Archive for March, 2013
by Lindsay on Mar 31st, 2013
Julian Barnes’ new book, Levels of Life, is coming out early next month. The book is an mix of fiction, history and memoir that follows “a tripartite structure of linked narratives”, according to a review by Tim Martin for The Telegraph.
Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his previous novel, The Sense of an Ending. The first two thirds of this latest book deal with ballooning and photography, the first third about Nadar who took “aerostatic photographs” of Paris in 1858 and the second a short love story about two balloonists. The last third is a “blast of paralysingly direct emotion” as Barnes describes his grief over his wife, Pat Kavanagh, passing away in 2008.
“I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious.” Nudges and winks aren’t really Julian Barnes’s style, but when he gave this line to the doomed schoolboy Adrian Finn in his Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, it suggested at the very least a sort of authorial raised eyebrow. To the occasional exasperation of his countrymen, Barnes has made a career from the serial anatomy of the British mind, in scrupulous, glittering fictions filled with self-collapsing narrators, essayistic sidesteps and a continuous preference for implication over declaration.
Hannah Furness from The Telegraph writes about Barnes’ contemplation of suicide that he describes in the book, which he says he still thinks about. However, he realises that is his wife’s “principal rememberer” and so killing himself would be like a second death for her. Furness reports that earlier this year Barnes spoke out about assisted suicide, saying that ” it’s terrible that people have to go to Switzerland and have their relatives threatened with lawsuits or criminal prosecution when they are obviously of sound mind but terrifyingly unsound body.”
The author, a former Man Booker Prize winner, worked out precise details while grieving for Pat Kavanagh, his wife of 30 years.
In his new novel, Levels of Life, he writes for the first time about coping with her death from cancer, aged 68, in 2008, and attacks friends whom he believes were too cowardly to speak her name.
Book details
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by Ben - Editor on Mar 31st, 2013
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by Carolyn on Mar 29th, 2013
For this week’s Fiction Friday we bring you Nick Wood’s short story “Case Notes of a Witch Doctor”, which takes place on a Friday afternoon at a mental institute. Wood, the author of The Stone Chameleon, drew upon some of his own experiences working at Valkenberg Mental Hospital in Observatory, Cape Town, to write this story for The World SF Blog:
He’d reached the age where he’d seen it all—liars, psychopaths, the neurotic… and the completely insane. Psychosis it was, though, that still just about held his interest.
Like the young black man in front of him, sitting and grimacing, but trying hard not to tilt his head. He has some insight, then, not wanting to reveal a listening attitude in the silence of the sickly yellow room.
Not enough insight, though.
Mark spoke, to put the young man out of his misery.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay in for the weekend, Kolile.” (Try as he would, he’d never been able to make the correct click on the X in Xolile’s name.)
This time he could see he had the patient’s full attention. “Please, asseblief doctor, I need to go home this weekend.”
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by Maggie Marx on Mar 28th, 2013
Indien jy dié Paasnaweek en skoolvakansie op pad KKNK toe is, kan jy ’n stampvol boek- en woordprogram verwag. Afrikaanse skrywers van regoor die land kom dié jaar op Oudshoorn bymekaar om rondom woorde te kuier.
Philip de Vos se gewilde limerieke en rympies is verwerk tot ’n toneelstuk en is te sien in Boetie dit is tyd vir bid as ’n seekoei op jou skoot kom sit met Wessel Pretorius en Cintaine Schutte in die hoofrolle. Dié stuk was ook by die US Woordfees op die planke.
Digters en musikante trek Woensdag laer om dié twee kunsvorms te vier in Hardop en digters Danie Marais, Loftus Marais, Ronelda Kamfer, Toast Coetzer, Pieter Odendaal en Nathan Trantraal sal van hul werke voorlees.
WEG Louw se lewe word gevier in ’n teaterstuk met sy enigste reisverhaal, “So ver soos ’n engel te perd kan ry&rdquo” as afsetpunt in W.E.G. Louw 1913 en Hermann Giliomee gesels Dinsdag saam oor die stand van Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis in die Die Burger se diskoersprogram in die Rembrandt-saal. Bernard Odendaal bied ook Maandag in samewerking met die ATKV-skryfskool ’n poësieskryf-werkswinkel vir ontluikende digters aan.
Hierdie jaar word daar ook by die fees ’n gespreksreek, “Skrywers en stories”, aangebied. Adriaan Basson gaan oor sy gewilde boek en blitsverkoper Zuma Exposed gesels, André P Brink gaan met die gehoor oor sy skrywersloopbaan en mees onlangse boek, Philida, praat en Dine van Zyl, skrywer van Die groot boerekos-boek, gaan van haar lekker resepte deel. Spanningsverhaalskrywers Leon van Nierop en Karin Brynard gaan mekaar oor dié genre uitvra en akademikus Louise Viljoen praat oor beelde van die Klein Karoo in die werk van CJ Langenhoven, die storieboer Abraham de Vries, en die skrywer-joernalis Willemien Brümmer.
Kaartjies vir dié items en ander vertonings by die KKNK is by Computicket te koop.
Boekbesonderhede
Scribd.com boekvoorskou:
Die reuk van koffie: Rubrieke, blogs en ander geskrifte
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by Lindsay on Mar 28th, 2013
A memorial service for Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, who passed away last week at the age of 82, is being held this evening at the SABC M1 Studio in Radio Park, Auckland Park. The event will start at 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM and you can RSVP to info@writeassociates.co.za or 011 791 3585.
Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has written a tribute to Achebe. He describes first meeting Achebe in 1961, two years after Things Fall Apart had been published, when he was a second year student with one story published in a literary magazine. Achebe took the time to read his story and encourage him.
The following year they met again, an encounter that Wa Thiong’o says, “would affect my life and literary career profoundly”. Achebe not only read part of the manuscript of Weep Not, Child and gave him feedback, but recommended him to his publisher, Heinemann, who later published Wa Thiong’o.
I first met the late Chinua Achebe in 1961 at Makerere, Kampala. His novel, Things Fall Apart, had come out two years before. I was then a second year student, the author of just one story, “Mugumo”, published in Penpoint, the literary magazine of the English Department. At my request, he looked at the story and made some encouraging remarks.
My next encounter was more dramatic, on my part at least, and would affect my life and literary career profoundly. It was at the now famous 1962 conference of writers of English expression.
The Salon has republished an article on Achebe by fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that she wrote in 2010. This piece is printed as the introduction to Achebe’s The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God which was published by Everyman’s Library. She describes how she grew up reading British children’s books and that her first introduction to Achebe’s writing was “a glorious shock of discovery” because she “did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature”.
When, in 1958, the London publishers William Heinemann received a manuscript of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” they were unsure whether to publish it. The central question, according to editor Alan Hill, was this: “Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African?” Not only were there a mere handful of examples of African writing in English at the time – such as Amos Tutuola’s surreal “The Palm-Wine Drinkard” and Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of contemporary Lagos, “People of the City” – but none of them had the ambition, the subtlety, or the confidence of “Things Fall Apart.”
Book details
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by Maggie Marx on Mar 28th, 2013
Verdict: stick
If the work is great, the publicist, the readers and the author are united in their joy; if it’s bad, the event organisers, the author and the publicists will think of the review as a hatchet job.
For a few months now I have been meaning to read Who Fears Death, a novel by Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor (she was born in the United States).
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by Luso on Mar 27th, 2013
Verdict: carrot
DR Pat Ferguson, 84 years old and terminally ill with cancer, wants nothing more than for her joyless life to be over. When her ailing body refuses to go she asks her son, Sean to do the unthinkable thing and that is to help her die.
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by Maggie Marx on Mar 27th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
’n Lekkerlees-storie oor die ontstaan van ons taal – só kan die nuwe boek deur ’n taalkenner en gevierde taalreisiger beskryf word.
Dit is die toeganklike vertelling deur afgetrede prof. Christo van Rensburg met die lekker gemoedelike titel So kry ons Afrikaans.
Boekbesonderhede
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by Maggie Marx on Mar 27th, 2013
Uitspraak: stokkierige wortel
Dié outobiografie van Pistorius, wat nou om die verkeerde redes die wêreld se verbeelding aangegryp het, het in 2009 die eerste keer verskyn.
’n Nuwe weergawe is verlede jaar gepubliseer voordat Pistorius aan die Olimpiese en Paralimpiese Spele in Londen deelgeneem en wêreldwyd ’n algemeen bekende naam geword het.
Boekbesonderhede
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by Maggie Marx on Mar 27th, 2013
Verdict: carrot
The Founders is a fascinating account of the rise of a black elite, the members of which were products of the mission schools and exerted themselves for the extension of human rights in the 19th century colonies and republics that were to make up the present South Africa.
Book Details
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Apr
