reading space

Best (unread) books of 2012

2012-01-22T23:23:00.001+01:00

By this time we've probably all seen quite a few of those 'Best of 2011' literary lists published in the press and on internet. At this stage most of them only make us feel guilty and/or lazy for not having read enough during the past twelve months. Or not having read discriminatingly enough. For somehow managing to miss what other - more informed - readers regard as Must Reads.

Enough already.

I'm compiling another kind of list to start the new year. Not the Best Books I've read in 2011 (many of which I've already praised in this blog anyway), but the Best Books I plan to read in 2012. Of course you never know if you're going to love a book, even if your best friend or the most brilliant literary critics or a million other people adored it, so it's quite daring to make a list of best unread books. But then, what the heck. Even readers sometimes want to live dangerously.

The books on my list are either already in my possession (some af them have been lying around the house for months, taunting me with their seductive covers, begging me to make time for them) or have been on my literary shopping list for a while because of great reviews, word of mouth or personal preferences.

Roberto Bolano's 2666: This brick of a book (my copy has nearly 900 pages) is actually 5 books in one, published posthumously after the brilliant Chilean writer's death in 2003 at the age of fifty. The novel revolves around the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a place where horrifying crimes are committed, and has become an international sensation. The motto - 'An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom' (Charles Baudelaire) - sets the tone. I've actually read more than 200 pages and arrived at the third 'book' (The Part About Fate) without encountering too much horror, but I'm anticipating it in the next part (The Part About the Crimes)...

José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: The Portuguese author is probably best known among English-speaking readers for his more recent novel, Blindness, but I've been drawn to this one (published in Portuguese in 1984 and in English nearly a decade later) because the Ricardo Reis of the title is one of the many heteronyms of the celebrated poet Fernando Pessoa. And because I love the city of Lisbon - which I'll be visiting early in the year - and one of my erudite friends proposed that I take this novel along as a fascinating guide book.

Keith Richards' Life: Because variety is the spice of life, no pun intended, and because a few of my old rock 'n roll friends raved about this entertaining autobiography by a Rolling Stone who did everything in excess and lived to tell the tale. Although he tells it with the help of 'contributor' James Fox, his own voice apparently comes through clearly enough to please his many fans and maybe even earn him some new ones.

Patti Smith's Just Kids: Not just another rocker's memoir, but then, Patti Smith is not just another rocker. Since I couldn't get a ticket for one of her concerts in France last year, I decided that this version of her early life and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which won a National Book Award in the USA in 2010, would be a perfectly acceptable consolation prize. 'The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s,' as it has been called in the New York Times.

Ewan McEwan's Solar: Because I have yet to encounter a piece of writing by this British author that I don't like. And when I heard that his latest novel, along with all the expected pleasures of McEwan's prose, unexpectedly offered a healthy dose of humour too, I was sold. Unlike The Guardian's critic who wrote: 'I was not expecting to like it. It is billed as his first foray into comedy, and we can only wonder about a man who waits until his seventh decade before he cracks his first joke.' Well, yes, I have to admit that's true, but the critic ended up loving it, calling it one of McEwan's 'best achievements'. And he has achieved quite a lot in his seventy jokeless years, hasn't he?

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies: No, I haven't read any glowing reviews of this novel, nor have I heard trusted friends raving about it, for the simple reason that it hasn't been published yet. But it's the sequel to Mantel's marvellous Wolf Hall - which would be on my list of Best Books read in 2011, had I drawn up such a list - and that, frankly, is reason enough for me to add it to this list. Wolf Hall is a so-called 'genre novel' that managed to seduce people like me who don't usually fall for historical novels, winning the 2009 Man Booker Prize along its triumphant way.

Bring Up the Bodies, with its blood-curdling title, to be published later this year, will focus on Anne Boleyn's downfall, while the third novel in Mantel's Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, will continue Thomas Cromwell's story up to his execution in 1540. If history could have been taught in such a thrilling way in school, I would probably have been a more enthusiastic reader of historical novels by now. On the other hand, as one reviewer stated, to call this simply a historical novel would be like calling Moby Dick a novel about fishing.

My list goes on, but I'll end here, because I have to leave space for all the books I don't yet know about that are bound to blow me away in 2012. One of the many pleasures of reading, after all, is the surprise factor. Not knowing the end of the story. Not even knowing which stories you'll want to know the end of.

May 2012 be filled with fabulous reading and a few lovely surprises for all of us.

Coe for Christmas

2011-12-14T09:23:00.000+01:00

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse... Well, not quite, not yet, but the Silly Season is upon us and incurable readers like me need lots of lovely books to help us through the silliness.

At this time of the year we want our reading matter to be relatively pain-free, not necessarily 'easy', but not too complicated, dark or depressing. (It's dark enough outside if you're living in the Northern Hemisphere.) We want books that are well-written, that goes without saying, gripping and convincing, preferably with a decent dose of humour.

I got lucky and kicked off the Festive Season with a book that meets all the above requirements. Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle is a sequel to his hilarious portrait of adolescence in the seventies in Britain, The Rotters' Club. You don't have to read the seventies novel before the sequel - set three decades later in Blair's New Labour Britain at the beginning of the 21st century - because Coe provides a synopsis of The Rotters' Club for those who have not read it, or have read it and (in the writer's own words) 'inexplicably forgotten it'. This tongue-in-cheek phrase from the Author's Note sets the tone for a satirical and entertaining novel, 'with a disturbing undertow of menace', according to the Literary Review.

I got aquainted with The Rotters' Club during a lazy summer week on a yacht off the Croatian coast last year and found it such perfect holiday reading that I promptly posted a blog about it (http://maritareadingspace.blogspot.com/2010/08/those-lazy-hazy-days-of-summer.html). Much to my delight I can now report that the sequel is just as enjoyable and eminently suitable for the Silly Season. 'Intensely readable', is how Ian Rankin rates it - and he should know, having written some intensely readable books himself. I have to confess I still prefer the earlier novel, but then I'm a child of the seventies. I could identify with everything depicted in The Rotters' Club, from the punk rock to the ugly brown wallpaper.

In The Closed Circle Benjamin Trotter and his old school friends are on the brink of middle-age: married, divorced, disillusioned and angst-ridden. Coe manages to achieve the same irresistable mix of politics and sensual pleasures, satire and seriousness, as in the earlier novel - and music once again plays a prominent role.

The Rotters' Club, after all, is also the title of an album by the cult group Hatfield and the North. And one of the three sections of The Closed Circle is called High on the Chalk, inspired by a song with the same title from the album Beet, Maize and Corn by The High Llamas. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of these groups. Even my French partner, who's a walking encyclopedia of modern music and often listens to Hatfield and the North, had to admit he doesn't know The High Llamas.

By the way, it's through my partner that I got to know Coe's work, only after I'd moved to France, where they adore him. He seems to be one of those English authors who are perhaps even more popular in France than in some Anglo-Saxon countries. So if you're still searching for something to read while you're digesting your Christmas turkey or trifle, I can assure you that most of his novels would make pretty good festive fare for the spirit: What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Dwarves of Death...

Season's Greetings to all readers out there - and may Santa bring you at least one great book this Christmas.

Travelling space

2011-11-20T18:35:00.001+01:00

Novels often turn out to be better guides to the soul of a place than even the best official guide books. A first-rate fiction writer can grasp the essence of a country, a city, an era in a more creative way than most travelogues.

I realised this once again during a recent short trip to the USA when I was fortunate enough to have Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as my fictional guide.

I'd been meaning to read Freedom ever since it was published last year. Like millions of readers worldwide I'd been enchanted by Franzen's The Corrections; I'd also read his earlier novel The Twenty-Seventh City (not quite as enchanting; the author was obviously still getting into his stride) and his thought-provoking nonfiction work How to Be Alone. But there were so many other books-to-be-read on my bedside table that I kept postponing the pleasure.

Then I found myself on the east coast of the USA with a suitcase full of unsuitable books. Yes, I'm still old-fashioned enough to carry actual books instead of an electronic reading device when I travel. The extra weight isn't really a problem. I leave the books with friends along the way once I've read them - which usually leaves me with enough space in my suitcase to buy more books. This time, though, I'd packed in a hurry, and the books were all wrong, nothing even vaguely American.

Just the excuse I needed to walk into a New York airport bookshop, where I saw Freedom on a shelf waiting for me as if we had an appointment. An hour later I was reading it with the kind of slow-burning excitement that increases with each page. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the novel even if I'd never been to the USA, but reading it while I was over there was a real treat.

Freedom is a huge sprawling family story set over a few decades and in many different cities (which I couldn't all visit, obviously), but a substantial part of the narrative action happens in the two cities where I spent most of my time: New York and Washington DC. I also visited friends in Mclean, Virginia, just across the river from DC, where the young Joey Berglund sees 'a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where (he) wanted to live as soon as he got rich'. Previously I'd never even heard of Mclean, but now I could understand exactly what Joey meant with that 'sylvan cul-de-sac'. There is even a short scene between Joey and Jenna in a Florida airport, which I read just after I'd flown to Florida. Talk about the right book at the right time. This one was perfect.

I don't mean that it's a perfect book - such ambitious novels seldom are. There are a few pages full of rather boring background information on Walter Berglund's complicated career moves which I would have gladly skipped. But the novel has nearly 600 pages, most of them gripping, satirical and serious, extremely well-written with totally convincing characters.

Walter Berglund's wife, the sporty and pretty Patty, is so vividly drawn that I was still thinking of her days after I'd finished the book. Their egotistical son, Joey, started out as the character I would have loved to hate and ended up learning to like somewhat reluctantly. And their eternally cool, eternally selfish rock-and-roll friend, Richard Katz, well, let's just say it's easy to understand why Patty found him so irresistible.

Freedom is a big novel about big ideas - politics and ecology, the state of the planet and overpopulation, capitalism and corruption, friendship and faithfulness - but the ideas are never abstract, always carried forward in a very concrete way by the characters. And there are moments of heart-stoppingly pure and beautiful writing. Let me leave you with one of my favourite paragraphs:

She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of a workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consist of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.

Bon voyage, if you're travelling soon. Here's hoping you find the perfect fictional guide.

Out of the shadows of 'children's books'

2011-10-19T16:02:00.000+02:00

'You must write for children in the same way as you write for adults, only better.'

I couldn't help thinking of this famous quote by Maxim Gorky while reading Jason Wallace's Out of Shadows, winner of the 2010 Costa Children's Book Award and shortlisted for the prestigous Carnegie Medal 2011. Especially in the light of Martin Amis's arrogant remark in a recent interview that if he had 'a serious brain injury' he might well consider writing a children's book (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/martin-amis-brain-injury-write-children).

Of course Amis was duly taken on by some well-known authors of children's fiction. But unfortunately his words confirmed the lingering suspicion among many readers that you have to write 'down' when you write for children. That it's somehow 'easier' to write for children or teenagers - and that these authors therefore deserve less respect than their colleagues who write for grown-ups.

From my personal experience of writing for adults and for children, I know just how wrong these assumptions can be. Yes, there is a difference between writing for children and for adults, just as there is a difference between writing poems and novels, or plays and short stories. But this does not mean that writing poems is easier than writing novels, does it?

As far as I know the Nobel Prize has never been awarded to someone who writes exclusively for children or teenagers - and we'll probably have to wait for that happy day before children's fiction finally gets the respect it deserves - but many a worthy Nobel Prize winner has also written for children. The French laureate JMG le Clezio is a good example - and I wouldn't dare call him brain damaged.

The test of a good children's book has always been that it could be read and enjoyed by all ages. In fact, a really good children's book should be read by all ages. Think Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird and many, many more.

Jason Wallace's intriguing debut novel definitely passes this test - which is why I'm almost sorry that the cover mentions the Costa Children's Book Award so boldly. Some potential adult readers might be put off by the knowledge that it was actually written for teenagers. And that would be a real pity. Out of Shadows is an initiation novel about a British boy's adolescent years in an expensive private boarding school in 1980's Zimbabwe - but it is much more than just another boarding school story. The events begin shortly after Robert Mugabe has become the first black leader of the former Rhodesia, a Prime Minister deeply detested by most of the mainly white boys at Haven School. Their privileged families - and quite a few of their teachers, almost all of them still white - share their mistrust. The 15-year-long 'bush war' has left deep scars on both sides, black and white.

But Robert Jacklin's father is an optimistic believer in liberty and equality, a dreamer who has brought his unwilling wife and son from England to start a new life in a new non-racist country. Very soon Robert, desperate to be accepted by the other boys, learns to hide and betray his father's beliefs. He is especially keen to befriend the leader of the group, Ivan Hascott, a cunning boy willing to go to any extreme to 'save' his country from the blacks.

The book reads like a thriller, short chapters full of action and horror, as you watch Robert fall under Ivan's spell, being drawn deeper and deeper into an abyss of bigotry and senseless cruelty. The malicious pecking order of 'good' traditional boys' boarding schools is brilliantly depicted, the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest. By the time Robert reaches his last school year, he has become 'one of the boys', consciously losing his British accent, using the same slang and racist terms as his chums, even joining in the sadistic 'games' they play with children from the black village.

But then Robert Mugabe visits Haven School for the official opening of a new building named after him, and Robert Jacklin realises that Ivan has been hatching a deadly serious plan all along, a fanatic final attempt to change the course of history...

Of course the reader knows that Mugabe wasn't assassinated in 1987 - that he is still in power more than thirty years later, a stubborn dictator seemingly hellbent on destroying his country - but this is not where the real tension of the story lies. Wallace concentrates on the internal tension of a teenager being torn apart by conflicting feelings of loyalty and morality and the need to belong. Out of Shadows is a story about black people and white people, but it is never told in a simplified black and white way.

On the contrary, it leaves readers - of all ages - with the distinct feeling that life remains full of grey areas. Sorry, Martin Amis, but this is certainly not the kind of story a brain injured person would write.

Me and Madam and Eve

2011-09-28T12:03:00.000+02:00

I know. This is supposed to be a blog about books, not comic strips. But hey, Madam & Eve is not just any old comic strip. It's become something of an institution back where I come from - South Africa's most popular cartoon - and it can be bought in the form of a book at least once a year.

But the main reason I couldn't resist posting this blog, is because of the back story. My 11-year old daughter discovered Madam & Eve's Greatest Hits, published in 1998, in a beautiful old second-hand bookstore in an obscure little town near the French Pyrenees during our summer vacation. She immediately bought it, with her own pocket money, 'to improve my English' - her first languages being French and Afrikaans. Now she diligently reads a page or two each night. Her English is rapidly improving - but not nearly as fast as her grasp of South African politics.

During the past week she asked: 'Ma, what is a truth and reconciliation commission?' I had some explaining to do. The next night: 'Ma, what is affirmative action?' I explained some more. We've dealt with 'wage negotiations', 'go-slow' and 'power cuts'. And we're smiling all the way.

To those of you who don't know the 'liberal' white 'Madam' Gwen Anderson and her sassy black domestic worker Eve Sisulu, it might sound like a reactionary throw-back to the Old South Africa, but the cartoon has become an international hit precisely because it constantly undermines all the old racist stereotypes and prejudices. Madam and Eve are always trying to get the better of each other - with Eve usually winning. There are some other remarkable characters, like Madam's son Eric who brings home a black girlfriend, testing the limits of Madam's 'liberalism'; Madam's atrociously colonial mother from England who lives on a liquid diet of gin and tonic; and the wide-eyed little black girl Thandi who likes hanging out with Mother Anderson. Famous politicians like Nelson Mandela and members of the current government often make guest appearances. And whenever anything interesting happens in South African politics - which is just about every day - the cartoon strip is there to make us laugh about it.

Madam & Eve was created at the dawn of the New South Africa, in July 1992, by Stephen Francis, Harry Dugmore and Rico Schacherl, and nearly twenty years later it is still produced by Francis and Schacherl. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Francis, an American married to a South African woman, who first hit on the idea after visiting his mother-in-law and encountering the South African phenomenon of the live-in maid. With his outsider's eye he could quickly spot the comic potential of a relationship which was strangely familiar to millions of people in the country. His mother-in-law happened to be called Gwen, but any other similarities between her and Madam are apparently purely coincidental. And the rest is cartoon history...

I would like to continue, but my daughter wants to know what is 'a sangoma'. And how can a woman sell 'mielies' in the street simply by shouting at the top of her voice? I guess have some more explaining to do.

Negotiating with Margaret

2011-08-29T15:50:00.013+02:00

Writers are like friends. With some you have intense relationships - or with their books, at any rate - for a while and then you move on. Others come and go in your life. Now you read them, now you don't. Sometimes you love them, at other times they disappoint you.

And then there are those who become a part of your life. The Canadian author Margaret Atwood is someone with whom I've always identified strongly - and not only because of her passion for the Grimm brothers' fairytales and Greek mythology.

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) is essential reading for anyone who ever wanted to make a living from writing, a marvellous guide book with most of the ingredients of Atwood at her best. It is clever yet accessible, serious without ever becoming pretensiously heavy, always dosed with humour. Of course it shows neither the full power of her imagination - for this you have to read her fiction - nor the astonishing versatality of her work, but it is enough to leave a lesser writer like me quite overawed.

Atwood, born in Ottowa in 1939, is known mostly for her novels (winning the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin), but she has also produced several volumes of poetry and short stories, children's books and non-fiction, TV scripts, even lyrics and librettos. In the seventies she created a cartoon character called Survivalwoman - writing and drawing everything herself, under a pseudonym - which was featured in a magazine for years. Her novels vary from well-researched historical fiction such as Alias Grace (1996) to science fiction such as The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003).

She has received honoroury degrees from famous universities like Harvard and a dozen others, her books are translated all over the world and she has become a kind of national monument in the Canadian literary landscape.

As my son would say, what's not to admire?

My personal favourites among her books (besides just about everyting already mentioned in this blog) include her 1969 debut novel, The Edible Woman (the sort of savoury title I wish I could have dreamed up myself) and Cat's Eye, a novel about youthful friendship and memory with a striking opening line ('Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space'). Oh yes, and I also loved her latest short-story collection, Moral Disorder (2006).

In fact, she seems to be one of the rare contemporary authors whose career I've followed from the first to the latest book, spanning forty fertile years of writing, without ever finding her boring or predictable. Now isn't that the stuff that life-long friendships are made of?

A third of the whole

2011-08-07T09:00:00.016+02:00

Life is too short to finish a book you don't like. This is probably the most precious lesson I've learned in my life as a reader. With so many wonderful works out there that I yearn to read - and more being written every day - why should I waste my time with anything less than wonderful?

With 'wonderful' I don't necessarily mean literary masterpieces. I mean any well-written, well-constructed piece of writing, from a crime novel to a children's picture book, which moves me personally.

The question, of course, is when do you drop a book. How many boring pages do you have to endure before you can be sure this is as good as it gets? Because another invaluable lesson I've learned from a lifetime of reading, is that you should never give up too soon. Not all great books grab you from the first line, like Tolstoi's Anna Karenina ('Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way') or Austin's Pride and Prejudice ('It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife').

Reading is not in the first place about instant gratification. Sometimes the pleasure you get out of a book is directly related to the effort you put into in. And sometimes you have to slog through a valley of incomprehension or boredom before you reach the peaks of pleasure. For me the book that drove home this lesson, was Don DeLillo's Underworld. It starts with a loong description of a baseball game which made me abandon the book two times before I eventually managed to get past the damn game - and fell in love with the rest. To this day I regard Underworld as one of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years.

Nowadays I have the one-third rule to help me decide when to drop a book. I'm not talking about bad books, the kind you drop after a few lines without a tinge of remorse, I'm talking about supposedly good books by supposedly good authors that just don't do it for me. You know, the ones your intelligent friends or some reviewers love, but they leave you stone cold? In these cases I believe I owe it to the author to read at least a third. If it has 150 pages, I'll read 50; if it has 900, I'll keep going until page 300. If I'm not hooked by then, I know I won't get hooked at all. Then I cut my losses and run. Bye-bye, book. No-one can say I didn't try. Je ne regrette rien.

I recently applied this one-third rule to the Australian Steve Tolz's 711-page debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole. This 'riotously funny first novel is harder to ignore than a crate of puppies, twice as playful and just about as messy', according to Wall Street Journal on the jacket, which made me believe it would be perfect summer reading. Well, maybe I'm not as fond as puppies as I thought I was, but I found the playfulness and the messiness rather tiring. Still, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I decided to withhold my judgement until I'd read at least a third.

It tells the story of the two Dean brothers, one a criminal, the other crazy, and of the son, Jasper, that the crazy Martin Dean brought up by himself. It starts with Jasper in jail - where else would you be with such a family? - then jumps to Martin's catastrophic childhood, then back to Jasper, a sprawling epic if ever I saw one. It abounds with the kind of self-deprecating black humour that the young Woody Allen was so good at. But I have to admit, by page 237 I was still underwhelmed.

I kept going, though, mainly because I was vacationing in another city with nothing else to read. I only really got into the book in the second half, and by the end I was actually glad I'd persevered. Like when you grow to love a puppy you wanted to drown in the beginning, I suppose.

But I'm convinced it would have been a much better novel if the author, with the help of a rigorous editor, could have deleted at least a third. If only he'd taken his own title a little more seriously. A fraction of a fraction would have been sufficient. Two thirds of the whole would have been a very satisfactory read, thank you.

Who was it who said in every fat book there's a thin one screaming to get out? I don't agree, I love some fat books, but this one could have done with a diet.

The tiger's touch

2011-07-09T14:25:00.015+02:00

What is it with tigers and English literary prizes? I couldn't help wondering when I heard that Téa Obreht was the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011 for her debut novel The Tiger's Wife.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not dissatisfied that a 25-year-old author won a major fiction prize for a novel not written in her mother tongue, but in a language she learnt later in life, as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia. I think it's an astonishing feat that deserves all the praise - and the prizes - the author can possibly get.

But it is the third time in a decade that a novel featuring a tiger - a real tiger or a tiger used as a metaphor - receives a coveted literary award. In 2002 Yann Martell, born in Spain and living in Canada, won the Man Booker Prize (as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Governor General Award) for the wildly imaginative Life of Pi. This tells the rather tall story of a 16-year-old boy trapped on a lifeboat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean along with a huge Royal Bengal tiger. Oh yes, also on the small boat are a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg and a female orang-utan...

Then, in 2008, the Indian writer Aravind Adiga struck the literary jackpot, winning the Man Booker for his debut novel, The White Tiger. This time not only a picture of a tiger on the cover, as with Life of Pi, but also the word tiger in the title, just to make sure the tiger's touch really works.

It has to be noted, though, that this novel is not about a real tiger. 'The White Tiger' is the nom de guerre of an entertaining criminal character called Balram Halwai, who tells his life story in a series of letters written to a Chinese politician. Don't ask. Just read it - if you haven't yet - because it turns a lot of comfortable conceptions of India and Indian-English novels inside out. I say this as a dedicated fan of Indian-English fiction and authors such as Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie, Anita and Kiran Desai, Amitav Ghosh and many many more. Adiga has a savagely angry voice of his own among all these literary greats.

And now the astonishingly young and gifted Obreht has made it a tiger's hat trick with another prize-winning work of fiction featuring a tiger on the cover, in the title and on the pages.

Moral of the story? If you're an aspiring writer, don't, please don't, write a novel featuring a tiger in the hope that you're going to get lucky. Surely the tiger trend must be nearing its end? After more than a decade of tiger fiction, wouldn't it be nice to be entertained by other fascinating feline creatures such as lions or leopards? But then again, The Leopard has been done, brilliantly, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa - and turned into an equally brilliant film by Visconti. And Henning Mankell wrote The White Lioness and C.S. Lewis gave us The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe more than fifty years ago...

So, if you absolutely have to have a wild animal in your next novel, make it an elephant or a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus. Start a new trend! It's about time that we stop this rampaging literary tiger in its tracks.

Outrageous!

2011-06-07T15:46:00.020+02:00

'93 years. This is the very last stage. The end is not far away any more.' This is my own translation of the opening sentences of a little booklet that has taken France by storm during the past few months. The author is 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel, concentration camp survivor, former French Resistance fighter, diplomat and ambassador, and the publisher is a two-person outfit run from a house in the south of France by a former correspondent of Le Monde, Sylvie Crossman.

Indigène Editions usually publish rather obscure books on Native Americans or Australian Aborigines, rarely selling more than a couple of thousand copies. But Hessel's pamphlet, Indignez-vous!, has become a word-of-mouth publishing phenomenon, selling 1.5 million copies in about six months in France alone, with versions in many other languages already published or in the pipeline.

Literally translated the title would be a command, something imperative like 'get indignant' or 'get angry', but the recently published British version bears a more polite (more British?) title: Time for Outrage.

Hessel urges younger readers (and at his advanced age, just about every reader is a younger reader) to revive the ideals of wartime resistance to the Nazis by protesting against modern social and political ills such as the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, the state of the planet, the way illegal immigrants are treated, the way the media is influenced by the rich and powerful - to name but a few causes for outrage. It ends with a heart-felt message:

'To those who will be forming the 21st century, we say with all our affection: To create is to resist. To resist is to create.'

In other words the pamphlet of less than 30 pages (bound by two staples and sold for 3 euros) is full of praiseworthy sentiments, forcefully expressed, but it doesn't contain anything truly original. Or in any case not original enough to explain the astonishing sales figures. Hessel himself admits gallantly that had it been written by a younger person, it would probably not have sold nearly as well.

But then Hessel is not just any old guy preaching to the young. His entire personal history places him on a moral pedestal. Here is a real-life self-sacrificing hero in an era where such heroes have become a rare phenomenon - almost as rare as well-meaning political pamphlets becoming bestsellers. If further proof of heroism is needed, it might be mentioned that his royalties are all donated to his favourite charity causes.

Hessel also has rather unique cultural credentials. His parents, Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, inspired two of the three main characters in Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim, on which François Truffaut based his cult film starring a magnificent Jeanne Moreau. These autobiographical details might have something to do with the runaway success of Indignez-vous! in France, and maybe even in Germany where Hessel was born and where the German translation, Empört euch!, sold nearly 100 000 copies in a month or two.

But how does one explain the impressive sales in Spain or Italy? Or the fact that translation rights have been sold in more than twenty countries, from Croatia to Korea and from Australia to Argentinia?

Well, I guess if we'd been able to explain publishing phenomenons, we'd be able to predict them too - and then they wouldn't be phenomenons any more, they'd become simple marketing strategies. This is exactly what I love about the world of books: the marvellous unpredictability of an indignant sermon by an angry young man of 93 becoming an international hit. Outrageous, isn't it?

A day in the life of...

2011-04-22T09:17:00.006+02:00

I just had to share this link with other incurable readers! What a wonderful idea, a day in the life of... thousands of fictional characters.

Go through the list, minute by minute, to revisit some great scenes from literature, meet up again with marvellous characters, and make stunning new aquaintances.

Of course you can also go through your personal favourite novels to find more phrases mentioning a specific time of day or night. Then why not add them to this growing list?

Have fun!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/table/2011/apr/21/literary-clock

Big author, small book

2011-04-21T08:50:00.010+02:00

Ever since I published my first novel, I've tried to keep out of the messy business of critisising other novelists. I particularly avoid reviewing fellow South African writers, because the pool is so small and the egos are so big and literary critisism often ends up being nothing more than a case of mutual back-scratching. Or reciprocal nastiness.

But praising other novelists is another matter. That's why I started this blog, to spread the Good Word of Reading, to tell other readers about books I love. When it comes to reading, I have the heart of an enthusiastic missionary rather than a strict judge.

If I don't like a book, why should I waste time writing about it? That's mostly my credo, also when blogging.

When I do agree to write a review for the traditional press, I try to choose an author I've admired in the past or a book I suspect I would like. I prefer being nice to being nasty - maybe it's as simple as that.

But nice doesn't always cut the dice. Recently a Johannesburg newspaper asked me to write a short review of Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel - latest available in English, that is - The Bad Girl. A task I took on with pleasure because I remember enjoying Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter many years ago (the book, not the movie) and being impressed with some of Vargas Llosa's more serious works.

What a disappointment this turned out to be! Not because The Bad Girl a bad novel; no, it's a quite enjoyable little love story, but it's simply not good enough for the latest laureate of the most prestigeous literary prize on earth. I felt rather presumptious, a small author like me 'attacking' a literary giant like Vargas Llosa, but this time I simply couldn't be 'nice'.

If you read Afrikaans, you could read the original review published in Beeld earlier this week (http://www.beeld.com/Vermaak/Nuus/Boeke-Miskien-kan-nie-elke-boek-groots-wees-20110417). If not, let me sum it up: 'Of a Nobel Prize-winning author you expect more than a good yarn. You expect a deeper insight, a unique style, a personal vision of the world, something bigger than the sum of the story and the person writing the story, so that by the time you reach the last sentence you are not exactly the same person as when you started reading the first page. Great books change the reader. Unfortunately even the greatest authors cannot always produce great books.'

The Bad Girl is a small book - please note, not a thin book, at more than 400 pages - about lifelong obsessive love. Comparisons are odious, yes, yes, we all know that, but I couldn't help comparing this novel rather unfavorably to another Latin-American novel about the same subject written by another Latin-American Nobel Prize winner. I'm referring to the unforgettable Love in the Time of Cholera (the book, once again, not the movie) by Gabriel García Márquez - who used to be Vargas Llosa's friend, although apparently they haven't spoken to each other for more than 30 years. Thirty Years of Solitude? Only in South America...

A joyful reunion

2011-04-07T11:01:00.026+02:00

Glory hallelujah! This week I unpacked the last of numerous boxes filled with books in our new house - which I can now start calling home. Because home, as any book lover knows, is not only where your heart is. It is also where your books are.

All our other boxes and belongings have been unpacked weeks ago, but the books required special attention. If you have a huge amount of books, you need to arrange them according to some system - alphabetically, fiction distinguished from non-fiction, whatever works for you - otherwise you'll never be able to find the book you want when you want it. My books are now not only alphabetically arranged, but also according to languages (French, Afrikaans/Dutch and English), with fiction separated from non-fiction, poetry and plays separated from novels, and non-fiction subdivided into travel, history, philosophy, literature studies, dictionaries and grammar books, etc. The food and cook books are on a special shelf in our new kitchen (where else?), while the 'coffee-table books' are not on a coffee table (because we don't have enough coffee tables for our collection) but all over the house, in the bedrooms, next to the toilet, on the staircase...

For the first time in years I can find any book I need within a minute.

The problem is that I don't live alone in this house, nor am I the only reader, and the other inhabitants (i.e. husband and children) are already messing up my beautiful system. As I don't see any solution, short of forbidding anyone else in the house to touch a book - rather counterproductive for a wife and mother trying to encourage reading,isn't it? - I suspect that by the time I post my next blog, I'll once again be searching all over the house whenever I want any specific book.

But I won't have been wasting my time unpacking and arranging my books so carefully. It wasn't a chore, it was more like a joyful reunion of a long ago school class. I found novels I didn't even know I had, and others I'd been missing for years, and still others I'd loved long ago and want to read again to see if the same passion can be rekindled.

Among the tempting group of old flames are Don DeLillo's marvellous comic novel White Noise and Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels. Among those that went missing years ago and have now unexpectedly turned up all battered and dusty, are most of John Irving's earlier novels, including the unforgettable The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meany. But the loveliest surprise of all was the treasure I didn't know I owned, for instance the classic French novel by Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves. I actually wanted to buy this very first modern novel, written more than 300 years ago, because it is one of French president Nicolas Sarkozy's pet hates (for a bit background, read 'Nicolas Sarkozy, murderer of princess of Clèves': http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/sarkozy-murderer-princess-of-cleves) and has recently been turned into two interesting French movies about contemporary teenagers, La Belle Personne and the documentary Nous, les princesses de Clèves , proving once again that good literature never really dates.

Now I can't wait to start reading all the 'new', refound and rediscovered books in my new home. Happy reading to you too.

Reading vs writing (and renovating)

2011-01-10T10:00:00.007+01:00

I'm going to have to take a break from this blog for a while, because I need to start working on a new novel. Not that I'm not one of those authors who stop reading while they're writing. I don't even stop reading while I'm brushing my teeth. I'm always astonished when I hear authors say they don't read for lack of time or fear of contagion by another author's style or whatever reason they manage to find.

How can a writer not read? If you don't read books, surely you still read newspapers, magazines, internet articles, cornflake boxes, grafitti on the back of public toilet doors? And couldn't all these words, words, words also influence your style? So why not rather read a good book? Or even better, read various brilliant books by various brilliant authors, so your style won't be influenced by a single one but might benefit from general exposure to brilliance!

So rest assured, I'll keep reading - but I know I'll have even less time than usual to write about what I'm reading. Because my second reason for begging some time out is that I'm in the process of moving out of an old house into another old house which needs a lot of TLC - that coy phrase property agents love to use when they actually mean you'll be driven to despair, divorce or a nervous breakdown by the challenges of the renovating process. For the past two months all my weekends and free time have been devoted to this task - which is why I haven't finished Hilary Mantel's magnificent Wolf Hall, started before Christmas already - and I think I can safely say that this unsatisfactory situation will continue for quite a while.

But oh, the comfort a good book can give while you're busy with mind-numbing menial jobs like scrubbing shreds of old wallpaper off damp walls! My hands may be cleaning and sanding a wooden floor in France, but my mind is constantly engaged by Henri VIII's glittering court in sixteenth century England. Thank you, Hilary Mantel, thank you. I'm reading the novel about Thomas Cromwell's amazing rise to power ever so slowly, not only because I lack the time to tackle the more than 600 pages in any other way, but because it is turning out to be a very commendable cure for the home-renovating blues.

Meanwhile, if you're following this blog, wish me luck - and don't stop reading. I promise you I won't.

Season's reading

2010-12-22T19:47:00.015+01:00

Christmas reading is like summer reading. Well, in a large part of the Southern Hemisphere, of course, Christmas reading is summer reading.

But here in Europe, where we can't spend the Festive Season spread out on a beach with a great book, we still manage to steal a few more hours than usual, lying on a couch next to a cosy fire, reading something yummy. Which often turns out to be one of the heap of books we haven't read all year, saving them for the lazy days and long nights of our Christmas break.

This month, for instance, I finally got stuck in a nice thick novel I've been hearing about all year - New York Times best seller, Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 and, even better, praised by quite a few of my friends and fellow readers. I always find the small buzz created by word-of-mouth among like-minded book lovers so much more trustworthy than even the most raving literary review, don't you agree?

I think it was in May that my Johannesburg friend Elsabe first mentioned she was reading a wonderful novel set in Mexico, written by the author of The Poisonwood Bible, and dealing with real-life historical figures like Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera. A month or two later an American friend told me she was reading a marvellous story about the horror of the anti-Communist hysteria in the fifties in America. Then my friend Irma from England came to visit and, as always, brought some books along for me. Among them was this very same Mexican-American novel that I kept hearing about.

By now many of you will know I'm referring to Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. I saved it for Christmas - and glory hallelujah, it is everything I want from a good Christmas read. Because Christmas reading, I believe, should be like Christmas food. Special, substantial but not too 'heavy', decadently enjoyable; in short, not your everyday fare. The Lacuna is special for many reasons: more than 600 pages, each of them finely crafted, telling a gripping tale set over two decades in two countries - 1930s to 1950s in Mexico and the USA - with a cast of unforgettable characters.

It is certainly not the least of Ms Kingsolver's many achievements that the fictional characters appear every bit as alive as the real-life figures. The protagonist's flighty mother and his sensible, demure secretary, Violet Brown, are the kind of people you remember long after you've met them between the pages of a book. And then there's the protagonist himself, Harrison Shepherd, a Mexican-American cook who later becomes a briefly famous author before mysteriously disappearing...

In case you haven't yet read the story, I won't spoil your pleasure by speculating about the end - but let me assure you, this is one of those that end not with a whimper, as is so often the case, but with a quite spectacular bang. Actually I'm quite envious of you if you're still planning to read it. You have a lot of pleasure to look forward to.

And now I'm returning to my next Christmas novel, which promises to be a glorious treat too: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, last year's winner of the Man Booker Prize, another lovely Big Fat Book.

I wish you all a happy Festive season and, above all, happy Festive reading!

All about Angola

2010-11-29T10:44:00.014+01:00

In my South African youth, Angola was a fascinating, familiar, forbidden place, at once dangerously close and impossibly far.

A neighbouring country which I wasn't allowed to visit, at first because of the nebulous 'Border War' that South Africa was involved in during the seventies (when many of my white male contemporaries were secretly transported over there, whether they liked it or not, as army conscripts), and then because of the devastating civil war dragging on for three decades.

I was therefore delighted to meet Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa a few years ago at an international writers' gathering - finally someone who could tell me about Angola from the inside - and even more delighted when I started reading his novels. The Book of Chameleons is thrillingly original with it reptilian narrator, winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 and drawing favourable comparisons with Kafka: 'Not since Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis have we had such a convincing non-human narrator,' was the conclusion of the Independent.

The next one I read, I liked even more. Creole is a historical novel about a Portuguese aristocrat and adventurer who travels through untamed Angola and colonial Brazil, meeting slaves and slave-owners and abolitionists and witch-doctors along the way, some of them 'real' and others fictional, all quite extraordinary. The most unforgettable character is the former slave-girl, Ana Olimpia Vaz de Caminha, believed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, with whom the Portuguese aristocrat falls hopelessly in love. This novel was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature and the influential Spanish newspaper El Pais called it 'one of the most powerful and most beautiful arguments against a stereotyped vision of Africa'. High praise, indeed.

Earlier this year I met up with the author again in Lisbon - he now divides his time between Angola, Brazil and Portugal - and he was kind enough to give me his two latest novels published in English. Rainy Season, an autobiographical journalist's investigation into the disappearance of a fictional Angolan poet and historian in 1992, against the backdrop of thirty years of war, was originally published in 1996 and only translated last year by Agualusa's usual collaborator, Daniel Hahn. The Translator's Diary included at the end of the novel, consisting of a blog that Hahn kept while working on the translation, is a fascinating piece of reading in itself; enlightening to 'ordinary' readers and absolutely irresistible to anyone with an interest in translating.

After reading My Father's Wives, I told the author that this is my favourite - but I'd better add 'so far', since I seem to like each of his books a little more than the previous one. Once again it's the story of a journey, this time of a contemporary character, Laurentina, a young Portuguese woman travelling through Angola, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, to try and find out more about a father she never knew. The father figure is a famous Angolan musician, Faustino Manso, who died leaving at least seven wives and eighteen children scattered across southern Africa, and during her journey Laurentina discovers many brothers and sisters and other family members. Or so she thinks...

There's a wonderful twist at the end that lifts the story above any accusation of macho swaggering - and some really impressive female characters. Agualusa is apparently that rare thing: an African writer with a Latin-American connection who can create strong and believable female protagonists from book to book.

No wonder an impressive real-life African woman like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the young award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, recently named him as one of her favourite writers. If you love Adichie's work but don't know Agualusa yet, do get hold of one of his books. Who knows, it might just be the start of another beautiful literary friendship.

As he lay dying...

2010-11-03T21:07:00.025+01:00

Novels about old white men dying - and reminiscing about their dreary lives - are usually not cheerful reading. But sometimes, just sometimes, such a novel can become a transcendental literary experience.

Ever since William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (in which the dying/dead protagonist is a woman), this fictional road has been well travelled. Of course, not all writers who try to follow in Faulkner's footsteps have his talent, so when I come across one of these as-I-lay-dying stories that really grips me, I am always relieved and grateful. Recently I was fortunate enough to read two such novels in consequence. Bliss. Pure bliss.

I knew that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Tinkers by Paul Harding had both won the Pulitzer Prize (Robinson in 2005 and Harding this year), but this scrap of literary knowledge didn't prepare me for the impact of the two books. Both deal with death and dying, with sin and mercy and forgiving and other moral issues, and both are brilliantly written.

Harding's protagonist, George Washington Crosby, is a retired teacher who used to tinker with antique clocks, dying of cancer and kidney failure in a hospital bed in the middle of his living room, surrounded by his family. Robinson's narrator, John Ames, is an old preacher with a failing heart in the Mid-West town of Gilead, who writes a letter to his young son, knowing he will never see the child grow into an adult. Neither George Crosby nor John Ames has led an exceptionally interesting or adventurous life - and yet their stories are spell-binding.

Of the two books, I preferred Gilead. Not that Tinkers isn't an absolutely worthy read; it's just that I found Gilead more moving - although for the life of me I can't understand why it touched me so deeply. It is a 'religious' novel, in many ways, and I am not a 'religious' person, in most ways. Nowadays I mostly want to run and hide when I hear the word 'religion' because it reminds me of Tea Party zealots in the USA and their Muslim counterparts in Pakistan or Iran or elsewhere. But in this book I encountered that rare breed, a profoundly moral character, who can give unreligious souls like me renewed respect for religion.

Robinson is not what you would call a prolific author. She waited more than twenty years after her highly acclaimed debut novel, Homecoming, before publishing this second one. Perhaps the long wait produced the amazing grace of Gilead, the calm reflection, the spiritual insight, the pure wisdom. Perhaps I should stop trying to explain my reaction to this extraordinary book and simply urge you to read it - and see for yourself.

Both Gilead and Tinkers are proof that old white men dying can still be unforgettable characters in great books. Glory hallelujah.

On radio, writers and wet hair

2010-10-08T09:59:00.016+02:00

So here I sit with unbrushed teeth and wet hair dripping on my keyboard - probably permanently damaging my computer - and it's all the fault of writers on the radio.

I was innocently listening to France Inter this morning, as I do every morning while showering, dressing, having breakfast and mentally preparing for the day, when I was jolted into a state of catatonic bliss. The studio guest was so brilliant that I couldn't take the risk of missing a single phrase by opening the tap to brush my teeth or switching on the blowdryer for my hair. It was that old Italian wizard Umberto Eco talking - in fluent French with an occasional English word thrown in when he couldn't find the exact French phrase - about languages and literature and lists, translation and interpretation, 'real' books versus e-books, classic writers versus contemporary writers, and much much more. Eco, a professor of semiotics probably most widely known for his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, recently published a non-fiction 'dialogue' with a French writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, under the delightful title of N'espérez pas vous débarrasser des livres ('Don't hope to get rid of books').

Don't ever hope to get rid of books - or of wise and witty writers, or of the humble radio. That was my fervent wish as I listened, transfixed, to Umberto Eco. Yes, he admires internet for opening up access to information (the Holocaust, he claims, wouldn't have been possible if there had been internet), but he also fears the false information that could be spread in this democratic way. He compares his relationship to internet with his relationship to his car. The fact that he owns and drives a car doesn't mean he can't complain about his car, does it?

But he is at his brilliant best when he talks about books and reading. He regards himself as 'a young writer' - at the age of nearly eighty! - because he only started publishing at fifty. And since becoming a published author, he has preferred reading classic authors rather than his contemporaries - for fear of being influenced, he says, but then adds rather mischievously: Either he finds contemporary writing bad, worse than his own, which upsets him, or he finds it better, which also upsets him... Much less upsetting to stick to the classics.

I was so inspired that I wanted to rush off, wet hair and all, to write it all down before I forget. But as I left the bathroom, I caught the daily Revue de la Presse on the same radio station - and because the Nobel Prize for Literature had been announced yesterday, the press review was also at least partly devoted to literature.

(I have to confess, my first reaction yesterday, when I heard that Mario Vargas Llosa was the 2010 laureate, was a kind of selfish joy because here was a winner of whom I'd actually read a few books, as opposed to all those worthy Nobel winners whose books I know I should have read...)

So I hung on to listen to the press review - and was rewarded with the most magnificent quote from Vargas Llosa, published in today's edition of the newspaper Liberation. According to our latest Nobel laureate, literature expresses a different truth from historical, political or social truth; literature expresses 'a truth made up of lies'.

Three cheers for the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Italian Umberto Eco and a French radio station that gave me a great start to my day. Now let me go and dry my hair and brush my teeth...

The Children's Day has its day

2010-09-28T15:22:00.011+02:00

Help! I'm suffering from serious withdrawal symptoms. I haven't read a book in two weeks and I'm in absolute agony. This is not by choice, simply the result of an impossibly hectic schedule. I'm touring through France with a TV team filming a cooking series, and the only reading I seem to manage between the long hours of travelling-cooking-eating and the short hours of sleeping is from magazines and on internet. Which doesn't really count as 'reading'- not for a book junkie like me.

A little ray of light in this bookless darkness, though, is that my friend and fellow South African author Michiel Heyns's coming-of-age novel The Children's Day has just been nominated for the Prix Femina in France. Jours d'enfance, translated by Françoise Adelstain, is one of eleven finalists in the foreign section of what has been called 'the most gracefully slim, the most distinguished, the most pleasantly courteous' of French literary prizes. Graceful and courteous, maybe, but definitely not lightweight - not with internationally renowned names such as Edna O'Brien from Ireland, Shirley Hazzard from Australia and Bernardo Carvalho from Brazil among the finalists.

The selectors could also be praised for the geographic scope of their list, with authors hailing from Ireland to Iceland, Sweden to South Corea, United States to Venezuela. The winner will be announced in November - as is customary for most of the big literary prizes in France - which gives you enough time to read The Children's Day - in its original English version, in French, or even in Afrikaans - if you haven't done so yet.

And believe me, it is a delightful read, humorous and ironic and sad and serious, set in the sixties in South Africa, in a boys' boarding school in Bloemfontein, during the dark days of Apartheid. What I loved about the book is that it deals with so much more than the rather obvious moral problems of Apartheid politics; it also shows the class differences among whites - all more or less equally rascist - and the sometimes ridiculous discrimination between 'liberal' English and 'conservative' Afrikaner.

The protagonist, Simon, is the adolescent son of an English father and an Afrikaans mother, getting the best possible education in a good English school, while Fanie is working-class Afrikaner, attending a technical school where he will be taught a practical craft and not much more. Or maybe much more than Simon - depending on how you look at things. Sexual hypocrisy turns out to be just one of the moral pitfalls of sixties South Africa.

I haven't read the other finalists' novels, so I can't judge whether Jours d'enfance should win the Prix Femina or not - but all these translated novels are already winners just for appearing on such a distinguished international list.

Key to good reading

2010-09-03T14:05:00.016+02:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I don't feel duty-bound to read or report on the literature of South Africa just because I was born and bred down there. My taste in books is as eclectic as my taste in food - variety truly is the spice of reading, eating and life in general.

But?

But every once in a while I come across a South African book that is so great that I have to rave about it, urge all my friends to read it, post a blog entry to spread the word. Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys is just such a book. Provocative and poetic and deeply personal yet universally appealing (to anyone looking for more than mental candyfloss, of that I'm sure), Portrait with Keys is not fiction, but to describe it simply as 'non-fiction' doesn't do it justice either.

It is 'a chain of lyrical texts' linking memoir, history and geography. With a teasing sub-title like Joburg & what-what, it is also a kind of inspired guide to the city of gold. A love letter to Johannesburg with the power to seduce even people like me who never really learnt to appreciate this particular city. If you don't know Johannesburg at all, you'll want to visit it after reading this book. If you've lived there before, you'll be laughing in recognition and longing to return.

Vladislavic looks at his hometown with wonder and humour, never shying away from the darker side - the horrific crime figures, the beggars and the poverty, the obsession with keys and locks to protect against burglary and theft - yet always spotting the absurd, the unexpected or the unexplained in his everyday surroundings. Like the little girl in a school uniform with a satchel on her back walking towards him one spring afternoon in Roberts Avenue.

'A perfectly ordinary little girl on her way home from school. Or she would be, perfectly ordinary, I mean, if she were not wearing a diving mask and snorkel... Her eyes look out with the astounded, strained expression of a diver who has just sunk below the surface and discovered a second world. 'After passing this strange creature, he finds that his feet have turned to lead, his head become 'round and deaf'. 'She has submerged the world, and me in it. The light streams like water over everything, the grass on the verges shifts in currents of astonishment, as I press on into the deep end of the city.'

This constant transformation of the mundane into something nearly magical or achingly funny or incredibly wise, is what makes Portrait with Keys such a joy to read.

Here is Vladislavic describing the end of a lazy summer day on a stoep in Hope Street: 'We are talking, my friends and I, with our bare feet propped on the wall of the stoep, our cane chairs creaking. We have been talking and laughing for hours, putting our predicaments in their place, finding ways to balance in a tide of change...

'This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on the skin, where it grasps us... We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this.'

You can read this book - and do read it, please! - as you would any other book, from first to last page, beginning to end. Or you can read it following the Itineraries provided at the end; winding your way through all the pages dealing with Beggars and sellers, for instance, or Liars and thieves; finding your own path through Gardens or Memorials or Painted walls. There is an itinerary called Artists Book and another called Writers' Book and another and another...

You might even end up reading the book like me, first in the 'normal' order, and then, the moment you reach the last page, starting all over, this time following the author's suggested itineraries. It's always difficult to close and take leave of a good book; even more so in this case because you're leaving behind more than just a book. It's as if you have to part from a beloved city too - or rather a city you didn't realise you loved until you read this brilliant book.

An annual avalanche of fiction

2010-08-24T16:52:00.021+02:00

It's that time of the year again in France. La rentrée, the start of the school year, is just around the corner - and with it comes the annual avalanche of new books known as la rentrée littéraire.

This frenzy of publication never fails to amaze me. Coming from a third-world country where publishers' lists of new books are counted in tens, not hundreds, I find it astonishing that French publishers can produce hundreds of fiction titles in a single month. In September 2010 there are no less than 701 novels on offer. Yes, you read correctly - 701 novels. These 700 new books do not include non-fiction or biographies, children's literature or poetry, cook books or travel books or beautiful coffee-table books. We're talking novels, only novels, nothing but novels. Now isn't that something?

And among these 700 novels, only about 200 are translated from other languages, the rest are as French as the Eiffel Tower. Well, not quite. Some are from other francophone regions in Africa, Europe and elsewhere. In fact, the best-selling French author is the Belgian Amélie Nothomb, who has been coming up with a novel each September, as regularly as clockwork, for more than a decade. Her 2010 offering, Une forme de vie (A Form of Life) has the highest print-run of all the rentrée's novels (220 000 copies), followed by the British Ken Follet's Fall of Giants (150 000 copies in France, but simultaneously published in 13 other countries) and the French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq's La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory), which has an initial print-run of 120 000 copies.

Among the 200 odd translated novels there are some Big Names too. South African Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee's L'Eté de la vie (already published in English as Summertime) is the eagerly awaited third book in the series of 'auto-fiction' starting with Boyhood and followed by Youth. French fans of American fiction can look forward to Vice caché, the translation of Inherent Vice, a comic-noir crime thriller featuring ukulele music by that infamous Invisible Man, Thomas Pynchon, as well as works by Bret Easton Ellis (Imperial Bedrooms) and my own American favourite, Don DeLillo. Although I'd prefer to read the inimitable DeLillo's Point Omega in the original English, of course.

But the best thing about la rentrée littéraire, I've always found, is the surprise element. The unexpected and unpredictable hits by authors who are still completely unknown, but might just be, who knows, among the Big Names by the time the next fictional avalanche hits France in September 2011. Watch this space. I'll keep you posted.

Those lazy hazy days of summer

2010-08-01T22:14:00.016+02:00

Summer reading. What a lovely phrase that is, conjuring up images of swaying hammocks under shady trees, comfortable old couches on verandahs, lazing next to sparkling swimming pools. Sipping cool drinks and enjoying cool books - because summer reading should be like summer drinks: cool and light and fun rather than dark and heavy and serious.

Although light, when it comes to books, doesn't have to mean frivolous, brainless or badly written. Some of my all-time favourite books have been read during summer holidays, in a hammock or on a beach or on the deck of a boat. Many readers regard crime fiction or thrillers as perfect summer reading, others like biographies or non-fiction with a light touch. I tend to go for humorous novels with a literary undertone - or literary novels with a lot of humour. But then I tend to go for humorous literary novels in autumn, winter and spring too. A good summer read should be a good read right through the year.

Last month, while spending a sunny week on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, I managed to read four novels in five days. That's pretty much my idea of a perfect vacation. All four books were humorous and serious at the same time, but the most memorable was Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club. Coe's translated novels have been popular in France for at least a decade; The House of Sleep won the coveted Prix Médicis Etranger in 1998, and my French partner has read most of his books. But since it seems easier to find Coe's publications in France than in South Africa, where I buy most of my English reading matter, I haven't read him until last month. And what a delightful discovery it was!

The Rotter's Club is a richly comic coming of age tale set in 1970s Britain, featuring, among other things (quoting the jacket): 'IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love... prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper...' You get the drift.

But it deals with much more than 'just' adolescence. The teenagers' parents and even grandparents' lives and loves are featured too, and the story is seen through the eyes of two of those erstwhile teenagers' children two decades later. It is above all a novel about the ecstacies and the agonies of the seventies. It would certainly be enjoyed by readers of all ages, but if you happen to have been young in the seventies, you might just adore it.

I grew up in seventies South Africa, which was a very different place from seventies Britain, and yet also eerily similar. In fact, reading this honest, sometimes tragic, often vividly funny account of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' struggle towards adulthood among ugly brown wallpaper, I was reminded that adolescence is always another country - no matter in which country the adolescent actually lives: Britain, South Africa, France or the dark side of the moon, like most teenagers.

And thank heavens for authors like Jonathan Coe who can lead us back to that country, laughing out loud in wonder and embarrassment, while we sip a chilly drink in a shady spot. Ah, the joys of summer reading...

Lolita's creator loved soccer

2010-07-19T23:25:00.011+02:00

And now that the noise of vuvuzelas has finally died down and Fifa 2010 has been declared a success, I am pleased to give you some feedback on Vladimir Nabokov's attitude towards soccer. Last month, on the opening day of the World Cup in South Africa, I asked the rather silly (and as it turned out, totally uninformed) question: Did Vladimir Nabokov like soccer?

The question was prompted by Pale Fire, in which the author supplied a long list of popular pastimes that he did not appreciate, including jazz music, which I still find hard to swallow.

'If anyone reading this could enlighten me, I'd be really grateful,' I added, not seriously expecting an answer.

So imagine my delight when I was quickly relieved of my ignorance by a couple of readers - and one of them turned out to be the great Nabokov's only son, to whom I also referred in that post. Dmitri Nabokov informed me in no uncertain terms that his father had indeed been a life-long soccer fan. What's more, he had actively enjoyed the game by playing goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge, and later for an emigré club in Berlin. Talk about facts from the horse's mouth! Not that I mean to call Dmitri Nabokov a horse. It was bad enough, in his eyes, that I called his father an opinionated old fart.

Sorry, Mister Nabokov Junior, if I hurt your feelings - but I did add that I adore your father's writing, fart or not.

And this reply made my day. I was struck, once again, by the immediacy and the accessability of internet. Like many other modest bloggers I sometimes suspect that I keep a blog mainly for my own pleasure, not really caring much whether anyone else actually reads it. Now Dmitri Nabokov's reaction has once again reminded me that these posts are indeed read, sometimes by the most surprisingly well-connected people.

So I guess I'll keep blogging a while longer. Who knows who might answer me next?

Where we meet

2010-06-25T11:02:00.014+02:00

Among the many thrills of travelling, is the quiet pleasure of reading a story set in the place you're visiting.

A couple of years ago, for instance, my partner took one of Ian Rankin's marvellous crime novels along when we went to the Edinburgh Festival. We saw great theatre pieces and striking art exhibitions, but what made our stay really memorable, was drinking a pint or two in Inspector Rebus's favourite pubs, following his trail through the ancient streets, seeing the squares and the statues of the Scottish city through the eyes of a beloved fictional character - and the author who created him, of course.

Last year a friend visited Turkey with Orhan Pamuk's evocative masterpiece, Istanbul: Memories and the city, as her most important item of luggage. In fact, the desire to see Istanbul had sprung directly from reading the Nobel Prize winner's description of his home town, and she loved rereading the book while exploring the city. Another friend found that a first visit to Barcelona was vastly enhanced by Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, in which the Catalan capital is vividly depicted. And how can any reader discover the Egyptian city of Alexandria without being constantly reminded of Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet?

There are endless examples of this very particular reading pleasure, which I also experienced again recently during a short visit to Lisbon. Until then, my main literary reference for the Portugese capital was the inimitable Fernando Pessoa, whose lonely statue can be admired among the outdoor tables of one of the most popular eating, meeting and drinking establishments in the centre of town. But as my Lisbon guide happened to be a writer, I was taken to quite a few bookshops, some even selling English books. And this is where I met John Berger's Here Is Where we Meet.

Here Is Where we Meet is a collection of inter-related autobiographical 'stories' set in various European cities, starting with a strange encounter in Lisbon and ending with a memory of this encounter. The fact that I've visited all the other cities in the book too, obviously added to my enjoyment, but that wasn't essential. What was - essential - was that I started reading about Lisbon while I was still in Lisbon, recognising the names of streets and parks; sometimes even reading about a certain square while sitting in a cafe on the same square. Or reading about Lisbon's beautiful yellow trams while actually travelling in one of them...

'It's not any place, John, it's a meeting place. There aren't many cities left with trams, are there?'

This remark comes from the author's mother, whom he unexpectantly meets in Lisbon - truly unexpectantly, since she's been dead for 15 years and has never been to Lisbon while still alive. The remarkable conversation between living son and long-dead mother sets the tone for the rest of the book, an enchanting melange of magic and realism, short story and essay, novel and autobiograhy, a unique blend of genres that John Berger has long ago made his own.

Of course Berger has always been much more than just another storyteller. In 1972 he won the Booker Prize for the novel G, but his most influential work is probably still Ways of Seeing, a long essay published in the same year which has forever changed the way we look at art and its relationship to time, place, politics and life in general.

During the course of Here Is Where we Meet the author meets other people - some alive, some dead, all fascinating characters - in other places. About two thirds through the book, a single sentence is printed in the middle of an empty page: 'The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.' This simple phrase somehow sums up the mystery of the book; this and a sentence found on the back cover: 'No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead.'

And please note, you don't have to be religious, you don't have to believe in ghosts, angels or aliens, to appreciate the sensual details and the serious intelligence of Berger's writing. The penultimate piece, The Szum and the Ching, is a breath-takingly beautiful and life-affirming story of exile and homecoming set in London, Paris and the Polish countryside. But the first piece, Lisboa, remains my favourite, part of my memories of Lisbon and its yellow trams and its Fado bars and its Santa Junta lift - in which the dead descend to earth, according to the author's dead mother.

Apart from all these reasons for loving Lisboa - the city and the story - the book also provided me with a totally convincing explanation for the existence of Fado:

'Lisboetas often talk of a feeling, a mood, which they call saudade, usually translated as nostalgia, which is incorrect. Nostalgia implies a comfort, even an indolence such as Lisboa has never enjoyed. Vienna is the capital of nostalgia. This city is still, and has always been, buffeted by too many winds to be nostalgic. Saudade, I decided... was the feeling of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly. And Fado is its unforgettable music. Perhaps Lisboa is a special stopover for the dead, perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city.'

Remember that, next time you're in Lisbon, and don't say you weren't warned.

Did Nabokov like soccer?

2010-06-11T10:00:00.037+02:00

What would Vladimir Nabokov have thought of the World Cup? This is the niggling question at the back of my mind on the opening day of Fifa 2010 in South Africa.

I recently read Pale Fire, see, in which he wrote:
'I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores...'
And the list goes on.

Does this sound like someone who'd get excited about a soccer game? No, I'm afraid this makes the great writer sound like an elitist and opinionated old fart. And just in case you think I'm making the tyical reader's mistake 'of dotting all the i's with the author's head', as Nabokov himself so succintly put it, let me remind you that he admitted, in a famous BBC TV interview in 1962, that John Shade, the fictional poet composing this list of loathing in Pale Fire, 'does borrow some of my opinions'. And to prove his point, he quoted and endorsed the above passage.

I can understand a Russian-American intellectual detesting bull-fighting or swimming pools - but jazz? How could the author who produced some of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, loath jazz? Enough to break my jazz-loving little heart.

But apparently the wise man didn't detest all popular past-times. He was actually good enough in tennis and boxing to earn money teaching both these sports during his perambulatory young adulthood. Lolita's eponymous heroine happens to be an excellent tennis player, and a passage in the novel has been called 'the best description of tennis anywhere' in The New Yorker magazine. It starts like this: 'She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounce the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score...'

Don't you just love that 'white-lined time'?

Remember, also, that Nabokov's only child, Dmitri, became a professional racing car driver. True, these are all individual sports, not a universally popular team sport like soccer - so the jury is still out on Nabokov vs Fifa 2010. If anyone reading this could enlighten me, I'd be really grateful.

Because I adore this opinionated old fart's writing. Every time I read one of his novels, I'm overawed by what he managed to do with the English language - which was not even his mother tongue, for crying out loud! Indeed, what he called his 'private tragedy' - 'that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English' - could probably be regarded as one of the best things that ever happened to American literature.

Yes, he was ruthlessly opinionated, not hesitating to demolish his fellow-American literary contemporaries. He tried to read Saul Bellow's Herzog, he claimed, but it was so boring that he had to give up. And among his Russian predecessors, he confidently declared that Tolstoy was the greatest novelist and Pushkin the greatest poet - adding that this made him feel like a school master marking papers and that Dostoyevsky would probably be waiting at his office door, wanting to know why he got such poor results.

This is a fine example of Nabokov's irrepressible humour - the other important reason why his writing is so irresistible. Yes, he loved showing off and using complicated words, even inventing his own words, but his irony, wit and humour always saved him from pretentiousness. Anyway, how can any fanatic reader resist a book like Pale Fire, a marvellous mixture of poetry and prose, a campus novel hiding a detective story, a series of Russian dolls each revealing another literary genre? Pale Fire has been called 'a Jack-in-the-box, a Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem', and many other adjectives.

It can also be called, quite simply, a masterpiece. The second canto of the 999-line poem written by the fictional poet John Shade, around which the whole novel is constructed, begins with 10 unforgettable lines about the mystery of life and death:
'There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.

There was the day when I began to doubt
Man's sanity: How could he live without
Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom
Awaited conciousness beyond the tomb?'

Every time I read this, I can forgive Vladimir Nabokov absolutely anything - including his loathing of jazz - and I actually don't give a damn whether he liked soccer or not. Viva Vladimir viva!

The elegance of a French author

2010-05-25T09:10:00.017+02:00

I might have seemed lazy during the past month, but believe me, I have a solid excuse. I was travelling to promote a new novel, spending almost every night in a different bed and rising at the crack of dawn to catch the next flight. The good news is I met some wonderful writers along the way - about whose books I'll be blogging in future.

Let me start with someone close to home (I'm now referring to my European branches rather than my African roots): the French novelist Muriel Barbery. I was asked to interview the author of the astonishingly popular The Elegance of the Hedgehog at a literary festival in South Africa. She charmed the capacity audience with her intelligence, humour and warmth - three qualities also found in abundance in her best-selling novel.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog was a word-of-mouth phenomenon in France, where it was published in 2006, topping the best-seller lists for more than six months. Over the next four years close to five million copies have been sold in about forty languages - and Madame Barbery still finds it hard to believe that she has become such a successful writer. It is a book full of 'Profound Thoughts' (as Paloma, the precocious young protagonist, calls some of her diary entries) rather than action, and it is very much driven by character rather than plot. Or perhaps by place even more than character. It is a Parisian story, set in a specific street and a specific building - 7 Rue de Grenelle - an elegant apartment block inhabited by a few wealthy families. Among these privileged people are Paloma's parents and older sister, whose meaningless lives depress Paloma so much that she has decided to commit suicide on her 13th birthday.

The other protagonist, whose point of view is alternated with Paloma's, is a fifty-something widow - poor, unattractive, lonely - named Renée, the congièrge of the building. But Renée is an autodidact with a passion for literature, films, art, philosophy, and an inner life far richer than anyone else in the building. Paloma and Renée are both befriended by a new inhabitant, the mysterious Monsieur Ozu of Japanese origin, and then things start changing in their lives...

It's true that Paloma sometimes sounds just a little too clever - even for an extremely clever pre-adolescent - and that the outcome of her meeting with Renée could probably be foreseen. But don't be mistaken, this is not a silly fairytale with a happily-ever-after ending. (The ending is actually quite sad. Be warned.) No, it is an amusing and accessible story dealing with profound philosophical and metaphysical questions such as the meaning of life and the search for beauty, as all worthwhile literature should.

And if you happen to read Barbery's previous novel, The Gourmet (or The Gourmet's Feast as it is titled in the USA), which has only been translated into English after the international success of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, you will be delighted to meet many of the same characters in the same building. No, Barbery is not planning a best-selling series about the inhabitants of a building. The two books could be read in any order or each on its own. It reminded me a little of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy (Blue, White and Red), where a minor character in one film becomes the protagonist of one of the other two films.

And the cinema reference is not out of place in a novel that owes the name of one of its characters to the author's self-confessed passion for the work of the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Read it, enjoy it - and then try to see at least one of Ozu's magnificent films, like Tokyo Story, Early Spring or Late Autumn.

The trouble with Big Fat Books

2010-04-28T15:58:00.015+02:00

They say in every thick book there's a thin one trying to get out. It's probably partly true, as most clichés are. But sometimes thin books just don't do it for me.

Every once in a while (not too often)I want to get stuck in a BFB. That's a Big Fat Book, like Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, with 1474 pages of small, tight print - possibly the thickest one-volume novel I've ever read. Not that I've finished reading it. The trouble with BFBs is that it takes forever to read them... Of course, that's also the joy of BFBs.

I started reading A Suitable Boy ages ago. And I don't mean weeks or months, I mean years ago. In fact, I tackled this brick of a book not long after it was first published in 1993 - but I ran out of steam after only a couple of pages. The time wasn't right, the place wasn't right, I wasn't right for so many superfluous words. But I didn't get rid of the book. I suspected that I would get back to it some day.

Shortly before Christmas last year, while dusting my book shelves, I came across A Suitable Boy again and started (re)reading the first few pages. And this time it was a case of the right book at the right moment. Suddenly Voltaire's phrase, quoted as a motto at the start of the novel, made perfect sense: The superfluous, that very necessary thing... I couldn't stop reading.

Although I had to - several times over the next four months - because I had quite a lot of travelling to do. And the trouble with BFBs is that they don't travel well... They're too heavy to carry around in a handbag or pack in a suitcase. They're too thick to finish during a weekend - or even a week - away from home. Much more practical to travel with thin books that you can read though and get rid of along the way. Donate to friends, leave on a park bench, whatever. To make place in your suitcase to buy more books. Because real readers will always bring back books from their travels. Other people buy fridge magnets or mugs as souvenirs; we buy books. Thin ones, preferably.

So I had to leave A Suitable Boy behind when I flew to Cape Town early in January, and again when I flew to Portugal later in the same month, and again when I visited London and Cambridge in February, and again when I travelled to a writer's congress in Kimberley and a word festival in Stellenbosch in March. And each time, once I got back home, I had to speed-read through the hundreds of pages I'd already read, just to get back into the narrative flow. I began to feel like poor old Sisyphus, condemned to a neverending task. Except that this was rather a pleasurable task - otherwise I wouldn't have continued, would I?

Earlier this month I spent a weekend at a friend's home about two hours from where I live. Since I was going by car, not by plane, and was getting quite desperate to finish the damn BFB, I decided to take it with me. And then, woe is me, I forgot the book at my friend's home! Now if you leave a thin book somewhere, you can simply ask someone to pop it into a padded envelope and post it to you. But the trouble with BFBs is that they don't fit into envelopes...

The weight of a BFB turns it into quite an unwieldy and expensive parcel. So now I have to wait until I visit my friend again, or she visits me, whichever happens first. Meanwhile I'm turning to thinner books for comfort. But I'm really, really missing my BFB.

The trouble with BFBs is that after about a thousand pages, which is more or less where I got with this one, you are totally immersed in the character's lives. No matter how many thin books you read to forget about these characters, you yearn to know what happened to them, to Mrs Rupa Mehra's determined search for 'a suitable boy' to marry her stubborn daughter Lata, and to the Kapoors and the Khans and the Chatterjis and all the others.

I have another 500 odd pages to read before I'll be finished with A Suitable Boy. Since it took me more than four months(!) to read the first thousand pages, I'll probably need at least two more months to read the rest. And the book is already falling apart. (The front cover came loose, so I started using it as a page marker.) And since I've never had to wait half a year to get to the end of a novel, I have no idea what the state of the book will be by the time I finally reach the last page. But I fear the worst.

The trouble with BFBs is that they don't travel well and that they don't fit into envelopes and that they fall apart and haunt your dreams and never offer instant gratification. But then again, the constant postponing of pleasure is just one of the many delights of a really good, really big, really fat book. Come to think of it, maybe I should try and postpone the pleasure for a few more months?

Say cheese - and buy a book

2010-04-17T11:43:00.030+02:00

What is the connection between a small round goat's milk cheese and one of the biggest bookstores in France?

The answer lies in Banon, a lovely little village in the mountains of Provence where the eponymous cheese - wrapped in chestnut leaves and bound with raffia strings - is produced. Tourists used to travel to Banon only to taste the celebrated cheese, but about twenty years ago a former carpenter, Joël Gattefossé, opened an independent bookshop in an old mansion in the isolated village - and against all expectations it has grown into a thriving enterprise and one of the major tourist attractions of the region.

Nowadays the bookshop with the delightful name of Le Bleuet (bleuet is French for the bright blue cornflower) is open 7 days a week throughout the year, except for Christmas and New Year's Day, and book lovers flock to Banon from far and wide to 'taste' its books along with its cheese. Tens of thousands of books (mainly in French, with a small selection of mostly tourism titles in English, German and other languages) are stored on shelves reaching up to the ceiling in several rooms on several storeys. And in summer you can take a break in a peaceful tea garden if your head starts spinning from turning too many pages. A true Ali Baba's cave for greedy bibliophiles!

It was a medical doctor who'd first told me about Banon's hidden treasure cave quite a few years ago. Whenever I consulted her about any ailment or health problem in the following years, she would eagerly enquire whether I'd made my annual pilgrimage to Le Bleuet. Then we'd usually start discussing books - and I'd leave her consulting rooms feeling inexplicably better, even before taking a drop of medicine. Maybe it's not an apple a day, but a book a day that keeps the doctor away?

During the past long winter I once again found an excuse to make a detour through Banon on the way home from a friend in Manosque. On this rainy Sunday morning I was accompanied by my husband and 10-year-old daughter. Husband immediately rushed to the room with the crime fiction (his taste in this genre ranges from Ian Rankin's magnificent Rebus and Deon Meyer's fast-paced thrillers to Alexander McCall Smith's gentle and humorous No 1 Ladies' Detective series), daughter draped herself on the floor in front of the juvenile comic books (or BDs, as they're called in France, for bandes dessinées), while I wandered off to browse through the literary fiction.

One of the joys of Le Bleuet is that books don't disappear from the shelves if they don't sell within a couple of weeks, as is increasingly the case in most bookshops. Here books are allowed to stay put for months or years, patiently waiting for the right customer to come in at the right moment and lift the book off the shelf with a soft sigh of satisfaction. Sometimes even a shout of pleasure.

We spent a few blissful hours 'book tasting' and each chose two or three titles to take home with us. My selection included two novels by Marie Ndiaye, who recently became the first black woman in France to win the prestigeous Prix Goncourt for Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women). Hopefully the powerful prize will help this woman to be more widely translated and be appreciated by Anglo-Saxon readers too. As far as I know only one of her novels, Rosie Carpe, is currently available in English.

By the time we emerged from this cave of treasures, all the other shops in the village had closed for lunch. So we couldn't buy the famous cheese. Not to take home, anyway - but we enjoyed a scrumptious lunch in a little restaurant across the street, where the choice of cheese at the end of the meal included Banon. Of course.

A great way of spending a rainy Sunday, enjoying good cheese and good books. And it gets even better in spring when you can really benefit from the fresh mountain air. Banon's annual Fête du Fromage is celebrated next month, on Sunday 16 May. Make a note of the date if you happen to be anywhere in the vicinity - and if not, visit the village whenever you get the chance. They say cheese goes with anything, don't they? Well, here's the proof that Banon definitely goes with books.

Love is in the air

2010-03-22T13:03:00.017+01:00

After an exceptionally long and rigorous winter I'm overjoyed to spot the first tulips stubbornly pushing their yellow heads through a last patch of melting snow. Contemplating this pretty picture through my kitchen window, I raise my eyes to the clay-tile roof across the street and observe a randy pigeon frantically trying to mount all the feathered females in sight. Yes, spring is in the air.

Flowers are budding, birds are fornicating, and all around me human beings are falling in love. (I live in a house with teenagers.) And I suddenly have this irresistible urge to read love poetry. Fortunately I have the perfect book at hand: Penguin's Poems for Love, selected by Laura Barber, a brand new anthology presented to me by a poetic friend, Isobel Dixon, who has two short and potent poems included in the impressive selection.

What I really appreciate about this beautiful book - beautiful in appearance and contents - is that the poems are not arranged in the predictable chronological order. The result is that some centuries-old poems suddenly seem almost shockingly modern, while some contempory poems acquire a classic sheen. A handful of the usual suspects like Pope, Byron and, of course, Shakespeare (for how could Shakespeare not feature in any serious collection of love poetry?), are so famous that one doesn't need to see their birth dates to place them in their historical context, but a few of the lesser-known names (or lesser-known to me, at any rate) provided a pleasant surprise when I checked their birth dates in the Index at the back of the book.

Laura Barber arranged her selection in a more original way, using Elizabeth Barret Browning's evergreen sonnet How do I love thee? as a map to chart the ways of poetic love. (How do I love thee? Let me count the ways./ I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/ My soul can reach...) Barret Browning (1806 - 1861) continues in this vein: I love thee freely... I love thee purely... I love thee with a passion... and concludes: I shall but love thee better after death. So Barber presents her chosen poems according to adjectives, with captions such as Suddenly, Secretly, Persuasively, Passionately, Brutally, Bitterly and, after Finally, also Eternally. Of course. We are dealing with love poetry, remember.

But not everything here is romantic. On the contrary, some of the poems are refreshingly cynical, humorous, even absurd. Realistic, as love has to be when it wants to survive. And when it comes to realism in love, Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 is as delightful today as it was four centuries ago: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.../ If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun.../And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ As any she belied with false compare.

Many of the poems are sensual, sexy, lustful; others are almost unbearably tender and sad. Some of my favourites deal with older love, love that endures past youthful passion, such as Margaret Atwood's Sunset II: Sunset, now that we're finally in it/ is not what we thought. This one ends with the evocative lines: This is you on my skin somewhere/ in the form of sand.

Whatever mood of love you happen to be in, you'll find an appropriate poem here. You'll rediscover old flames and be titillated by new possibilities. I was overwhelmed by two poems of Elizabeth Bishop, whom I'd somehow never thought of as a 'love poet'. Too 'intelligent', I had probably presumed - as if intelligence should be separated from love! Well, now that I've read One Art, on 'the art' of losing a lover, and the heart-breakingly beautiful Breakfast Song, I look at Bishop with something like awe.

Read Breakfast Song - preferably over breakfast - and you'll see what I mean. It starts like this: My love, my saving grace,/ your eyes are awfully blue./ I kiss your funny face,/ your coffee-flavoured mouth... Then it turns to death, in the same pure and simple way, before finally returning to the saving grace of the beloved's awfully blue eyes - 'early and instant blue'.

Pure and simple joy. As is Isobel Dixon's two-line poem, Truce: You bear the hatchet./ I'll bury my heart. Poems don't have to be as lengthy and rigorous as this past winter. Sometimes they can be as instantly overwhelming as the first tulips of spring.

A woman's book?

2010-03-09T09:42:00.021+01:00

To celebrate International Women's Day - rather late than never - I want to praise a book by a woman whose writing I've been admiring for many years.

The British novelist and Booker Prize winner AS Byatt, like most serious female writers, would probably not appreciate the label 'women's writing'. They regard themselves as writers, who happen to be women, writing for whoever wants to read them. The problem with 'women's writing', ten years into the 21st century, is still that invisible but always present prefix 'just'. Just women's writing. Implying something not quite as good as the norm, produced by the other half of the human race, which is simply called 'writing'.

At a recent writer's festival in South Africa I had to take part, once again, in the inevitable panel discussion on 'women's writing'. A male member of the audience made the provocative - but probably true - statement that a sensitive reader could correctly guess the gender of the authors of ninety percent of fictional works even if their names were not printed on the cover. This wasn't a value judgement, he stressed, just a recognition of difference. Most - but not all - female fiction authors write differently from most - but not all - male fiction authors.

And one of the notable differences, according to various audience members, was that women tended to give more detailed descriptions of the outward appearances of people and places. If this is true - and do let me know if you disagree! - AS Byatt's writing is undoubtedly more female than male. One of the joys of this 'relentlessly talky' author, as she was once called in The New York Times Book Review, is her solid command of detail even when she deals with the most slippery intellectual ideas.

The novel Possession, which won the Booker Prize in 1990, first drew my attention to this fiercely intelligent, wildly imaginative author. During the next twenty years I read quite a few of her other books and was particularly enchanted by Babel Tower and The Matisse Stories, both show-pieces of Byatt's vast knowledge of the history of art and literature.

Her latest novel, The Children's Book (shortlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize), provides all the delights and, I have to reluctantly admit, some of the irritations of her lush, expansive style. Once again it is a big, fat, serious book about art and literature and secrets and relationships. Once again it starts off in Victorian England, sweeping the reader along to the thrills of the Paris Exhibition in 1889 and the political turmoil in Germany at the turn of the century, through the utopian ideals of the Edwardian era, right up to the trenches and the horror of the First World War. Once again it is an 'old-fashioned' novel with a strong story line (and I mean this as a compliment) by 'an author who behaves as if James Joyce never existed - and gets away with it', as another reviewer described her.

This time the protagonist is Olive Wellwood, a successful Victorian writer of children's stories who raises a large brood of children, not all her own as it turns out, in a rambling house in the countryside. For each of her children she writes an ongoing fantasy story, a beautiful private book bound in a particular colour and kept on a special shelf. Numerous other narrative threads are woven into this intricate tapestry: a working-class boy from the potteries joins the family; a mysterious German puppeteer arrives with his puppets; the children, their cousins and their friends grow up in an enchanting storybook world, totally unprepared for the war and the darkness ahead.

I can't remember when last I read a book which thrilled and irritated me in such equal measures. It is not enough for AS Byatt to tell us about the fairy tale that Olive writes for one of her children; no, she has to show us the whole story, written in Olive's Victorian style. Remember the fake Victorian poetry in Possession? That really impressed me. But this time it isn't just the well-known writer's trick of showing rather than telling. It's more like showing off. The same goes for the puppeteer's work; we get a blow-by-blow account of each puppet show, often based on ancient fairy tales. Even for a reader like me, who adores fairy tales, it becomes too much of a good thing - which is never a good thing.

But then, the value of many really good novels, like handwoven carpets, often lies in their very imperfection. In their lack of restraint, their flashes of brilliance, forming a whole which is inexplicably greater than the sum of its uneven parts. And that has nothing to do with gender. The Children's Book is a wonderful story you won't easily forget, whether you're male or female, written by an author who happens to be a woman.

And if this makes it a woman's book, well, then so be it.

The winning team

2010-02-18T21:14:00.020+01:00

One of the more agreeable ripple effects of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, is that South Africa is suddenly all the rage, not only on sport fields but also in the field of cinema and literature.

I might not recognise soccer superstars like Beckham or Renaldo if I fell over them in the street, but I surely recognise the prolific talent in a spate of recent movies like District 9, Invictus and Disgrace, all based on South African stories.

And talking of stories: At the London Book Fair from 19 to 21 April the spotlight will fall on South African writing with authors like Antjie Krog, Marlene van Niekerk, Deon Meyer, Breyten Breytenbach and quite a few others taking part. Do keep this in mind if you live anywhere close to Britain and are interested in books from the southern tip of Africa. And if you don't yet know South African literature, well, this is the year of getting acquainted. No more excuses.

Even here in France, South African authors seem to be riding the crest of the literary wave. Three months ago Karel Schoeman was awarded the prestigeous Prize for the Best Foreign Book of 2009 (PMLE) for the French translation of his novel Hierdie lewe (see my blog post titled 'This literary life', November 2009) and last month Breyten Breytenbach won the equally impressive Max Jacobs Prize for the best foreign poetry volume of the past year for Outre-Voix/Voice Over. The poems in this bilingual French-English publication (described as 'a nomadic conversation' with his Palestinian friend and fellow poet, the late Mahmoud Darwich) was originally written in Breytenbach's mother tongue, Afrikaans.

Both these prizes have glorious histories of at least half a century, but had never before been given to a South African author. For two Afrikaans authors to win both these prizes within the space of three months is a major achievement. Quite as great as winning a Football World Cup, in my immodest opinion.

Catching the catcher(s)

2010-02-07T12:48:00.028+01:00

It took the death of JD Saliger last week to make me realise that two of my all-time favourite books deal with catchers and catching. Actually three, if I count Don DeLilo's Underworld, which starts with an interminable baseball game, and in which a ball from this game plays a major role. So once again catching is of the essence - rather ironic for a reader like me who has never had any ball sense.

But in Underworld there are no catches or catchers in the title, as there are in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Another difference is that I read the last two books when I was very young and impressionable. Who is it who said that it is perhaps only in our youth that books can truly influence us? Before the age of twenty we are like blank pages. Even a single sentence can make a huge difference to a previously empty page. Now that my page is all messy with decades of scribblings, books don't influence me as easily or as profoundly as when I was young. Sad but true.

Or maybe it's not so sad. Maybe I should rejoice that as a young and naive reader I was influenced by books as great as Catch-22 and The Catcher in the Rye. These novels gave me an emotional compass which I used to steer the rest of my reading life. They showed me that 'good' doesn't have to mean 'difficult', and that a serious story about a serious subject can be really entertaining and - sometimes - also really funny.

The only consolation, when a beloved author dies, is that he lives on through his books, often even acquiring a whole new readership immediately after his death. There are apparently two great career moves for a writer who wants to sell more books: one is to give in to Hollywood, the other is to give in to death. During the past week my adolescent son and his friends were frequently confronted with JD Salinger's name - not on the arts pages of newspapers, but on the front page. Or, more appropiately for their age group, on internet and on their mobile phones, as hard news. Some of these young people even started wondering about the meaning of a title as catchy as The Catcher in the Rye. What is 'a rye', one of my son's friends wanted to know. Honestly.

Which sent me back to my pale yellow Penguin version of this classic coming of age novel published nearly 60 years ago. In Chapter 22 Holden Caulfield, one of the most unforgettable adolescent characters ever created in fiction, talks to his sister Phoebe about what he wants to do in life.

'You know that song "If a body catch a body comin' through the rye"? I'd like - '
'It's "If a body meet a body coming through the rye"!' old Phoebe said. 'It's a poem. By Robert Burns.'
'I know it's a poem by Robert Burns.'
She was right, though. It is 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'. I didn't know it then, though.
'I thought it was "If a body catch a body",' I said. 'Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.'

There you are, I said to my son's friend. 'Do yourself a favour and read the rest.' This single passage was enough to remind me why I had loved the book when I'd been my son's age - and why I still loved it when I reread it fifteen years later. (Now another fifteen years have passed, so I guess I'm ready to read it again.) Salinger had an ear for dialogue that simply jumped off the page. The amazing thing is, it still does, half a century later.

Im memory of Salinger I also looked up Robert Burns' poem, Comin Thro' the Rye. The Scottish farmer Burns, known as 'the ploughman's poet', wrote this in 1782, and it remains an enchanting ballad of sensual liberty.

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl' ken?

Do yourself a favour and read the rest at: http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/Comin_Thro_The_.htm?p=1

Salinger was in the unique position, among important post-World War 2 writers, of 'dying' fifty years before his actual death at the age of 91 last week. Ever since he went into hiding in Cornish, New Hampshire, he was as good as dead to the literary world. His last book was published in 1963 and his last work to appear in print was a story (Hapworth 16,1924)in the June 19 1965 issue of The New Yorker. But his few books never stopped selling; The Catcher in the Rye alone has sold more than sixty-five million copies, at an annual rate of about 250 000 copies. These are the kind of sales figures most living writers can only dream of achieving, perhaps for a year or two. To sell like this, consistently, for half a century, is truly extraordinary. And now that the author is officially dead, the sales will no doubt increase.

There is also the possibility of posthumous publication. In a rare press interview in 1974 he told The New York Times, 'There is a marvelous peace in not publishing... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.'

The burning question, of course, is what the writer did with whatever he wrote during the last fifty years. Maybe he destroyed everything. Maybe he wrote the same phrase over and over. But maybe, just maybe, we'll soon be able to read another great story from The Catcher.

No phony goddam crap - to use three of Holden Caulfield's favourite words.

Now that would really be something, wouldn't it?

On borrowing books

2010-01-02T17:55:00.027+01:00

Like almost all passionate readers I prefer to own the books I really love. But since my budget has never been big enough to satisfy my hunger for new books, I often have to opt for the practicality of borrowing books.

Ah, borrowing books - a beautiful but dangerous road if ever there was one. Whenever I borrow a book from a friend, I risk falling into one of two treacherous traps. Either I love the book so much that I can't bear to live without it ever again. In which case I absolutely have to buy my own copy as soon as possible. Preferably even before I return the borrowed book. So much for stretching my budget by borrowing books.

Or, even worse, I enjoy the book so much that I can't possibly return it to its owner because anyone can see that it has been thoroughly enjoyed: caressed; carried around; opened and closed numerous times in numerous places; collecting small scars, slight stains, even faint odours along the way. In which case I simply have to buy a new copy for the old owner. And keep this slightly tattered one for myself. So much for stretching my budget...

Not that I mind the tattered look. I believe books take on a secret life of their own as they are read and reread and borrowed and swopped and sold and shared. To me reading is not an abstract intellectual or emotional experience, but a physical, sensual adventure in which the look and feel and even the smell of the book offer as much delight as the words and wisdom it contains.

Therefore I prefer not to borrow books in a pristine condition. It's a little like sleeping with a virgin, I imagine. One doesn't want to spoil the pleasure by feeling guilty afterwards. No - rather lend me a book that has obviously been loved by someone before me.

Every once in a while, though, I fall for a 'virginal' book on someone else's shelf, a book that the owner has not had the time or inclination to read, and then I start perusing, perhaps even reading a few pages, and before I know it, I'm hooked. I have to - absolutely, immediately, urgently - read this book.

This happened again quite recently, while spending a few nights in a friend's guest room. Temptingly close to my bed was an immaculate copy of John Updike's Due Considerations (2007), a collection of essays, criticism and short pieces about absolutely anything under the sun. This sixth - and sadly, final - volume of Updike's non-fiction prose was published eight years after More Matter, which in turn followed eight years after Odd Jobs. When the author died exactly a year ago, I posted a blog entry about his influential fiction(January 2009). This time I want to praise his non-fiction.

Due Considerations is a big, fat book of more than 700 pages - the index alone covers 30 pages! - a fine example of the variety and depth of Updike's interests and passions. 'Assembled here are pieces on...Shakespeare, Henry James, Hemingway, Albrecht Dürer, a baseball star, sex in literature, poker, undergraduate life and plenty about the New Yorker', as the Literary Review stated - and then we haven't mentioned the brilliant pieces on cars, Coco Chanel, a visit to China and many, many more. Updike has an opinion about everything, it seems, but he delivers it with such unfailing good humor, fierce intelligence and flashy style that it doesn't matter whether you agree with him or not. As the Sunday Times claimed, these pages 'don't only pay handsome tribute to the pleasures of reading. They abundantly provide them.'

What more could any enthusiastic reader ask from any book about reading (among other things)?

It also happens to be the perfect bedside companion - or guest-room book - because you can dip into it at leisure and find something delectable on almost every page, close it when you grow sleepy, read another page on a totally different subject when you wake up. This is how I started reading it in my friend's home, simply hoping for a few nights' entertainment, but I soon wanted more...

So when my friend kindly offered to lend it to me, I took it home and devoured it from cover to cover - and realised a little too late that the book wasn't looking quite as immaculate as when I first laid my eyes on it. (And to be honest, by this time I couldn't bear the thought of parting with a book that had provided me with so much reading pleasure.) I was obliged to find another copy for my friend - and quickly too.

Thank heaven for internet book shops. Now my friend has her new virgin copy to read, if she ever gets around to reading it, and I'm thrilled to have the frequently fondled familiar old copy next to my own bed. Together with heaps of other books I recently read or still want to read, tomorrow, next week, next month.

To all the readers out there, may 2010 be filled with fabulous books - bought, begged or borrowed - and enough spare hours to enjoy all of them.

Picture this

2009-12-02T14:34:00.017+01:00

Pictures, you asked. Pictures you'll get. Well, actually only a few of you suggested that I might add pictures to my posts to attract people who are too lazy to read. Personally I don't think a blog on reading should try to attract people too lazy to read - but I thought I might as well offer the eager reader something besides words, words, words, as Hamlet so memorably mumbled.

To tell the truth, I've been toying with the idea of adding pictures for quite a while. We live in a visual age, after all, no use denying that. Even really serious novelists like WG Sebald had made use of photographs in their work during recent years. Not that I'm aiming for a really serious blog. The idea has always been to have fun producing it - and if I can provide a bit of enjoyment to those reading it, so much the better.

Still, I couldn't see the point of simply using publicity pictures of book covers or authors with my posts. Nor did I want to exhibit myself on my blog; that's why my official profile picture shows only one eye and a few fingers, the rest of me is comfortably hidden behind a book. But then this very same profile photo got me wondering. I asked myself how many ways one could possibly find of hiding behind books. And I started experimenting...

So today I offer you a non-view of myself (you'll have to trust me on this) behind a few of the books I've praised during the past year. A picture truly paints a thousand words, I realise once again. I also added pictures of me hiding behind other books to some of my older posts. Do have a look and let me know what you think. I'm beginning to suspect this could turn into quite an enjoyable past-time - not Hide and Seek, but Hide and Read.

I even used a picture of a young family member (or at least the arms and tongue of a young family member) with a post, The president, the professor and the police officer, from August this year, because the colour of her T-shirt and tongue went rather well with the splash of bright pink on the cover of Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty. I might use family and friends in future too, but rest assured, they'll always be anonymous behind a book. (Or next to a book or under a book or whatever.) This is still a blog about the joys of reading, not about the joys of family and friends.

Mostly, though, it will be me you'll see (or not see, preferably) with a book. If nothing else, it could at least prove that I've physically handled the book I claim to have read. Just in case you had any doubts.

Meanwhile, happy reading.

This literary life

2009-11-16T20:54:00.042+01:00

Last week my adopted country honoured one of the great living writers of my country of birth - and not a moment too soon.

Karel Schoeman's Afrikaans novel, Hierdie lewe, was published quite a long time ago in South Africa (1993 to be exact), where it won the Hertzog Prize, the biggest cherry on the local literary cake. Although many of the author's other novels have also received important awards in South Africa, his works are not widely translated and he is not nearly as well-known internationally as his literary compatriots JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, André P Brink and nowadays even Deon Meyer. Hierdie lewe had to wait nearly two decades before it finally found a French publisher, the relatively unknown Phébus, which published Pierre-Marie Finkelstein's translation earlier this year under the title Cette Vie.

Et voilà! Within a few months the Afrikaans novel wins France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (PMLE) 2009 - which can be directly translated as Prize for the Best Foreign Book- a highly respected literary prize with a proud 61-year history. You simply have to look at the list of previous prize-winners to realise that this is la cour des grands, as the French say, 'the playground of the big kids'.

From Nobel laureates like Gabriel García Márquez and, more recently, Orhan Pamuk (who was crowned in 2002, before he won the Nobel Prize) to many notable names from the Anglo-Saxon literary universe like Salman Rushdie, John Updike, John Fowles, Peter Carey, Philip Roth, Graham Swift and Anthony Burgess - they have all received the PMLE during the past few decades.

The list is also a fascinating mix of 'serious' and more 'popular' authors, with recent laureates like the American Nicole Krauss for The History of Love and the Spanish Carlos Ruiz Zafón for The Shadow of the Wind. And the crowned novels are translated from an impressive variety of languages. Of course the 'big' languages like German (Günter Grass and others), Spanish (Mario Vargas Llosa and others), Russian (Vassili Grossman and others) and Japanese (Yasunari Kawabata and others) are well represented, but it is a pleasant surprise to spot so many 'smaller' languages on the list: Estonian (Jaan Kross), Lituanian (Youozas Baltouchis), Polish (Bruno Shulz), Hungarian (Péter Nádas), Swedish (Per Olof Enquist)... And now, for the first time, also Afrikaans.

Hierdie lewe (This Life) presents us with an old woman on her deathbed, recalling her long and lonely life in an isolated farming community in the Roggeveld towards the end of the nineteenth century. Since this is supposed to be a personal blog, I might as well confess that it is not my personal favourite among Schoeman's books - perhaps because I read it too soon after the Australian Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, another novel dealing with an old woman on her deathbed, which really knocked me out.

I know, I know, 'comparisons are odious', as John Donne stated, and White's magnificent novel convinced even the judges of the the Nobel Prize to crown him in 1973, but there you are. I've always preferred Schoeman's earlier 'n Ander land (Another Country), which also earned him the Hertzog Prize a decade before Hierdie lewe, and once again gives us a dying protagonist at the end of the nineteenth century. This time it is an ailing Dutchman who comes to the dry climate of the Orange Free State for health reasons. His alienation and slow acceptance of death are brilliantly depicted, and the landscape of the Free State (where Schoeman was born) is beautifully drawn.

I have to admit, though, that I find most of Schoeman's novels brilliant but too 'bloodless' for my taste, too dry and too cold for someone like me who's always searching for Roy Campbell's famous bloody horse when reading fiction. From the poem On Some South African Novelists:

You praise the firm restraint with which they write -

I'm with you there, of course:

They use the snaffle and the curb all right,

But where's the bloody horse?

Still, I feel unexpectedly proud that Hierdie lewe is not only the first Afrikaans novel to win the PMLE, but in fact the first South African novel on the long list. The South African Nobel laureates JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, who both write in English, have never featured among the winners. Not that I prefer Schoeman to Coetzee; in fact, Coetzee's later novels please me precisely because I'm beginning to see at least the skeleton of the bloody horse. But I do think it worth mentioning that Coetzee, in spite of his far wider international renown, has not yet conquered the jury of the PMLE.

So, yes, I am grateful that a novel in my mother tongue has finally joined this illustrious list of foreign works honoured by the finicky French. Schoeman had to wait sixteen years for the honour - but in the literary world, as in life, it is always better to arrive late than not to show up at all. Dankie, Karel Schoeman.

Out of the writer's vault

2009-11-09T16:08:00.027+01:00

No, I haven't disappeared in cyberspace. I just went MIA (Missing In Action), busy, busy, busy writing my own book instead of writing about other people's books.

Not that I stopped reading while writing – I only stop reading to breathe and sleep – I simply took a short break from writing about reading.

Now I’m BIA (Back in Action), trying to recall the reading delights of the past few weeks. The novel that stands out in my memory, is Anne Michaels’s latest, The Winter Vault. Like many other readers, I was absolutely enchanted by her previous novel, Fugitive Pieces. This 1997 Orange Prize winner - praised by the great John Berger as ‘the most important book I have read for forty years’- tells the story of a Greek geologist (Athos) and a small Polish boy (Jakob) whose lives are transformed by the Second World War. The writing was described as ‘incandescent’ and the language as ‘electric with life’.

A hard act to follow, indeed. Besides, it is always a bit of a gamble to read a second book by an author whose first book you adored. Your expectations are so high that some form of disappointment is almost inevitable. So let me get this off my chest: The Winter Vault is an excellent book – but it didn’t thrill and exhiliarate me as Fugitive Pieces had.

Anne Michaels is a poetic, lyrical novelist, if ever there was one, a superb stylist whose language delights the ear, the eye and the heart on every page. I have to admit, though, that in this latest novel the dialogue sometimes sounded a little too stylised to me. The way her characters speak – all those lovely, long, often lyrical monologues – was simply not realistic enough to sustain the suspension of disbelief that I find vital to the enjoyment of fiction. I kept thinking, no, surely people don’t talk this way? Do they?

Still, the novel offers more than enough reading pleasure, with a narrative spanning three continents and many decades, as well as quite a few memorable characters who are all displaced, lost and searching in different ways. Michaels has a particular talent for illustrating how huge historical events shape small human lives. This time water, rather than war, causes most of the havoc. The displacement of people caused by the construction of gigantic dams, in Egypt and North America, is the thread running throughout this fictional tapestry.

If this sounds more like engineering or social history than story-telling, well, the author has evidently done an enormous amount of research, but she never loses touch with her characters, their emotions and their experiences. The Winter Vault stays a story - and therein lies its glory.

Pity about the dialogue, though.

Summer of music and poetry

2009-08-22T18:28:00.017+02:00

This has truly been a summer of music and poetry - and not only because we commemorated the 40th anniversary of the famous Woodstock Festival.

Every summer I attend a few great music concerts - rock, jazz or classical - in the magnificent amphitheatres that the ancient Romans left behind in the south of France. This year I've been exceptionally fortunate in my choice and spent a couple of glorious hours in the company of Marianne Faithfull, David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) and Leonard Cohen, among others. The problem is that all these musical excursions - together with the usual seasonal avalanche of social invitations and visitors from far and near - played havoc with my reading habits. Which is where the poetry came in.

Whenever I struggle to find time for the hefty literary novels I adore, I turn to poetry. Short and sweet. Sometimes short and bitter. Sometimes not so short at all, but still manageable if you have only half an hour's reading time while waiting in the queue for David Byrne's show. I don't know much about poetry. I just know that I love certain poems, whether I 'understand' them or not. It's a little like human relationships, I guess. Often we can't explain rationally why we love the people we love.

Suffice to say I see myself as one of those 'some people' in Wislawa Szymborska's poem Some people like poetry - which happens to be one of my favourite poems. It starts like this:

Some people -

that means not everyone.

Not even most of them, only a few.

Not counting school, where you have to,

and poets themselves,

you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Read the rest, if you don't know it yet, in Szymborska's Poems New and Collected 1957 - 1997.

I reread the Polish Szymborska this summer, along with some evergreens like the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the South African Antjie Krog. I also read some fresh young Afrikaans voices, like Carina Stander (Die vloedbos sal weer vlieg), Loftus Marais (Staan in die algemeen nader aan vensters) and Danie Marais, not related to Loftus (Al is die maan 'n misverstand). And I discovered some new poets, not new in the sense that they're young or unknown, but still marvellously new to me because I was not aware of them, although they might have been publishing for years, even decades. This is one of the advantages of not knowing much about poetry. You discover old-but-new poets all the time.

My latest discovery is Tony Hoagland, an American poet who was born in 1953, followed The Grateful Dead at some stage, and has been publishing since the eighties. Already in 2003 his collection What Narcissism Means to Me was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. So I suppose you can say he's been around.

I discovered Hoagland when another poet sent me one of Hoagland's poems - appropriately, I thought, since poets themselves seem to be the only people who really know the work of other poets - and it was such a fine example of the right poem at the right moment that I immediately fell under Hoagland's spell. I was on my way to one of this summer's musical delights, the Marianne Faithfull concert in Lyon, when the poem Are you experienced? popped up on my computer screen. It is a wonderful, nostalgic and funny description of a rock festival where 'Jimi Hendrix played Purple Haze on stage,/ scaling his guitar like a black cat/ up a high-voltage, psychedelic fence', and the poet was desperately searching for his car because 'I wanted to have something familiar/ to throw up next to'.

The haze I was in

was actually ultraviolet, the murky lavender

of the pills I had swallowed

several hundred years before,

pills that had answered so many of my questions,

they might as well have been guided tours

of miniature castles and museums,

microscopic Sistine Chapels

with room for everyone inside.

But now the poet found himself 'unable to recall the kind and colour of the car I owned', and unable to guess 'that one day this moment/ cleaned up and polished/ would itself become/ some kind of credential.'

Experience, indeed. Jimi Hendrix was one of the most brilliant victims of the excesses of the sixties. I read the poem a few hours before I watched Marianne Faithfull - surely one of the ultimate survivors of that wild decade. She's been everywhere, she's done everything, she's got the scars to prove it. Hoagland's words are a glorious post scriptum to that age of sex, drugs and rock and roll, a lament for the victims, an ode to the survivors.

Read the poem for yourself, read other poems by the same poet, read other poems by other poets. As for me, I'm going to continue reading poetry now that the days are getting shorter again. Who knows, it might even turn into a winter of music and poetry...

The president, the professor and the police officer

2009-08-03T22:01:00.015+02:00

Once again I'm amazed at how real life can sometimes come crashing into the fiction one is reading.

I posted my first blog entry last year on the day that Barack Obama was elected President of the USA, because I realised that I was reading the perfect book at the perfect moment: The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers. And last week, as Obama had to deal with the first potentially damaging 'racial incident' of his presidency - after a prominent black professor from a New England university town had been arrested for burglary in his own home - I was reading a remarkable campus novel about black academics and their fancy homes in, yes, you guessed, a New England university town.

Zadie Smith's On Beauty , winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006, would have been a joy to discover under any circumstances, but the media blitz following the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates - by a white police officer who mistook him for a burglar - added some authentic seasoning to a tasty dish of make-believe and satire.

Smith, in case you've forgotten, was seen as something of a literary Wunderkind after the success of her debut novel, White Teeth, while she was still in her early twenties. Her next book, The Autograph Man, proved that she was not simply a shooting star, and On Beauty, written before she turned thirty, confirmed that she was indeed 'the author setting the bar for her generation', as The Scotsman claimed. She was praised even more profusely in The New Statesman: 'Smith can outwrite all but a few of her contemporaries, and everyone her own age.'

After reading this wise and witty and sexy and stylish campus novel, I can only agree. Smith is an astonishingly accomplished author - not only for her age, but for any age - and On Beauty is a story with emotional substance and intellectual depth, which also happens to be very, very funny. Her characters are completely convincing three-dimensional people of various ages, races and social classes; her dialogue is always pitched perfectly, whoever is speaking; and the plot, full of unexpected twists and delightful turns, provides pure narrative pleasure.

So if you're still looking for a book to carry you through these long lazy days of summer (or long dark winter nights, if you're living on the other half of the planet), hurry up and read this one. And while you're enjoying the humorous depiction of black intellectuals and art critisism and campus politics and family relations and marital infidelity - and much, much more - do spare a thought for the real-life black intellectual who was recently invited, by the first black president of his country, to share a beer with the white police sergeant who'd arrested him.

One more proof that life outdoes even the best satirical fiction, time and again.

In praise of prizes

2009-06-29T21:25:00.021+02:00

You might remember that in January I published a post (Local stays lekker), confessing that two of my favourite books of last year happened to be South African, nothing to do with patriotism, just pure reading pleasure. So I was thrilled earlier this month when Anne Landsman and Michiel Heyns won two of the top literary awards in the country, the M Net Prize and the Herman Charles Bosman Prize, for The Rowing Lesson and Bodies Politic respectively.

Congratulations to two novelists who really deserve recognition - quite apart from the fact that I count them among my own favourites.

As all readers know, literary awards can be a frustrating business. Sometimes you hate the book being crowned, sometimes you can't understand why a wonderful book has been overlooked. Awards are the fruit of so much more than literary merit, depending on the personal tastes and moods of the judges, on politics and publishers' promotion, on timeliness and luck and sometimes even on the looks or age of the writer.

Which is why the French Prix de l'Inapercu, also recently awarded, is such a great idea. It could be translated as Prize of the Unnoticed - and it does exactly that. It notices the unnoticed, awards a deserving book that somehow got lost among the stacks of books published each year, suffering the sad fate of being ignored by critics as well as buyers. This year the winner is Dominique Conil's En espérant la guerre (Hoping for War), published by Actes Sud, which now gets a second chance to be seen in book shops, talked about on radio, reviewed by magazines - and, of course, discovered by readers.

I wonder if other countries have similar second-chance awards? Any means of informing discerning readers of good writers they might otherwise never discover, gets an enthusiastic shout of approval from me. As it is, I live in dread that somewhere out there is a really GREAT contemporary author whom I might not get to know before I die. You know what I mean?

Until about two years ago, for instance, I'd never come across the name - let alone read the all too rare novels - of Marilynne Robinson, who recently won the prestigeous British Orange Prize. My ignorance might be excused by the fact that this American author published only two novels in a quarter of a century - Housekeeping in 1980 and Gilead in 2004, the first nominated for and the second winning the Pulitzer Prize - not what you would call a prolific output. Fortunately for all her fans she seems to be entering a more productive phase. Home, the novel awarded the Orange Prize, was published a mere four years after Gilead.

I haven't read Home yet, but Housekeeping was such a delightful (albeit belated) discovery that I can't wait to renew the acquaintance. When it comes to really good writing, it is always a case of rather late than never. Or as we say in Afrikaans: Agteros kom ook in die kraal. Even a lagging ox eventually gets to the kraal of literary joy.

Blessed by books

2009-06-03T14:14:00.032+02:00

Now that the year is nearing its halfway mark, I can confidently claim that 2009 is going to be a

grand cru. I'm talking books, not wines, in case you're confused.

Because readers, like wine tasters, know that the harvest differs from year to year, in quality and in quantity. Often I read for weeks, sometimes even months, without coming across a really great book. Oh, I find pleasure, of course, I always find pleasure in reading, but I yearn for something more. I want a book that grips me and shakes me, a book that thrills me and fills me with awe and admiration.

And then there are years, like this blessed one, when each month is illuminated by a brilliant book. The kind of book that stands out from the crowd, or jumps off the shelf, for the rest of the year. Maybe even for many years to come.

The thrill started in January, when I finally tackled Don DeLillo's Falling Man which I'd been threatening to read ever since its publication in 2007. It is the most magnificent writing about 'Nine Eleven' and the attacks on the Twin Towers that I've ever encountered, and it convinced me (as if I needed any convincing) that DeLillo is an awesome author. I wanted to fall down at his feet and worship him after some pages, for what he does with language and style and human relationships. I know this sounds over the top, but we all have our weaknesses, and DeLillo is one of mine.

Then, in February, I was blessed by another beautiful book: Anne Enright's The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2007, a lyrical novel about a family gathering. The nine surviving siblings of the Hegarty clan get together in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam... Dark and delightful from the first to the last page.

So far so good, I said to myself, like a falling man (with apologies to DeLillo) who still has a long way to go before he hits the ground, but surely this good luck can't last. Well, it did last, into March, when I read Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, another outstanding novel published in 2007. (Talking of grand crus, what a grand year 2007 was for readers.) On Chesil Beach is a devastating study of a single young couple on a single night in the summer of 1962; 'a short, sharp shock of a story', as it was called in The Observer, proving once again that power has nothing to do with size or length.

And still my luck didn't run out. In April, while on vacation in South Africa, I read Toni Morrison's latest masterpiece, A Mercy, which I praised in my previous posting (Of mothers and race). And in May I read another novel I probably should have read three years ago. Kiran Desai's exquisitely titled The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, which makes it the 'oldest' of the five memorable novels I've encountered in the first five months of 2009. One of those marvellous stories about India that I just can't resist, as I confessed in another earlier posting (Hate and hurt in Mumbai, November 2008), it deals with an uprising in the Himalayas region in 1986, and demonstrates in a quite unforgettable way how big political dramas can affect the small personal lives of ordinary people.

So far so good, I say again, still falling. I can't wait to see what the rest of the literary year holds in store for me.

Of mothers and race

2009-05-14T11:56:00.026+02:00

Speaking of movies (as I did in my previous post), a few nights ago I saw the 1958 version of Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk's magnificent final film, a classic tearjerker with a potent political message. They just don't do melodrama like that anymore, do they? The only contemporary director who might get away with such a sweeping and sentimental story about mothers and daughters, such strong actresses and such extravagant use of colour, is maybe Spain's Pedro Almadovar. After all, he already gave us Volver and All About My Mother.

I can't remember when last I cried so copiously during the last scene of a movie - maybe Love Story which I watched at the age of twelve with a gaggle of pre-adolescent girls all sobbing on each other's shoulder - but I defy anyone not to shed at least a single silent tear when Mahalia Jackson's powerful gospel voice rises up during the funeral service of the long-suffering black 'maid', Annie. What distinguishes the film, though, is how topical the central themes of motherhood and race - and power politics in personal relationships - still seem, more than half a century after it was made.

Just hours before I watched Imitation of Life, I'd finished reading Toni Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy, which deals with - yes, of course - motherhood and race. And power politics in personal relationships. As all Morrison's readers know, these themes are threaded through all her books, especially the beloved Beloved. It's nearly impossible not to draw a comparison between A Mercy and Beloved, since both novels tell a story of slavery, and more specifically of a black slave mother sacrificing a much-loved daughter. And although A Mercy is not as illuminatingly brilliant as Beloved, it is still a very, very good book. Remember, three years ago Beloved was declared the best American work of fiction of the past quarter century by an impressive panel of critics, writers, editors and literary figures - so most other novels would probably pale into insignificance when placed beside it.

By the way, my personal favourite for the above-mentioned title was not Beloved (1987), even though I dearly love it, but the runner-up: Don DeLillo's breathtaking Underworld (1997). The other runners-up on the list published by The New York Times, were Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), and the four Rabbit novels by John Updike, published between 1960 and 1995. (For more on Updike, see From Updike to Queneau, which I wrote shortly after his death a while ago.)

Anyway, the day after I'd finished A Mercy and watched Imitation of Life, synchronicity struck again. I was woken by Toni Morrison's rich and dark voice on the radio next to my bed, speaking on the current affairs programme that I listen to every morning. She was in France to promote the French translation of A Mercy - and what a treat it was to hear such fierce intelligence and eloquence so early in the morning!

Wouldn't it be lovely, I thought dreamily while brushing my teeth, if one could start every day like this, listening to a thought-provoking Nobel Prize-winning author's views on love and life, rather than the usual bland statements by Nicolas Sarkozy's band of sycophantic politicians? Wouldn't it be lovely, indeed.

Don't judge a book...

2009-05-12T16:26:00.027+02:00

I don't know who coined the phrase 'Don't judge a book by its movie', but I think it's brilliant. Like most literature lovers, I'm often disappointed by screen adaptations of good books. Sometimes I'm even outraged. But every once in a while I can be surprised.

It happened again last week with The Reader, the Oscar-winning film of Bernhard Schlink's epynomous novel about post-war Germany. I watched it on a BA flight between Cape Town and London, and although an aeroplane is never the perfect place to watch any kind of movie, I thought this one at least as good, if not actually better, than the book. I shouldn't have been so surprised. I realised afterwards that the director was Stephen Daldry, responsible for the wonderful screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, one of the rare literary movies of the last couple of years which managed to please the original fans of the book nearly as much as the new fans of the movie.

The Reader, like The Hours, is a book about reading and the power of literature to change lives. Few directors, in this age of action-packed thrillers, have the courage to tackle such a 'static' subject - or the talent to turn it into a commercially successful and critically acclaimed movie. What's more, Stephen Daldry seems to have a way with actresses, like the great George Cukor of The Women fame. He led Nicole Kidman to an Oscar-winning performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, and then he did it again with Kate Winslet as the former concentration camp guard Hanna in The Reader. Part of the achievement of The Reader (the film), is that the script stays so true to the book. This is not always possible or even advisable in screen adaptations - but here it works just fine. In fact, the only bit of the film that seems irritatingly sentimental is the ending - which was not in the book, as I verified as soon as my flight landed, in a bookshop at Heathrow Airport.

I really liked both films, but if I have to choose between the two books, I won't hesitate a moment. I adored The Hours - the style, the story, the language, everything - whereas I appreciated The Reader as a marvellous story with a strong moral message, but I wasn't knocked over by the literary style or the language. Perhaps this is because I read the English translation, not the original German text. After all, we never know how much gets lost in translation if we don't have access to the primary language, do we? The Reader, I thought, was a novel written by a clever jurist with a philosophical bent. Whereas The Hours was a novel written by a born and bred novelist for born and bred novel fanatics like myself.

If you don't agree with me, do let me know. I'd also love to hear what your own all-time favourite screen adaptation of a beloved book is. My shortlist includes two magnificent movies of the Italian director Visconti: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Giuseppe de Lampedusa's The Leopard. As well as two by Stanley Kubrick: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Some directors are apparently born to turn great books into great films. Most, however, should rather leave well alone.

Words, words, words

2009-04-09T11:04:00.020+02:00

A while ago I confessed in my blog that I prefer not to meet writers whose work I enjoy (Close encounters of the literary kind) - but today I have to add that it can be quite a pleasant experience when it happens the other way round. I recently met a charming American expatriate living in a neighbouring village - and then read her equally charming book, Words in a French Life (Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France).

Kristin Espinasse, who describes herself as 'a former desert rat from Phoenix', fell in love with the French language and with a Frenchman (in that order) and now has French children who correct her grammatical errors when she speaks 'their' language. (That's when they're not splitting their sides at the way she mispronounces some words.)

Of course I can identify with all of this - except for the desert rat bit - because my own children cannot, for the life of them, understand my daily struggle with the gender of French nouns. They know intuitively that 'question' is feminine (la question) and 'problem' masculine (le problème). So what is their mother's problem (masculine) with this gender business? That is the question (feminine).

But even readers without French partners, children or family-in-law would appreciate Espinasse's short and humorous 'lessons' in French living - each time built around a specific word. The book tackles these rather random but always useful words alphabetically. For instance, under d you would find words like déguster, dent and douche (savour, tooth and shower), clarified by three separate anecdotes about wine tasting, the tooth fairy and a catastrophic bathroom experience in a French hotel. Each chapter starts with a word (like goût), provides its English meaning and pronounciation (goo - noun, masculine - taste), tells a little story, and concludes with everyday or idiomatic expressions (such as prendre goût a quelque chose = to take a liking to something).

Great stuff, whether you want to polish your own French, learn a few basic words - or have no desire to speak French but simply enjoy reading about life in the slow lane of the French countryside. As many people apparently do, because this book is the result of an astonishingly successful blog, French-word-a-day.com, that Espinasse has been keeping for seven years. Consistently, at least three times a week, with the kind of enthusiam and self-discipline that more occasional bloggers like myself can only admire, never copy. She started it as a little newsletter about the trials and tribulations of settling in a foreign country and struggling with a foreign language - soon attracting thousands of dedicated followers - and eventually published some of these anecdotes in book form herself. Her popularity just kept growing, until finally she was approached by American publishers Simon & Schuster, which led to the publication of Words in a French Life, in 2007.

She must be an example to millions of bloggers. French-word-a-day.com has by now become much more than a hobby, rather an almost full-time occupation, a way of earning a living while working from home, and at the same time keeping in contact with Francophiles all over the world.

And, maybe most surprising of all, she's as entertaining and modest in real life as on the pages of her book, as I can testify after having enjoyed coffee with her twice. And that really impresses me.

One man's perversity...

2009-03-10T20:49:00.013+01:00

Sometimes writing a blog feels a little like undressing in front of a one-way window. You don't know who's watching, so you have to pretend you're alone, otherwise you become all embarrassed.

That's why it's always great when readers react. Thanks to everyone who has been sending comments, suggesting must-read authors or books, or providing links to other sites. Sometimes friends or acquaintances prefer to send emails to my personal address, often in Afrikaans or French, rather than 'public statements' to this site. Fine with me, as long as we can keep talking, in whatever language, about books and bookish things.

Earlier this week, for instance, Karin from Stellenbosch sent a link to a New York Times piece about Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, finally on sale in English. Some of you might remember that in November last year I wrote about Littell and other authors who achieve literary glory in a second or even third language (Choosing the other tongue), and concluded that I'd rather wait for the English translation of Les Bienveillantes. Well, I still haven't read the translation (it has nearly a thousand pages, have mercy), but I did read what the New York Times had to say about the book:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/books/04litt.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bub2

Since the link is available for only a few days, I'll sum it up for you. The narrator of this 'divisive French novel' (according to the caption) is 'a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather.' While some American and British critics are hailing the book as a masterpiece and its author as a genius, others are calling it perverse, pretensious, odious, disgusting and vile.

What fascinates me, is that I can't recall any French reviews - or any of my French friends who read the novel - going on about incest or sodomy-by-sausage or any other juicy bits of perversity. Surely there must have been differences of opinion over here too, but the mainstream reviews that I read were mostly ravingly positive. The book was also awarded France's most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt, and as far as I know the jury of this prize is regarded as rather conservative.

Or is this just conservative by French standards?

I do remember my friend Pierre-Luc saying that it was hard to read the details of some of the atrocities commited by the SS, and that the narrator was not exactly a charming character, but I thought that was the whole point of the book. The former SS officer is, after all, unrepentant. Just a few nights ago I happened to watch a television documentary about the horrendous massacre of most of the inhabitants of an Italian village during the Second World War - and all the Nazi officers and soldiers involved, except one, refused to admit any guilt or remorse. They had simply been doing their duty, according to them. Just like Littell's fictional officer, I suppose.

Besides, many literary masterpieces have been called vile, disgusting, perverse and worse when they were first published. I don't yet know if I would find The Kindly Ones a masterpiece, but I do know that I am more curious than ever to read it. Meanwhile I'm wondering if French readers and reviewers are simply less easily shocked than those in England or the United States. Or perhaps one has become so used to 'perversity' in French literature that one doesn't notice it any more? Or perhaps the French concept of 'perversity' differs quite dramatically from the Anglo-Saxon one?

Or maybe this has nothing to do with nationalities. It might be just another example in a long list of books that have proven that one man's perversity is almost always another man's pleasure. So please let me know if you've read it - in whatever language - and whether you found it delightful, disturbing or disgusting.

Close encounters of the literary kind

2009-02-19T09:12:00.032+01:00

I don't like meeting writers whose work I admire. Novelists in flesh and blood are nearly never as exciting as their words on paper would lead one to believe. Which figures, I suppose. If you were enjoying a really exciting life, you would hardly have the time to write exciting novels, would you?

My experience of famous novelists - rather limited, granted - has also taught me that they are rarely as likeable as their books. Less amusing, less entertaining, less intelligent even. I know Milan Kundera (whom I haven't met) said a novel should always be more intelligent than the author who wrote it. But still, I can't help feeling a little pang of disappointment each time the person doesn't quite measure up to my high expectations.

So maybe it's a good thing that I live in an unsophisticated village in the French campagne, rather than in a cosmopolitan city like Paris, London or New York where famous authors pass through all the time to promote their books and meet their readers. Here I have far less opportunity for disappointment, I tell myself. And yet, every once in a while a really famous writer ventures to the countryside of Provence - not to enjoy a glamorous holiday among fields of lavender, but to actually work. Not to write, either, but to perform that most difficult of all writers' tasks, the promotion tour. (I'm not being ironic; as a small-time writer myself I know how emotionally and physically exhausting these tours can be. Most authors would prefer the solitary daily struggle with words to the frantic 'socialising' with journalists and sycophants.)

Recently it was Salman Rushdie's turn to visit my intellectual outpost. Well, no, he didn't visit my village. He's not that desperate to sell books. I still had to drive for nearly two hours to see him in Aix-en-Provence, where he was the guest of honour at an annual book festival - which happened to coincide with a promotion tour for the French translation of his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence. But he is one of the few living writers of whom I've read every single novel - some with enormous pleasure - except for his debut work, Grimus. I simply had to undertake that two-hour drive to meet the man behind the books.

Besides, meeting Rushdie will always have an almost mythical allure, due to the horrendous fatwa which forced him to live in hiding for so many years. He still seems to attract controversy, whatever he does, wherever he goes. When he received a knighthood from Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, a Pakistani government minister promptly declared that this knighthood justified the Islamic world's practise of suicide bombing.

My partner suggested that I take all my copies of Rushdie's novels along and request him to sign the whole lot. 'While you have the chance.' I was convinced he would refuse because it would take too much time - and even if he was kind enough to agree, his publisher or bookseller might be more bloody-minded. These people often insist that high-profile authors sign only their latest novel, or those bought at the event, to increase sales figures. Finally I stuffed about six novels in a bag - not enough to hold up a queue behind me for too long - and decided I would buy the latest novel at the book festival and, when asking him to sign it for me, casually mention that I've read all his others novels... and brought some of them along... right here in this bag under my arm... and would he mind...?

So there I was, travelling to Aix with mixed feelings, excited about the prospect of encountering such a controversial figure while mentally preparing myself for yet another disappointment.

It turned out to be a delightful day. It was fun watching a documentary film about Rushdie in the presence of Rushdie and his family, stimulating to hear him speak about his life and his work, fascinating to see his interaction with an enchanted French audience. He even spoke a little French to them. I also listened to the French translator of The Enchantress of Florence talking about the challenges of translating such a novel, and to a well-known French actor reading excerpts from the translation. I bumped - literally bumped - into Rushdie's young son and ex-wife in the cafeteria. Talk about close encounters.

But the highlight was when he signed my books. Yes, all of them. With a smile. Maybe he was just relieved to hear someone speaking English among all these French fans. But I was so ready for a refusal that I was rather flabbergasted when I met no resistance. Like shouldering open a supposedly stuck door and then landing on your face when it opens with the greatest of ease.

As a result I've had to adjust my harsh opinion of the aloofness of internationally famous writers. And since I'm living out here in the sticks, it will probably be quite a while before my next encounter with an author quite as famous as Salman Rushdie. So, for the time being, until the next disapointment, that is, I can say that I really don't mind meeting writers whose work I admire.

From Updike to Queneau - and back again?

2009-01-30T21:28:00.029+01:00

It seemed appropriate to write something about John Updike this week, but while I was still planning the perfect angle, I was side-tracked by an email from my friend H who is also a reading writer - or a writing reader - like me. It was simply entitled Updike is dead and consisted of a single line, a link to the writer's obituary in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/01/27/books/AP-Obit-Updike.html?_r=2

I read the tribute and was rather amused by the fact that judges of Britain's infamous Bad Sex in Fiction Prize had recently 'honoured' Updike for 'lifetime achievement'. Of course I knew that whatever I wrote about Updike would contain some reference to his sexual, well, not activity - unless one can call writing about sex a sexual activity? - but at least to the way he brought suburban sex to mainstream literature with a novel like Couples in the sixties. I read Couples more than a decade after it had first appeared, when I was finally old enough to appreciate it, and frankly, I found quite a lot to appreciate.

Thanks for the link, I replied to H's email. Wanted to scribble something about him in my blog. It's true that his sex scenes sometimes sounded ridiculous - as most sex scenes taken out of context? - but I have to admit that 'Couples' (especially the sex) made a huge impression on me in my youthful innocence.

I don't know him all that well, H replied, but his short stories are fantastic. His literary essays too. He wrote a beautiful essay, 'Getting the words out', drawing a link between his stuttering and his writing. My partner was also mad about 'Couples'. Have you read Colim Toibin's 'The Master' (about Henry James)? Definitely my book of the past 12 months. Now I also want to read Michiel Heyns and Lodge's books about him. I also read Perec's 'A Void' (originally 'La Disparition' in French). Normally intellectual pyrotechnics don't impress me - but fuck if you can combine intellect with a heart it makes for a great read. It's also extremely funny, a man who gets blown up (assassination) when he has sex with one of those huge sea lion-type things you get in Florida and Mocambique. But I don't think it's everyone's cup of tea.

Then of course I had to respond: It's fascinating to read all 3 those Henry James books in a short space of time. 'The Master' is probably the most 'literary', but do have a look at what Lodge does with exactly the same material. Exactly the same episode from the life of James! Michiel's book uses another angle and an imaginary typist, for me the most 'enjoyable' of the 3, or the most imaginative anyway, would love to hear what you think. And 'La Disparition' I've been wanting to read in French for yeeeears, but I just don't get there... You know how it goes. I remember a long time ago I read in Time Magazine what an enormous task the English translation was. It might be even more difficult in English than in French to write a phrase without an e. You can't even use 'the'??? In French at least you have 'le' AND 'la', so as long as you stick to feminine nouns, you're more or less OK. My partner is mad about Perec and his buddies who did all those wonderful style exercises...

Who are Perec's buddies and are they translated in English? my friend H wanted to know. I discovered him with a detour via Granta - the list of all the food he ate in one year - and then of course I read 'Life A User's Manual'. It's one of those books - like James Joyce's 'Ulysses' - which was supposed to be a total wank but turned out to be total magic for me. Right book at the right time???

So I asked my partner about Perec's buddies and promptly answered H: Raymond Queneau is the most well-known of the group, in France anyway. They called themselves Oulipo, acronym for Oeuvre Litteraire Potentiel or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle or something like that. Queneau's 'Exercises in Style' must surely be translated in English. I quickly googled his name and found some interesting English entries, for instance on the site www.grammar.about.com. He wrote 99 short 'stories' about exactly the same incident (or non-incident), a guy on a bus who looks at another passenger and finds something wrong with the button on his jacket, if I remember correctly. My son had to read the book about 2 years ago as a set work in French high school, and he wasn't what I would call ecstatic about it, but I found it magnificent. The kind of thing any potential writer should try as finger exercises...

As you can see, by now H and I had quite an entertaining literary roadtrip going, meandering away from Updike, taking a shortcut through Henry James, detouring around Perec and Queneau, with no final destination in mind. This is part of the joy of reading, I realised once again. It is always seen as such a solitary act, but the moment you put two enthusiastic readers together, you can be sure there will be a joint voyage to some unknown destination. Which is why, instead of writing just another boring tribute to a dead writer, I decided I'd rather invite you along for the ride by sharing these emails with you.

Who knows, if we keep going, we might even get back to Updike?

Local stays lekker

2009-01-25T18:01:00.034+01:00

My patriotism doesn't necessarily extend to my bookshelf. What I mean is that I don't feel morally bound to praise South African books just because I was born in South Africa. So when I say that three of the best books I read during the past year are by authors born in South Africa, please believe me, it is an ode to pleasure rather than an act of patriotism.

I am delighted to realise that local can still be so lekker. For those of you who don't understand lekker, it is the South African version of fabulous, genial, prima, wunderbar... All of these adjectives, in whatever language, apply to Anne Landsman's novel The Rowing Lesson. It is a thing of beauty from beginning to end.

A woman, pregnant with her first child, is summoned from her home in New York to her dying father's hospital bed in Cape Town. From these sad and simple facts Landsman constructs a tale that is anything but simple and, though sad, never sentimental. On the contrary, quite a few passages are laugh-aloud funny, a rare feat in any book.

Landsman's 'language of fire and passion', as Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee calls it, is spiced with Afrikaans, Hebrew and medical terms, producing a truly original new voice. The medical terminology makes perfect sense, not only because of the hospital setting, but also because the dying father has been a small-town doctor for decades. Harold Klein, once dedicated caregiver to a whole community, now needs to be taken care of as he lies in a coma, slowly slipping away from those who love him. The only way his daughter can still 'communicate' with him, is by meditating on his life - remembering, reliving, inventing it.

Thus the whole story becomes an act of imagination, brilliantly exposing the force and the fragility of a father-daughter relationship. It is also, perhaps above all, a book about memory - the many layers, the rich textures, the contradictions of memory.

Anne Landsman was a discovery to me, since I hadn't read anything else she'd written. Breyten Breytenbach, on the other hand, is a famous Afrikaans poet whose work I've been admiring for decades. His latest book, A Veil of Footsteps (Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character, as the subtitle has it), is neither poetry nor written in Afrikaans, but still a great read. Here too, as in Landsman's story, memory plays a pivotal role:

This should be kept in mind as I write Breyten Wordfool's black book of impressions. One must not let go of the memories; maggots and grubs are always needed to transform that which has been lived.

As always with Breytenbach, the borders between 'fact' and fiction, 'reality' and imagination, acting and dreaming, are deliberately and delightfully hazy. As nearly always, there is an undercurrent of anger - 'the sort of rage that produces great literature', according to The Washington Post Book World. And this time there are pictures too: simple black-and-white photographs used in much the same way as the melancholic German author WG Sebald had done in books like Austerlitz and The Emigrants. The photographs are supposed to confirm the 'reality' of what is written, but somehow they also convey a sense of alienation, an ambiguous process that seems particularly appropriate in such an undefinable literary work as this.

The third author in my trio of reading pleasure is Michiel Heyns, who only started publishing at retirement age, but is fortunately making up in productivity for all the years that we've been deprived of his talents. He has managed to publish no less than four books in six years, each in a different register, predictable only in its unpredictability, yet always retaining a stylish and ironic voice.

His latest offering, Bodies Politic, does in a way resemble its immediate predecessor, The Typewriter's Tale, in that it is also a historical novel fictionalising the lives of famous figures. In the previous book the famous figure was the English-American writer Henry James, seen through the eyes of his typist. This time we get to know Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, all of them passionate suffragettes and political activists, and the much lesser known younger brother, Harry, who died at the early age of 21.

It is only as I write this that I realise that once again I am describing a book dealing with a death bed, fragile family relationships, and memory - this time the often contradicting memories of three old women looking back at a young man's death many years earlier. What I love most about Bodies Politic, though, is its thoroughly convincing depiction of the personal price often paid for political victory.

Oh yes, and I also admire the fact that an author born and bred and still living in South Africa doesn't feel compelled to write only 'South African stories' - whatever that might be. Heyns spreads his literary wings to fly to other places, other people, other times. As a reader I am only too grateful to be able to fly along.

Pinter of the pregnant pause

2009-01-05T20:36:00.015+01:00

Just a short note to end the festive season's blog-fasting. In my previous entry I humbly confessed that I, like millions of other enthusiastic readers, don't know the work or even the names of many of the Nobel Prize for Literature laureates of the last century. Harold Pinter, who passed away on Christmas Eve, was one of those I did know and admire, for his political passion as much as for his powerful plays.

I saw some of these plays on stage or as screen adaptations, and as a drama student I actually read some of them too, which is more than many people can say about the work of well-known modern playwrights. In many of the tributes after his death, he was praised as 'one of the most influential' and imitated playwrights of his age'. After having seen plays like the brilliant Betrayal I can only agree. No one else could use the pregnant pause on stage in quite the same devastating way. In Pinter's work, what was not said always sounded more important than what was actually said.

Therefore the most apt -and witty - tribute I came across, was a letter published in the International Herald Tribune last week. A reader suggested that Harold Pinter's death should be commemorated by a minute of silence - followed by a pause.

Oh, the noble Nobel

2008-12-11T15:29:00.026+01:00

Yesterday the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm. 'Jean-Marie Who?' asked many of my Anglo-Saxon friends when the winner was announced earlier in the year. My friends are not particularly ignorant people. You can't blame them for not knowing Le Clezio. Like many previous Nobel literature laureates, he doesn't have a high profile outside his own country.

The only reason I happen to have read him, is because I happen to have lived in France for the last couple of years. I try to read at least one classic and one recently published French novel each year - in French, of course. Not very ambitious, I know, but it takes me much longer to read French than English, and let's face it, as far as modern novels go, I haven't been missing that much. French literature hasn't exactly set the world alight in the past few years. The days of Camus and Sartre and their international glory are long gone. The last Frenchman who won the Nobel Prize for Literature was Claude Simon in 1985. 'Claude Who?' you might well ask. I haven't read him either. That was long before I started living in France and feeling obliged to do my bit for French culture.

But Le Clezio's award got me thinking about other Nobel Prize authors and how often 'ordinary readers' don't know these illustrious names - and even less their work - when they are crowned.

Most people on earth would probably die without ever having read anything published by a Nobel Prize writer. Granted, there are a few literary souls, often academics, for whom it is a question of honour to have read the work of every single Nobel Prize winner of the last fifty years. If they don't know the writer by the time s/he is anointed, they'll hide this gap in their cultural knowledge and immediately start reading her/his work to catch up. And then, somewhere between the ignorami who never read anything worthwhile and the academics who try to read everything worthwhile, there are the rest of us. 'Ordinary readers' like me who turn to books for pleasure or illumination rather than pain or academic gain, and who sometimes know and even adore the work of Nobel laureates, while just as often they leave us cold.

When I look at the long list of laureates of the past century, some personal favourites jump out at me: the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1996), the American Toni Morrison who wrote Beloved and other beautifully crafted novels(1993), Gabriel Garcia Marquez who made magic realism acceptable to cynical western readers (1982), the ever-green and ever-wise Saul Bellow (1976), the French-Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1969), the French existential philosopher Albert Camus (1957), The American playwright Eugene O'Neill (1936)...

But there are just as many whom I haven't read and, frankly, I have no burning desire to rush out and buy all their books: the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek (2004), the Chinese Gao Xingjian (2000), the Spanish Camilo Jose Cela (1989)... And there are some whose names I don't even know, complete and utter strangers to me and my bookshelves. Is this my fault? I mean, do you know the Swedish witers Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson who shared the prize in 1974? Or, another double act, Shmuel Agnon and Nelly Sachs who were laureates in 1966?

And of course the further back you go on the list, the more unknown names you'll come across: Halldor Laxness (1955), Johannes V Jensen (1944), Grazia Deledda (1926), Wladyslaw Reymont (1924), all the way back to Sully Prudhomme and Theodor Mommsen, the very first laureates in 1901 and 1902.

Surely this must prove that the most famous of all literary prizes does not automatically bring international and immortal fame?

I might be horribly wrong about some of these writers I haven't read. I might be missing the literary thrill of my life. I might even, at some later and more evolved stage of my existence, learn to love some of them. Who knows? That's the wonder of reading, isn't it? That you never know, that you can always be surprised, unexpectedly enchanted, instantaneously overwhelmed.

That's why we keep on reading, isn't it?

Hate and hurt in Mumbai

2008-11-30T16:52:00.029+01:00

Whenever anything of international importance happens anywhere in the world, I turn to my bookshelves for comfort and comprehension. Usually not to non-fiction, as one might expect in the case of major political events, but to fiction. Stories.

I believe that one great novel can teach us more about the world we live in, on a deeper level, than dozens of mediocre books filled with facts and only facts.

Last week's terror attacks in Mumbai proved this to me once again. For many years I've been dreaming of visiting India, mainly because of stories written by authors of Indian origin like Vikram Chandra, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Kiran and Anita Desai, to name just a few in an ever-increasing list of literary delights. Barely a month ago Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger - not the first Indian author to achieve this honour for a first novel. In 1997 Arundhati Roy won the Booker for another remarkable debut novel, The God of Small Things.

In fact, The White Tiger is the ninth Booker Prize winner about India or Indian identity. And Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies was also on the 2008 shortlist. I am clearly not the only admirer of novels about this fascinating sub-continent.

So when I saw the shocking television images of burning buildings and injured people in Mumbai, I immediately thought of all these admirable writers, most of whom still prefer to call the city Bombay. It was, above all, Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay that sprang to mind.

From love and longing in Bombay to hate and hurt in Mumbai?

Love and Longing in Bombay is a collection of five interconnected 'long short stories', published in 1997, that reads like a love letter to a larger-than-life city. Vikram Chandra continued this literary love letter in Sacred Games (2006), a massive and magnificent epic about the criminal underworld of Bombay which apparently took him seven years to write. A very long love letter, surely, but as a reviewer in the British Sunday Telegraph raved: 'One could read Sacred Games seven times over and still be finding new treasures.'

For instance, one of the 'treasures' I missed when I read Sacred Games earlier this year, was that the hero of the story, police detective Sartaj Singh, was already an old acquaintance. When the unfolding news events in Mumbai prompted me to start paging through Love and Longing in Bombay again, I realised - of course! how could I have missed it! - that Sartaj Singh had actually made his first appearance more than a decade ago in one of these short stories.

My only excuse is that Sacred Games is so crammed with memorable characters that even a hero could get lost in the crowd. Bollywood meets Dickens would be a suitable, if insufficient, description. The Financial Times praised this 'blockbuster in every sense' for having 'more subplots than Shakespeare, more themes than Tchaikovsky, more dead bodies than Highgate, more history than Gibbons'.

And if this sounds like journalistic hyperbole, well, read it and judge for yourself. You might even end up reading it more than once and find a few of the treasures you missed in the first breathless attempt to keep following the twisting plot.

Something you won't miss, though, after what happened last week in Mumbai - 'India's nine eleven', as it is already dubbed in some quarters - is the undercurrent of political tension between India and Pakistan. The plot involves intelligence agents of both countries, the smuggling of radioactive materials, and 'the tense ticking away of a nuclear threat', as it was described in the Times Literary Supplement.

Fact, they say, is always stranger than fiction. We don't yet have all the facts - and might never have - about what happened in Mumbai last week. But we'll always have fiction to help us cope with even the strangest facts.

Food glorious food

2008-11-21T10:56:00.021+01:00

'The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.' Like all food lovers I can only agree with this famous remark by French epicure Brillat-Savarin - but if there is anything that does nearly as much for my personal happiness as tasting glorious food, it is the discovery of a glorious new book about food.

For the past week I've been wallowing in 1001 Foods You Must Try Before You Die, edited by Frances Case, with lyrical descriptions and lovely pictures of the best fruit and vegetables, cheese and bread, meat and sweetmeats and other culinary delights available all over the world. Part of the bestselling 1001 series (1001 Books You Must Read, Movies You Must See, Albums You Must Hear... Before You Die), it can serve as practical encyclopedia, attractive coffee table book, everyday kitchen guide, or a combination of all this and more.

Fortunately most foodies are adventurous souls - or have adventurous taste buds, at the very least - because a few of these foods might make the faint-hearted shudder. For the true food-lover it will be a pleasurable shudder, as when you watch a classic horror movie like Kubrick's The Shining. My favourite from these pages, when it comes to shuddering potential, is not the deep-fried giant water beetle of Thailand ('tastes like whitefish that stayed out all night', the book helpfully tells us; adding that 'beetles laden with eggs are a particular delicacy), nor the roasted leaf-cutter ant of Brazil (nutty and 'intensely crunchy in the mouth'; actually sounds rather tempting to me). No, I draw the line much closer to home, at a product from the food paradise of Italy, believe it or not. I don't think I'm brave enough to try casu marzu before I die. The name of this Sardinian treat means, quite simply, 'rotten cheese', and it has to be eaten riddled with live maggots.

The translucent maggots are 1/3 inch (8 mm) long and can jump distances almost twice their length - diners might like to consider wearing eye protection. (This description had me in stitches, probably some kind of shock effect, trying to picture myself eating rotten cheese while wearing diving goggles.) Some people prefer to remove the larvae before eating; others throw caution to the wind and devour the lot.

Well, to each his own.Thank goodness.

Other foods might shock other readers - bull's testicle, lamb's brain, pig's trotter, blood sausages - but they won't scare me. I might not like them, but I will try them. Still, the vast majority of ingredients in this book would be delightful to any more or less sophisticated palate. It is not a mere list of exotic tastes; most of the foods we've all heard of or tried before, and would love to try again - or even better, eat regularly. The origins and often ancient history of each food is described, as well as the legends and folklore surrounding many, and the literary references to mythic foods such as Proust's madeleine, the scallop-shaped little sponge cake in A la recherche du temps perdu.

I was surprised to learn, for instance, that the humble blood sausage (also known as black pudding), which my French partner loves but for which I haven't yet 'acquired the taste', was praised in Homer's Odyssey: As when a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood, and turns it this way and that, and is very eager to get it quickly roasted... My partner smirked when I told him this. Just goes to show that Homer had good taste, according to him.

Yet perhaps the most pleasant surprise of all was to find a colloquial phrase in my mother tongue tucked away between the covers. Under the entry for smoked snoek, 'considered a South African national treasure in much the same way as Parma ham is for Italians', we are informed that this cousin of the mackerel is so popular that it has even made its own contribution to Cape slang: 'Slat my dood met 'n pap snoek', which literally translates to 'kill me with a soggy snoek'.

The phrase is often used to express surprise, wonder, astonishment - all feelings I experienced while reading this book - so what the heck: Slat my dood met 'n pap snoek. There must be worse ways, for a food lover, to die.

Choosing the other tongue

2008-11-13T21:22:00.044+01:00

This week the glossy and glazed cherry on top of the French literary cake, the Prix Goncourt, was given to an Afghan refugee, Atiq Rahimi, for the very first novel that he wrote in his adopted language. Syngué Sabour - Pierre de patience obviously represents a turning point for Rahimi, who previously published three acclaimed novels in his Afghan mother tongue.

Two years ago the same prestigious prize was won by the American Jonathan Littell for his first French novel, Les Bienveillantes, a hefty 1403-page brick of a book, nearly twenty years after he had published a youthful science-fiction novel in English. Littell's previous application for French citizenship was turned down, but within a few months of walking off with the Goncourt, he was officially and proudly declared French . The inevitable conclusion is that if you want the French to welcome you with open arms, all you have to do is win the most important literary prize in the country...

On a more serious note, Rahimi and Littell are shining examples of a rare but seemingly increasing breed of writers who opt for 'choosing the other tongue'. This was the title of an illuminating panel discussion in which I took part at the Iowa International Writers' Program a decade ago. All the speakers, myself included, came from erstwhile British colonies in Africa and Asia. Most chose the language of the former coloniser, rather than their mother tongue, for their writing. My own sin was worse. I wrote mainly in my mother tongue, Afrikaans, which had been widely regarded as the language of the oppressor during the Apartheid years.

My main defence was that it wasn't really a 'choice'. Sometimes I write in English, with my head (journalism, essays, the 'truth'), sometimes in Afrikaans, with my guts (fiction, novels, 'stories'). Language is subject to the needs of what has to be written.

By now it has become clear to me that some writers can actually choose one language above another. International French above a 'small' language like Afghan, for obvious reasons, in Rahimi's case. Or international French above the even more international English, for personal reasons, in Littell's case. The most famous case is probably Vladimir Nabokov, who published no less than nine novels in Russian before becoming an astonishingly accomplished prose stylist in English, with classic novels like Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor. For Nabokov, as for Milan Kundera (yet another who chose French, after previously publishing in Czech) and most other tongue-changing authors of international fame I can think of, this was a true transformation. A full stop rather than a hyphen. Their writing left the safe shore of the mother language to sink or swim in another language.

The Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett, on the other hand, came and went between shore and sea, between goodbye and au revoir, between English and French. An Irishman who started out publishing novels in English (the 'oppressor', surely, for the Irish), then switched over to French when he needed a new kind of language for his ground-breaking plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Subsequently Beckett wrote some of his plays in French and others in English, the language apparently dictated by each particular work.

All of the above writers, consciously or not, followed James Joyce's renowned advice on what a writer needs: silence, exile, cunning. Littell strikes me as taking the concept of artistic exile to its multi-national, globalised, 21st-century extreme - an American who writes in French, lives in Spain, and is married to a Belgian woman!

The point is that most people on earth cannot write a great novel, play or poem, even in their primary language. To be able to do this in a second language, sometimes acquired much later in life, is a staggering achievement. (Joseph Conrad learnt English, his third language, after Polish and French, when he was already in his twenties - and went on to produce masterpieces such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim in this foreign language.) So let's all applaud Atiq Rahimi for conquering the Goncourt this week - and let's hope the English translation won't take too long.

Because many of us who are not as linguistically talented as these authors are still waiting for the English version of Jonathan Littell's 2006 prizewinner, The Kindly Ones, due out next year. I, for instance, do read French novels - but when it comes to 1403-page tomes heavy enough to use for stoning someone, I'd rather be 'a stone of patience', to quote from Rahimi's title, and wait for the translation...

Three vowels for President!

2008-11-07T09:53:00.015+01:00

Yes, we've come a long way. Barack Obama is not only the first black president elect of the USA, he also defeated the odds on another quirky score. He has a surname with three vowels and three syllables.

Quoi?

Let me explain. Once again I turn to an exhilarating and epic American novel about family and identity to help me make sense of the present. (And if we can't make sense, then at least we can make fun.) Thanks to a reader's letter in this week's edition of the French cultural magazine Telerama, I took Jeffrey Eugenides' marvellous novel Middlesex off my bookshelves this morning. Those of you who've read this Pulitzer Prize Winner of 2004, might remember the narrator's ironic take on another American presidential election, in which another 'multicultural' Democratic candidate (this time of Greek origin) was presented to the people.

This was 1988. Maybe the time had finally come when anyone - or at least not the same old someones - could be President. Behold the banners at the Democratic Convention! Look at the bumper stickers on all the Volvos. 'Dukakis.' A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower... Generally speaking, Americans like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice.

Well, actually three times. Middlesex had been published by the time Bush Junior was chosen for a second term. And of course the poor multi-vowel Du-ka-kis was soundly defeated by père Bush, no less.

But exactly two decades later we're watching the triumph of Obama. Can you believe it, he has more vowels than consonants in his surname? The final proof that the American people are really, really ready for change?

We'll have to see. Meanwhile, I'm delighted to have dipped into Middlesex again. The author's debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, was turned into a fascinating film by Sofia Coppola, but it will be much more difficult to turn the scope and largesse of Middlesex into movie magic. The story is set in several countries, spanning the Atlantic Ocean, and unfolds over several decades, with an unforgettable Greek-American narrator, Calliope Stephanides, who is born as a girl and changed into a boy somewhere along the way.

Truly a character 'on the cusp of identities' - the quote I used for the newly elected American president earlier this week - and this time we're talking of much more than racial identity. According to the Los Angeles Times, 'Eugenides has taken the greatest mystery of all - what are we, exactly, and where do we come from? - and crafted a story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent'.

If you haven't yet discovered this gem of a novel (from a multi-vowel author), do yourself the favour, soon. And I'm not saying that simply because my own name happens to abound in vowels and syllables.

Time of our singing

2008-11-05T18:13:00.005+01:00

On this historic day, the word 'historic' is beginning to look slightly frayed at the edges - but I'm going to grab it and fray it a little more, because frankly, that is what Barack Obama's election as the 44th president of the USA feels like. Historic.

I didn't know that the Americans would choose a president with a white mother and a black father when I started reading Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing about a fortnight ago, but it turned out to be the perfect choice for this time of international singing. Yes, like millions of people all over the world I want to raise my voice in a song praising the young and charismatic president elect. No, I won't do it, because I can't sing, alas. But let me do it silently, mouthing the lyrics like a transvestite singer camping I will survive.

Yes, we've all survived eight years of George Bush - and centuries of racism and bigotism before that. As a born South African, I've seen more than my fair share of hatred between races, but I needed this extraordinary novel about a 'mixed-race' family (father white, mother black, children searching their identity) to remind me of how strong the river of racism used to flow in the USA until shockingly recently. And that the undercurrents are still there. Will probably always be there, as in my own 'rainbow nation' of South Africa.

The blurb on the back of this book reads as follows: Powers brilliantly and devastatingly delineates the tragedy of race in America, as it unfolds from the Civil Rights movement to Rodney King and Louis Farrakhan, through the lives and choices of one family caught on the cusp of identities. It is indeed a riveting read about race and identity and family, but it is much, much more. It is a story about music and singing, about physics and time, about love and hate and war and peace and time, above all about time. It is not 'easy reading', which is why it took me more than a fortnight to finish it, but it is also one of those books that you read slowly because you don't want to part company with it.

You need time, after all, to read a story about time.

The first hundred pages are particularly tough for people like me who read words but not notes - musical notation - and who have lived in fear of scientific subjects ever since high school. This book brims over with musical theory, including long lyrical passages about the art of composing, as well as mind-boggling ideas about the elasticity of time. The surprise is that the self-assured style of writing simply sweeps you along - as when you appreciate a magnificent modern poem or a Shakespeare tragedy without having to understand every single word - and after about a hundred pages you won't even try to swim anymore. You'll be quite happy to drown in this glorious stream of prose.

When you reach the incandescent final chapter, you might even grasp something of the circular nature of time. I broke out in goose-pimples when I realised what the author had pulled off. Surely this must be the supreme reward of this remarkable novel.

And if there ever was a right time to read a book like The Time of Our Singing, it is now. At this 'historic' moment, when a man who grew up 'on the cusp of identities' has been chosen to lead one of the most powerful nations on earth.