Archive for the ‘Book Excerpts’ Category
by Lindsay on May 20th, 2012
Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller, best known for her 1994 novel The Land of Green Plums, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature for her writings on the disposessed.
In her latest book, The Hunger Angel, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, Müller moves away from a subject that has so far dominated her work – life in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. The Hunger Angel focus on a trauma experienced by her parents’ generation, the deportation of thousands of German Romanians to Soviet Union labour camps during World War Two.
Read an extract from the opening of The Hunger Angel, courtesy NPR:
On Packing Suitcases
All that I have I carry on me.
Or: All that is mine I carry with me.
I carried all I had, but it wasn’t mine. Everything either came from someone else or wasn’t what it was supposed to be. A gramophone box served as a pigskin suitcase. The light overcoat came from my father. The fancy coat with the velvet collar from my grandfather. The knickers from Uncle Edwin. The leather gaiters came from our neighbor Herr Carp, the green woolen gloves from Aunt Fini. Only the burgundy silk scarf and the toilet kit belonged to me, presents from the previous Christmas.
Alan Cheuse reviews The Hunger Angel:
For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that I had not read Herta Muller for a number of reasons before the appearance of Nadirs, her brilliant collection of short takes about a family of German-speakers living in the Romanian countryside. I don’t know that I would have picked it up if Muller, a Romanian-born writer who works in German, had not won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. I can tell you I was pretty happy that I did. Nadirs was — is — a terrific work of short fiction, showing off Muller’s powers as a world-class creator of fiction driven by visionary power. I was ready when her latest novel, The Hunger Angel, arrived in the mail. It’s a latecomer to the crowd of books written about internment during World War II — doubly so, because the war ends when the internment of the main character begins.
Larry Rohter speaks to Herta Muller for The New York Times:
As a child growing up in a tiny, German-speaking village in Romania, on the edge of Transylvania, Herta Müller was assigned chores that included herding cows. Out in the pastures with little to do, she amused herself by giving names and personalities to the flowers she collected and the clouds that drifted by, or imagined a future as a seamstress, like her aunt, or perhaps as a hairdresser.
But a career as a writer, much less one who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature? She could not imagine such a thing, living as she did in linguistic isolation and under surveillance as part of a suspect German minority under the drab Communist dictatorship that came to be ruled by the megalomaniacal Nicolae Ceausescu.
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Photo courtesy The New York Times
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by Sophy on May 17th, 2012
Next month, London-based publishing company Holland Park Press will release the debut novel from Books LIVE friend Karen Jennings. In Finding Soutbek, Jennings creates a moving story around the fictional town of Soutbek and its quirky inhabitants. Jennings won the 2009 Maskew Miller Longman Literature Award for her short story “The Shark” and is currently working towards her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Finding Soutbek will be launched at The Book Lounge in Cape Town next month.
The focal point of the novel is the small town of Soutbek. Its troubles, hardships and corruption, but also its kindness, strong community and friendships, are introduced to us in a series of stories about intriguingly interlinked relationships.
Contemporary Soutbek is still a divided town – the upper town destitute, and the lower town rich, largely ignorant – and Finding Soutbek is a novel about the real conditions that shape the lives of ordinary, marginalised people.
Karen Jennings’ focus on the quiet but necessary heroism of the poor and disadvantaged makes her work universal.
Holland Park Press invites you to read two passages from Finding Soutbek:
Introducing the mayor
Outside it was dim, the sky lightening at the horizon and broadening over the waves. Already gulls were flying low, calling. The mayor rolled over in bed and pushed his face into the pillow, his knees brushing against those of his wife. He felt her body stiffen as he moved towards her and then the shifting of the bed as she turned from him, rising quietly, leaving the room. He did not lift his face from the pillow. He felt the warmth of his own breath on his nose and lips and went back to sleep.
When he woke again the day was light through the curtains. He stood slowly, placing each foot carefully on the ground. In the bathroom she had left the window open and the room was cool, his bare feet cold on the tiled floor. He went to the basin and ran the water until it was warm, washing his face and lathering it with shaving cream. Then he picked up his razor and slid it along his cheek, down to his jawline and below.
Life among the Namaqua
In the days that followed, the explorers began to feel stronger and well fed. As guests to the kraal, they did no work, and so they spent their days sitting in the sun outside their huts, watching the activity going on around them. They slept much of the time, for they were still tired from their journey, and the luxury of having nothing to do soon encouraged laziness. It became common practice that some of the senior men of the tribe would come and join the men outside their huts to partake in tobacco and brandy. The explorers had not forgotten their search for the wealthy Monomotapa, and so they continuously asked the Namaqua elders the origin of their ‘‡ei’ (copper) and ‘/urib’ (iron). These questions the Namaqua pretended not to understand, or answered evasively. Van Meerman and his men determined that it would take some time to win the tribe’s complete trust.
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by Carolyn on May 9th, 2012
Evette Weyers se boek, Wat die hart van vol is, is deels dagboek, outobiografie en reisjoernaal, wat ryklik met foto’s geïllustreer is. Dit vertel die verhaal van haar kunstenaarskap en haar verhouding met haar man, die akteur Marius Weyers.
Cas van Rensburg het by die Weyers-egpaar in die Kogelbiosfeer naby Hermanus gaan kuier en uitgevind dat Evette inspirasie put uit die natuur, haar “oermatriks”, en woorde waarvan sy die oorsprong en betekenis noukeurig naspoor:
Emoyeni. Dit is die naam van die huis waarin Evette en Marius Weyers in die Kogelbiosfeer naby Hermanus woon. Dit is ’n saamgestelde Zoeloe- en Xhosa-woord wat “in die wind” of “in die gees” beteken, en dalk gepas, want dit is hier dat Evette haar beelde maak en Marius sy woorde leer en die kreatiwiteit dwarrel.
Vandag is dit egter windstil. Marius kom op die stoep langs met ’n wasgoedmandjie in die arms.
Dié keer is die onus nie op hom nie, maar op Evette. Sý dagtaak wag in die waskamer. Die honde kom eerste hek toe om te groet, en Marius sê: “Wag eers dat hulle jou ruik.” Die groot rifrug, Tookwie (dit is ’n Khoi-woord vir “donderende reën”), styg behoorlik bo die hek uit terwyl Paljas, ’n straatnommer, onderlangs snuif.
Lees ‘n lekker lang uittreksel uit Wat die hart van vol is, wat met foto’s aangevul word:
Verhoudings herinner my aan ysberge – nege-tiendes verborge onder die oppervlakte. Ek het ’n hele reeks beelde van ysberge gemaak. Een van Tsjekof se dramas en een van Goethe se gedig oor die Elwekoning wat die ylende kind kom haal. Nog een van my en Marius. Dit was gebaseer op ons goeie verhouding, ten spyte van ons uiteenlopende geaardhede. Ek voel ons kyk in verskillende rigtings, maar ons handpalms raak aan mekaar. Ons staan rug aan rug en maak mekaar sterk. Die nege-tiendes onder die oppervlakte van ons ysberg is propvol liefde, paradokse, respek, tergery, verdraagsaamheid, kontraste, aweregse humor, ’n bietjie woede en nog tergery. Marius het van die liefdesgedigte waarvan ons baie hou, op die ysberg-beeld geskryf; onder andere Marlize Joubert se “Ballade van die minnaars”. Een van die liefdesgedigte van Pablo Neruda is ook op die ysberg geskryf. Ons het dit in Spaans geleer en dra dit saam voor terwyl ons soggens oefeninge doen. (Ons noem dit grappenderwys ons “paringsritueel”, want ons doen die oefeninge teenoor mekaar, soos in ’n spieëlbeeld van mekaar.) Marius het die beeld van ons liefdes-ysberg herdoop na “Wie sal my kan sê hoe díép die liefde lê”.
Spies, skild.
In ’n Chinese verhaal van drie eeue voor Christus probeer ’n man ’n spies en skild verkoop. Mense vra hom hoe sterk sy spies is. “Dit kan enige skild deurboor,” is die antwoord. Nou wil hulle weet hoe sterk sy skild is, en hy sê dit kan alle spiesaanvalle weerstaan. “Wat sal dan gebeur as hierdie spies hierdie skild tref?” vra iemand. Daarop het die man geen antwoord nie.
Terloops: Die Chinese woord vir paradoks het uit hierdie storie ontstaan. Letterlik vertaal, is dit “spies-skild”.
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by Sophy on Apr 20th, 2012
Today we are delighted to bring you an extract from the short story “Warm Enough”, which appears in Colleen Higgs‘ brand new collection, Looking for Trouble. The collection consists of ten stories, centring on the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville in the late eighties and early nineties.
In “Warm Enough” – a nostalgic and humorous piece – we are privy to one side of a conversation between old friends who have lost touch with each other:
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Grant lived in a flat at the bottom end of Dunbar Street. You didn’t ever see his flat did you? I only went there a couple of times. And the one time I visited him there he’d filled his whole flat with branches he’d brought in from when the Council pruned the plane trees in his road. He was so mal, hey. Bos bevok. He didn’t want to leave them there to die in the street like rubbish, he said. His place spaced me out, completely. Apart from the branches, which was enough to push me over the edge, his flat was dirty and I mean vuil, hey. Dishes and pizza boxes and crusty pots rotting all over the place and I’m not exaggerating. Stompies and bottlenecks – not even in ashtrays. The oke was living like an animal. I was glad my old lady couldn’t see how he was living, she would have turned in her grave. Well she isn’t dead yet, but you know what I mean. No furniture apart from the mattress and sheets and blankets so filthy you couldn’t tell what colour they were originally. It was worse than bergies, and that’s saying something. I couldn’t stop myself from tuning him, “Sies man Grant, how can you live like this? Are you a dog?” But you know what? Not even dogs, not even pigs live like that.
Old Grant was always such a joker, so full of life and laughs, I felt like a dried up old prune around him, even when we were kids. He could always make you hose yourself. But I’m sorry, that flat was the end for me. Something inside me tightened. It scared me. I don’t think Ruth ever went there, she would have run a mile. Grant used to visit her in his leather jacket, somehow emerging from that bloody pig sty cleaned up enough for a person like Ruth to be cool with. No you’ve got to hand it to the oke, he’s pulled off some tricks in his day and getting involved with Ruth was one of those occasions – big time.
[...]
I remember this one night, we were all at Dawson’s. It was before Ruth and Nathan split up, she and I were still friends and somehow Grant came along for the ride that night. He used to pitch up at my place when he wanted something to eat and he couldn’t come up with a better plan. One time when he couldn’t find me he ate loquats from one of those big gardens in Jan Smuts near the Zoo, where the trees hang over onto the pavement. Anyway I think that was when they met, Grant and Ruth. The Radio Rats were making a comeback and Dawson’s was cooking. People like James Phillips and Johannes Kerkorrel showed up. Definitely the best jol in Joburg that night. We all danced like mal, even Nathan, who wasn’t really a dancer. His heart wasn’t in it, but that night he was jiving with the best of us. That journalist who got shot a few months later in Katlehong was there too. Everybody was at Dawson’s, even the short drug dealer who always wore that mustard-yellow felt homburg. When I think about it now, it was like we were celebrating the end of something terrible that we’d lived through our whole lives. It was like the war was over and who the fuck knew what would happen next?
* * * * * * * *
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by Sophy on Apr 17th, 2012
In February this year, Michigan State University Press released Joining Africa: From Anthills to Asmara, American Charles Cantalupo’s memoir of Africa. In Joining Africa, Cantalupo, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African Studies at Penn State University, documents his 20-year journey across the continent with a mixture of personal and national history.
Warscapes has released an extract from chapter six, entitled “Rome’s Rome”, in which Cantalupo describes his time in Asmara, Eritrea:
I traveled as a kind of pilgrim. I wanted to witness the site of one of Africa’s greatest, harshest, and most recent revolutions for independence: Eritrea’s thirty-year armed struggle—the longest war in modern African history—to liberate itself from Ethiopian colonial rule, added on to Eritrea’s seventy-year struggle to liberate itself first from Italian and then British colonial rule before Ethiopia took over. Yet I also traveled as a literary pilgrim: to write about what I experienced and toting two of my books, published by Kassahun Checole’s Africa World Press, to personally deliver them to Arefine Tewolde, the manager of its office in Asmara and Kassahun’s uncle.
“Ah, Cantalupo. Benvenuto a Asmara. Avete un buon viaggio? Venga all’ interno e rendasi comodo.” Arefine stood in a huge glass and iron open doorway under a red, yellow, black, and green sign with “Africa World Press/Red Sea Press” superimposed on an image of the earth with Africa in the center.
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Photo courtesy A nave do bom gosto
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by Sophy on Apr 13th, 2012
Efioanwan Edem invites you to read three chapters from his upcoming novel, Broken Portraits: Jonathan’s Chronicles. Set between Nigeria and South Africa, Broken Portraits chronicles the lives of two young Nigerian men who grapple with love and loneliness.
Read chapters eight, nine and ten on HarperCollins’ writing community site, Authonomy:
“Where on God’s green earth have you been?” Bengy asked by way of greeting when I got in late Sunday night. He burrowed himself out of the mess of cardboard paper and came to a halt in front of me. Our apartment’s near-empty living room had been turned into a temporary designing studio; Bengy was doubling as the graphic artist and costumes designer and he had a small creative staff working with him most of the day. I averted my eyes. It was an awkward situation I had put myself in. I had never had to keep any secrets from my best friend before. Yet, I knew I could not allow anyone, not even Bengy, a glimpse of my escapades that weekend.
“Ol’ boy, how far? Oh, wow that’s a good one,” I said referring to the charcoal outline Bengy had spread on the floor.
“Do you like it then?” Bengy asked uncertainly.
“Do I like it!” I bellowed.
It was a sketch of the famous balcony scene. There was Juliet, clad in sixteenth century garb, staring dreamily out of a window, and Romeo down in a garden, dressed in a three-piece suit and tie. The whole queer mix of the old and new fad was a perfect depiction of our twenty-first century remaking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It would make a good poster.
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by Sophy on Mar 30th, 2012
As the most talked about book of the past year, Teju Cole’s Open City needs little introduction. Geosi Reads offers us the chance to read the novel’s first chapter, and familiarise ourselves with Cole’s New York:
And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park. In the other direction, going west, it is some ten minutes to Sakura Park, and walking northward from there brings you toward Harlem, along the Hudson, though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible. These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.
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Photo courtesy Writers Institute Blog
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by Sophy on Mar 25th, 2012
Guernica has released part one of “Things”, an original short story by the late Portuguese author, José Saramago.
“Things”, which is divided across the magazine’s March and April issues, is one of the stories from Saramago’s forthcoming collection, The Lives of Things, which will be published by Verso next month.
The following is translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero:
As it closed, the tall, heavy door caught the back of the civil servant’s right hand and left a deep scratch, red but scarcely bleeding. The skin had been torn here and there, raised in several spots which began to hurt, for the uneven surface and roughness of the wood had not exerted the continuous pressure or prolonged contact likely to cause an open wound or pull back the skin, thereby allowing the blood to gush out and quickly spread. Before going to the tiny office where he was due to sign on in ten minutes and work a five-hour stretch, the civil servant made his way to the First Aid Room (FAR) to have the wound dressed—his work brought him into contact with the public and there was something unsightly about that scratch. As he was disinfecting the wound, the nurse, on being told how the accident had happened, commented that this was the third such case that day. Caused by the same door.
—I suppose they’ll take it off, he added.
Using a brush, he smeared over the scratch a colorless liquid that quickly dried, taking on the color of his skin.
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Photo courtesy the Guardian
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by Sophy on Mar 20th, 2012
The Times:
Blame my favourite writer. You have not “felt” writing unless you’ve read Maya Angelou, the great African-American author, poet and activist who wrote I know why the caged bird sings.
But it was her Letter to my daughter that really got my attention. As I read her letter I could not think of a greater gift to offer my own children than the life lessons I’ve learnt from hard experience.
Of course our parents (and other elders) leave all of us letters, so to speak. I mean those sayings we call to mind in later years in the form of “my mother always used to say that” or “my father’s favourite line was”, and so on.
With this in mind, I decided to put onto paper my own letters to my two inspiring children, Mikhail and Sara-Jane, over a period of 365 days, in other words a letter for every day of the calendar year.
This was not only for my two biological children. It was a way of communicating some core commitments to my more than 30000 other “children” at the University of the Free State.
The daily letter became a short statement on twitter (@JJ_UFS) of a precious lesson I learnt somewhere on the road of life. The scope of lessons covered subjects ranging from leadership to learning, about love and living, schools and the workplace, public service and materialism, and from “how to drive” to “how to leave the country” while your body remains at home.
“Jy het ‘n moeilike perd opgesaal” (you have mounted a difficult horse), said one of the campus dominees, correctly predicting the difficulty of committing to a new letter every single day.
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by Carolyn on Mar 16th, 2012
Troy Blacklaws’ first two novels, Karoo Boy and Blood Orange, have received international acclaim, and his latest novel, Cruel Crazy Beautiful World, promises to be another fascinating read.
We’re pleased to bring you an extract from Chapter 1 of Cruel Crazy Beautiful World in which Jerusalem (Jero), a young man of both Jewish and Muslim descent, is forced to go to Hermanus to earn a living after his father tells him that “the freeloading’s over”.
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Cape Town. December 2004.
A boy tracks a skinny dun cow along a caged footbridge over the N2 highway out of town. The bridge is wired in to keep crazy cows from jumping and bitter boys from dropping bricks onto motorcars that shark along the tarmac below. For such boys Mandela’s longed-for freedom is a joke.
A haze of smoke and summer dust hangs low over Crossroads shantytown.
Behind us the sun hovers over Table Mountain.
On the roadside a tow truck, like a morbid mantis, dreams up its next victim.
And on the radio Miles Davis blows high, cicada notes.
See my old man with a lazy palm on the wheel of his mystic-green ’74 Benz and his other hand combing his ducktail. Zero Cupido: in his flaring Hawaiian shirt and snakeskin boots, he looks the part of a dodgy Cuban dealer in an American film. In fact he’s half Cape Malay, half Cuban. With just a jot of Hottentot blood. In theory he’s Muslim. In reality he loves his whisky and pig and hasn’t gone to mosque for a long time. He has no intent to go on Hajj, yet he enjoys orientating his life to Mecca. He draws an arrow in the sand with his foot whenever he’s on a beach. He has pencilled an arrow under the roof of the veranda. Ghosting through Cape Town, he’ll cast his eyes starwards to find south and then figure out the angle toMecca. That imaginary notch in his mind keeps the world from spinning too randomly, he tells me.
Now, out of the blue, Zero’s put his snakeskinned foot down. Jero, the freeloading’s over, he said to me. He’ll no longer fork out good money (?!) on a son who is a drifter and a dreamer: forever lolling on the harbour wall, forever sipping cocktails with flaky gay artists, forever writing sappy po-ems. He spat out the word poems as he might a litchi stone. He has no time for fucking daffodils dancing in the breeze. It’s unclear whether he is recycling the one line of poetry he recalls from his school days, or is calling all poets and other artists daffodils.
My old man sees himself as a realist. He endlessly waxes his Benz, fills his hands with a whore’s tits, slices kudu biltong against his thumb, douses his fish and chips in vinegar, turns sizzling chops with his bare fingers and licks them off. He has zero finesse at the bone. His idea of finetuning is running a kind of spit cloth through the barrel of his Colt 45, or measuring and adjusting the gap in his spark plug. He wants the spark to jump far … so it burns clean.
I silently scorn his world of dabbling and dealing, of whistling at schoolgirls in skimpy skirts and shooting pool in murky bars, of totting up takings on a Lion matchbox and smoking fat Havana cigars.
It’s a mystery to Zero how I’m so tuned into the ephemeral, into things neither here nor there. I’m fazed by the sound of old men sucking air through gaps in their teeth. I sniff the wispy smoke from under a just-unlidded beer bottle as if it is perfume. I love Parma ham shaved in opaque slivers. I linger in a cinema long after a film ends to ride out the vibe as long as I can. I enjoy arthouse films with their zen endings that hang in midair. I gaze into a lava lamp until I see flamingos and phantoms. I listen to indie folk and whimsical garage instead of hard rock. All
this renders me a moffie in his eyes. A free-verse fairy with a footloose soul.
He has a point. I still have zip on paper after two years of reading for my thesis on García Márquez at the University of Cape Town. I got lost in the dusty labyrinth of his Latin American mind. All the thoughts I placed on paper somehow became poems … and a play. Lost? This is beyond imagining for Zero. He never goes beyond the Cape Flats without a map in hand. He loves to unfold a road map and follow the N2 all the way to Durban with a finger. Then to laugh at my fumbling bid to origami the map along the original folds again. Ironic, for a man of such hazy ethics to be so focused on compass points in a land where booming shantytowns render maps old overnight.
I curse him for exiling me to survive all alone out in Hermanus: boondock harbour town south-east of Cape Town. Hermaanus. I hope you’ve never heard of it.
We go by a fire raging on a highway island. A wizardy old man shakes a fly whisk at the flames.
My amigos pity me. At dusk today they’ll all head down to the Cape Town harbour for sundowners. They’ll jabber their dreams of recording music and put forward their beer-foam theories on why Mandela’s rainbow dream fell out of focus in this land of antithesis. And where will I be? In Hermanus, other side of Hangklip, far from the jazzy verve of Cape Town.
– My father and my father’s father were fishermen in Kalk Bay, Zero intones. Jero, my boy, you come from a long line of fishermen.
He swivels his focus away from the Benz icon to glare unblinking eyes at me, to spook me out.
This is, I think, his bid to prove the futility and absurdity of my reading García Márquez.
– But Dad, this sea’s been fished dry and the fishermen are dying out. Besides, my other grandfather taught philosophy.
He taught in Vienna until 1937. Then he sailed for Cape Town. He was one of the few lucky Jews. Lucky to have eluded the Nazis then. Lucky too to have keeled over before his daughter fell for a Muslim.
Zero flicks my words out the wound-down window with his ducktailing hand.
– And he had to sell newspapers to put a roof over his head when he came out to Cape Town. Philosophy won’t put fish and a beer in your hands. I tell you flat, my boy, if you want to survive … you have to have something to trade.
That’s Zero’s Survival Tip #1.
He’ll hand you his hard-earned wisdom free of charge. One hand palm up (as if balancing the circle of the wheel) and the other with fingers down (tapping on his drum-taut gut), he may just remind you of Buddha calling on the earth to witness his moment of illumination.
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- Cruel Crazy Beautiful World is published by Jacana Media
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Apr
