literary factors but it has always been mutable and undefined. It just is. It stretches back to the early 1980s when I first encountered South African ex-pats while I was at university, continued forward, from the outside, as the world watched the steady and difficult move to independence. Being able to visit the country and, for the most part, simply talk to people and observe has marked the beginning of a process of reconciliation for myself – on a deeply personal level on the one hand, on a socio-political level on the other.

Eastern Cape morning - Copyright JM Schreiber
Eastern Cape morning
– Copyright JM Schreiber

With respect to the former I will simply say that my decision to actually visit South Africa this year was sudden and born of the intense loneliness that sweeps over me regularly. One day when that wave crashed upon me I stopped and realized that the one person in the world that I really needed and wanted to talk to, the sole person who could understand the strange mixture of illness and queerness that I have been struggling to sort out lately, lives across the globe – in South Africa, Eastern Cape province. And, with some money I had needed to access that was not worth reinvesting at today’s interest rates I had enough to get there. So I went.

Arriving at my friend’s home in a small village perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, I was stunned by the beauty of the unfolding landscape, green flecked with the orange of aloe in bloom, the wide open blue skies, and the crystal brilliance of the waves crashing upon rocky shores. I was at peace. I felt grounded. I felt I had come home to somewhere I had never been. My friend and I settled into a comfortable routine as if we had known each other forever. Although at ease in silence, we never ran short of things to talk about. When it came time for me to prepare to head back to Cape Town, her dog worried after me as I packed my bags in the same way that my own cats had fretted over my suitcases back in Calgary. In a little over a week I had been accepted as family.

Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape - Copyright JM Schreiber
Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape
– Copyright JM Schreiber

Oddly I never felt lonely in South Africa, even though I spent much of my time alone. Strange that that feeling oppresses me in the city that I have lived in or near for most of my life, or this country where I have lived for over five decades. At one time I was immensely proud to be a Canadian but I feel increasingly discouraged and estranged from this land. Oh, of course, it has its beauty and, compared to so much of the world, its benefits are innumerable. But there are concerns, inequities, a steady erosion of freedoms, unresolved historical debts to our First Nations and now a rapidly declining economy against a growing racism and xenophobia to think about.

While I was in South Africa, whenever anyone would ask me where I was from, eyes would light up and I would be met with statements like: “Ah Canada, that’s like the perfect country, isn’t it?” Perhaps I am less than patriotic (which is in itself a rather Canadian thing to be), but I felt it was worth engaging people in honest discussions. After all in early June the final report of our very own Truth and Reconciliation Commission was released. For over 100 years First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were routinely removed from their homes and placed in Residential Schools. The cumulative impact of the abuses, trauma and cultural disintegration has been significant and devastating for Aboriginal communities. If I wanted to engage in conversations about colonial legacies it is not to compare or absolve anyone. But no country is perfect. The question for a citizen is, what am I willing to speak to? I can only speak to my experience in Canada and listen to South Africans. Which is a good start.

Sunset over the Atlantic, Cape Town - Copyright JM Schreiber
Sunset over the Atlantic, Cape Town
– Copyright JM Schreiber

But not even two weeks home and I feel shiftlessness starting to seep in again. On the positive, I returned to the promise that some healthy changes may be emerging in the life of my troubled son, opportunities that might not have arisen had I not put a continent and hemisphere between us. And on my last full day in Cape Town I sat in the Company’s Gardens and finally began to write in earnest in the notebook I had been scribbling in throughout my visit. That has continued. Yet I am aching for that indefinable other that drew me to South Africa in the first place… the landscape, the people, my friend, the oceans.

Yes, the oceans. Landlocked here in a vast country that spans 5½ time zones, it really is little wonder I feel so alone.

Ireland in the imperfect tense – Past Habitual: Stories by Alf MacLochlainn

A short story collection can be a curious beast, for the reader who may have a defined expectation about structure and form and for the reviewer who endeavours to capture the encounter with a writer who embraces and defies form as it pleases him. Having emerged from Past Habitual, the newly released collection of stories by Irish writer Alf MacLochlainn, the most helpful advice I can offer is: prepare to encounter narratives that will, at times, ramble and diverge into detailed accounts of practical matters: the treatment of scarlet fever, the options for constructing toilet facilities, the systemic way to approach the assessment of a corpse, the history and development of the stereoscope and more, but if one surrenders to the voices of the narrators, imagining a story recounted over a pint, such excursions prove remarkably compelling and, more often than not, fall imaginatively within the broader arc of the story unfolding around it.

pastThat is not to say that each of the twelve stories in Past Habitual follows the same formula – far from it. There are more traditional stories – “A stitch in time”, Demolition of a gnome-house”, “Why dd I volunteer to kill the kittens?” – that explore with a striking sensitivity, a budding love affair, a boy’s creation of a cardboard house in the garden as a symbolic retreat from the tensions inside his real house, a young man’s clumsy effort to impress his girlfriend and it’s disastrous outcome. His narratives are, however, frequently more complicated and sometimes very experimental in form and varied in style. Yet his keen ear and eye for the tenderness and brutality of human interaction surfaces throughout.

My preference often favoured the more unconventional narratives such as “Dot-and-carry-on” in which the segments of the story are offered as a series of linked dots connecting scenes like a child’s drawing activity as the narrator ties together key events in his personal and family history reaching back to the Easter Week rising and forward to a curious encounter with a Nazi spy living in the officially neutral Ireland during the Second World War. “Imagined monologues at a college function yield some explanation of the survival of the fittest” is, as the title suggests, a flow of conversational fragments that captures latent biases and prejudices that were not uncommon among mid-century intellectuals.

Born in Dublin in 1926, MacLochlainn was a career librarian. He has published a previous story collection and a novella. His stories extend a broad sweep across 20th century Ireland, from the Easter Rising, through the Second World War, to the political upheavals that have marked more recent times. Some stories are set against the backdrop of WWII, while others explore the role of memory in shaping and distorting the communal folklore within which pivotal events are recorded, remembered and passed on. As the sergeant instructing officers on the careful and appropriate use of a newly arrived shredder in one the most wonderfully inventive stories warns:

“without that evidential support, Guard, are we not entirely dependent on memory? And memory can be so fallible, can it not? – Or perhaps in some cases I should call it imagination…”

In Past Habitual, MacLochlainn skillfully blends remembrances, facts and imagination to offer a collection that surprises, challenges and delights. This recent release from Dalkey Archive Press is part of their Irish Literature Series.

Variations on a tragedy: Death in the Museum of Modern Art by Alma Lazarevska

The longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare began on April 5, 1992 when Bosnian Serb nationalists surrounded Sarajevo. The assault would last for 1,425 days, almost four years. Inside the blockaded city, citizens tried to pull together as their city was bombarded with mortars and artillery fire, cut off from access to food, power and communication. Families were driven from their homes, faced the real possibility of detention, rape, torture and slaughter. And yet, in small corners of daily life, small embers of humanity were kindled and nurtured. Death in the Museum of Modern Art is a testament to the fragility and the resilience of the ordinary people trapped in the city, an evocation of beauty in the face of unspeakable horror.

museumThis slim collection of six short stories by Bosnian writer Alma Lazarevska reads like a quiet musical meditation, a set of variations on a theme. Most of the stories are narrated by an unnamed woman, married, usually with a single child, a boy. The stories are imbued with a quiet humanness that is as comforting as the death and destruction that surrounds the characters is terrifying. To those of us who can only faintly imagine what it must be like to endure such conditions the effect is startling.

There is not a weak entry in this collection and despite the themes that do recur (in fact at times I wondered if the same family was at the core of some of the stories) each tale shines a light on a different angle of the experience of the residents of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war.

As a parent myself I was especially moved by the story “Greetings from the Besieged City”. Framed through a series of imagined picture postcard scenes this is a meditation on the desperate desire for a happy ending despite the awareness that in literature as in life, happy endings are elusive. While the knowledge of this truth drives a former classmate of the narrator mad, she herself tries to protect her own son from fictional unhappiness by changing the ending of the book she reads to him, The Seville Fan, a love story in which the hero dies:

“And so Pablo succeeded in not dying, which he was, after all, not accustomed to. Because, when I exhaled and put the closed book down, in its printed pages he was still dead. As I was pronouncing the sentences that were not in the book, it seemed to me that, for the first time in our reading sessions, our boy turned his eyes away from their fixed point. He glanced suspiciously at the book then at my face. A pedagogue would say that he was beginning to get used to the fact that parents tell lies. Or that they become accustomed to sentiment!”

The mother is conflicted by her need to prepare her child for the reality of death – of unhappy endings – and the desire to protect. But when “red-hot balls” start to fall on the besieged city, instantly transforming “human bodies into bloody heaps of flesh” the effort to create some variation of a picture postcard greeting against a landscape of horror is increasingly distorted. The impact is deeply unsettling, yet poignantly human.

The siege is a persistent presence in these tales. It drives the tenants of an apartment block from the odd niceties of shared accommodation to huddle in the basement in fear, or to flee the city if possible, in “Thirst in Number Nine”. The superstitious belief that each used match is a saved soul, leads a couple to use and collect precious matches to light cigarettes, rather than the candle that is equally vital in “How We Killed the Sailor”. This represents a perverse and symbolic luxury as civilian casualties mount around them. The wife wonders about these souls they pretend to protect as each day new faces grace the obituary pages of the paper: “Do they know that there is a besieged city somewhere in the world with the saviours of their souls in it?”

The title story “Death in the Museum of Modern Art”, features a narrator who muses on her involvement in a curious project. Bound for publication in a glossy magazine and an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, photographs of 100 inhabitants of Sarajevo are to be paired with their answers to a survey which includes the haunting question: How would you like to die? In a besieged city how does one begin to answer a question like that?

Upon its publication, this collection received the “Best Book” award from the Society of Writers of Bosnia and Herzogovnia. In this lovely edition from Istros Books, the translator, Celia Hawkesworth, brings the gentle and shocking power of Lazarevska’s unique voice to life. I am extraordinarily grateful to Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, the editor of the wonderful Istros Books for selecting and passing this moving, haunting collection on to me. I can recommend it without reservation, these are stories that need to be read. After all, the Bosnian War only came to an end twenty years ago later this year and today, in so many parts of the world, ordinary families are still struggling to survive under the conditions of unimaginable conflicts.

Sadly the happy ending continues to be elusive.