Archive for the ‘Feature’ Category
by Carolyn on Apr 30th, 2013
By Tymon Smith for the Sunday Times
Tymon Smith speaks to Lauren Beukes, who shot to fame with her sci-fi novel Zoo City, about her latest book, The Shining Girls.
Lauren Beukes is certainly a shining girl of the local and international fiction scene, but unlike the women in her latest novel, who earn the label of shining, she’s not due for a visit from a time-travelling serial killer any time soon.
Winner of the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction for her previous novel Zoo City, “a gritty phantasmagorical noir” set in the slums of inner-city Johannesburg, Beukes’s career has gone supernova at a speed that so many others only dream of. She has an international multibook deal – “somewhere in the six-figure range” – and plaudits from every corner of the globe. But as she reminds me over breakfast in a Joburg guesthouse: “To be a full-time novelist is a huge privilege and it’s what I’ve wanted to be since I was five years old. It’s only taken me 30 years to get here.”
Beukes – blonde with sparkling eyes, a slight accent (the result of two years in the US), a forthright intelligence and a self-deprecating sense of humour – is easy to like, even when she’s talking about serial killers and violence against women over fruit salad. She studied creative writing at the University of Cape Town and worked as a journalist, a job she sees as a good stepping-stone and one she still recalls fondly. “I still go on research trips and interview police detectives so I’m still doing some journalism, but it’s in service of a book rather than articles.”
Her 2006 non-fiction book Mavericks – Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past was shortlisted for the 2006 Alan Paton Award and her first novel Moxyland was well reviewed, but it was with Zoo City – and Zindzi its heroine who must traverse the dark underbelly of a futuristic Joburg with a sloth on her back – that international audiences began to take notice.
The first novel of her new book deal, The Shining Girls, is set in Chicago during the last century before the explosion of the internet – a tool that Beukes has used very successfully to her own advantage. She’s so addicted to technology that she employs a piece of software called Freedom that locks her out of the internet for periods so she can work on her writing without distraction. Her website offers fans answers to frequently asked questions such as “How do you pronounce your surname?” (answer: “Rhymes with mucus”), and “Will you send me an autographed picture?” (answer: “That kind of thing is best left to the Scarlett Johanssons and Anne Hathaways of the world, dontcha think?”)
The Shining Girls, bought by publishers based on a 16000-word outline in 2012 and due for simultaneous release in four countries and translation into 16 languages this month, tells the story of time-travelling serial killer Harper Curtis who discovers a house in Depression-era Chicago that allows him to travel through time hunting his “shining girls”. That is until one of them, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and spends her time in the pre-internet 1990s hunting him down.
Beukes had originally intended to follow up the success of her Arthur C. Clarke win with an “ambitious, really cool apartheid novel with a twist”, but the book was proving difficult to write. While she “was bantering with someone on Twitter, just talking sh*t as you do”, Beukes threw out the idea of a time-travelling serial killer.
“I realised that’s the book that I need to write right now and I can do it really well. My agent was over the moon because obviously it’s a very commercial, easy idea. It wasn’t a grand strategy, it was pure fluke and I just came up with a good idea on Twitter, which happened to be absolutely marketable in many territories.”
Having lived in Chicago, Beukes decided to set her novel there because she “wanted somewhere different”.
“It has a lot in common with Joburg. For example, it’s a very violent city … it’s one of the most racially segregated cities in America and also there’s a lot of modernism there, it’s the place that was the birth of the skyscraper. So there’s a lot of 20th-century mash-up in there and I found that absolutely fascinating. Everything I wanted was there and I felt like I had enough of a feel for it to be able to write it authentically.”
As for serial killers, Beukes – the mother of a four-year-old – was not overly interested in them until she decided to create one. She spent time listening to true-crime podcasts and decided that the only interesting thing about them “is that they’re not these kind of sexy apex predators”.
“They’re generally not Hannibal Lecters, they’re basically losers who can’t get it up and this is the way they get it up. They’re pathetic, cringing, awful, vile, violent men and they’re contemptible.”
It’s in the genre of speculative fiction that Beukes has made her niche over the course of three novels since 2009. I ask her if she’s worried that this will restrict her readership to young men who play video games and women who dress up as comic-book characters on weekends.
She replies: “I write what I like, I write the stories that occur to me. I wish there was a long-term strategy but I never set out to write a cyberpunk urban fantasy or whatever this is – it was the stories that occurred to me and which I decided I could write and do interesting things with. Afterwards people apply the labels and yes, a lot of people are put off by the science-fiction label, which is tragic and sad because there are some amazing science-fiction authors who do cross over.
“But I think there’s definitely a taste for it. Stephen King is a perfect point of comparison because he does high-concept thrillers with monsters and aliens and all sorts of scary things but also they’re very much about people. I might have more of a social edge.”
Beukes says she finds it hard to let things go. “Not if you stand on my foot or slight me in your newspaper – I won’t come to your house – but with social injustice, like murder and violence and apartheid, I find it hard to forgive those kinds of things.” While her new novel makes no reference to South Africa it does touch on a relevant social issue, violence against women. But it does so in a way that she hopes will “allow us to talk about what’s going on now in radically different ways and in ways that get over people’s issue fatigue.
“Do we really want to talk about violence against women, especially after the last couple of months; is it not something we’re just sick of and it feels like we’re raging against this monstrous social fabric that we can’t actually fight against? We feel helpless … And I suppose this is a way of exorcising some of those demons and dealing with it in a way … that’s a really engaging and interesting story. And to try and create people as real as possible and talk about what violence does to us as a society, what the personal impact is, the ripples it sends.”
With her next novel, set in Detroit, due for delivery in September and plenty of air miles to be racked up promoting The Shining Girls, Beukes has had to put work on the screenplay for a Zoo City adaptation on hold. But she has plans for a sequel to that book and perhaps for the completion of her apartheid novel.
She says she’ll keep trying to “write beautiful sentences as well as tell a good story that makes you think about the world, it’s not just blood and guts”.
“I’ve said to my agent that I want to write a Western and he’s said, ‘That’s fine. You will make no money but if you want to write a Western, write it and I’ll sell it.’ It might become a financial consideration down the line but at the moment I’m completely free and I can go where I want and hopefully not be boxed in.”
- The Shining Girls is published by Umuzi
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by Maggie Marx on Apr 2nd, 2013
Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine
Gareth Crocker is author of the international bestseller Finding Jack, as well as the African adventure thriller Journey from Darkness. His kidnap thriller, Never Let Go, hits SA shelves in April.
I’ve just read Stephen King’s combination memoir and book on writing for the fourth or fifth time. The book contains some extraordinary anecdotes about his life and how he brings his stories to the page. It’s a wonderful read for any aspirant (or seasoned) writer.
Interestingly, King rarely plots his novels upfront and prefers to begin with an intriguing premise and then allow the story to grow and develop from there. It’s a technique that sometimes lands him in trouble.
The Stand, arguably his most famous novel, almost never made it out of his study. After drafting more than 500 pages he realised that he had written himself into a dead end. And there it remained until, years later, a solution came to him in a dream.
Interesting stuff.
- Never Let Go is published by Penguin Books SA
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by Luso on Feb 18th, 2013
In an interview for the Telegraph conducted by Justin Cartwright, author of Other People’s Money, Rian Malan seems to offer a swinging pendulum of thoughts on South Africa.
Cartwright calls Malan, who has never been far from controversy since the publication of his seminal work My Traitor’s Heart, “South Africa’s Christopher Hitchens” and Malan himself says, “I was an atheist in the great revival tent of the new South Africa. The faith on offer was too simple and sentimental, answers it offered too easy”.
However, Malan seems to have retained some faith in the country, believing in simple justice. He describes South Africa as a journalist’s dream because there are always stories to tell. He tells some of these stories in his latest book, out after a 25 year hiatus, called The Lion Sleeps Tonight: and Other Stories of Africa.
Not so long ago I shared a platform with Rian Malan at a literary festival, and we were asked about literary success. Malan said: “Don’t ask me, I am a one-hit wonder.” As he approaches 60, Malan is both burdened and blessed by the fact that nearly 25 years ago he wrote the astonishing My Traitor’s Heart, a memoir of his life as a young Afrikaner South African, and a book like no other to come out of the cramped literary world of South Africa. It was a worldwide success but he has not written another book since. Instead, he has been a prolific journalist and a vigorous and fearless contrarian.
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by Lindsay on Feb 18th, 2013
By Tymon Smith for the Sunday Times:
Duo has cast a net of comic-book cool over SA, with a tale starring Jan van Riebeeck as a vampire.
Daniel Browde and Josh Ryba make an odd pair. One’s tall, skinny with prominent cheekbones, a long, narrow face and dark hair; the other is short, stocky with the ears of a boxer and close-shaven hair. They look more like a Jewish stand-up act than the writer and artist behind Rebirth, a graphic novel about vampires in Johannesburg, which gives us Jan van Riebeeck not as the leader of the Dutch East India Company’s first group of European settlers but rather as a vampire banished to the shores of Africa by the Council of Vampires as punishment for his rule-breaking.
They also have an expression on their faces as they pose for the camera that seems to convey a mixture of relief and disbelief at their having completed this labour of love, combined with a hint of satisfaction at the sheer achievement of having done it on their own terms. After five years they are about to move from an intense and difficult period of creation to the anxious moment of reception – the moment the public will decide what to make of their not-inconsiderable efforts.
Browde, an actor, poet and journalist who used to work for Business Day, had written a poem some years ago and was thinking it would be good to put the piece to pictures to create an illustrated story. The brother of a friend pointed him in the direction of Ryba. Ryba describes their initial meeting as “a little bit serendipitous because I always used to draw but I realised you can’t just draw, you need stories to go along with your drawings. That’s a nice way of communicating what you drew. Rather than just having one drawing, you could have a sequence of drawings and it would explain what you were trying to convey. I was also looking for someone who could write stuff, so it was the right time for us to come together.”
While the illustrated poem never materialised, the two worked on other ideas, including an animation about a Joburg superhero called Plastic Man, for which Ryba drew thousands of drawings to produce about three minutes of actual animation, believing that “I could make a Disney movie by myself.” Quips Browde, “I’ve never seen animation quite like it because it’s like the guy half doesn’t know what he’s doing and then it’s half something else.”
Plastic Man never worked out and, after finishing his Fine Art studies at Wits, Ryba went to the US, where he hoped to break into the animation industry. He “burnt a whole bunch of CDs and walked around the Pixar studio just handing them to random people. This girl who did a favour for my cousin by taking me to see the place told me that if I didn’t stop we were going to get kicked out and so I called it a day. I never got the phone call. I walked around San Francisco and New York dropping off my CV but people weren’t interested – there were a million artists like me and they were doing things in the appropriate way. I found out what the appropriate way was and realised you also need an angle, a product or an idea that you’ve done to get your foot in the door and so that got me thinking. I needed something that represented where I came from and was different to what everyone else was doing.”
When he returned from the US, Ryba called Browde and told him he had a cool idea. Says Browde: “I could hear this was different to what we had being working on before; it sounded like he was putting his full weight behind it. When he told me the idea of Jan van Riebeeck as a vampire I thought, ‘This is good’.”
While Ryba’s disappointing attempts in the US had given him the impetus for a unique idea, he still had the “same delusion that I’d had with the animation, believing that we’d just make this 300-page graphic novel in six months”.
Instead, the pair came up with the idea of a character named Cassia, who appears on the cover of the book, a vampire who would be both of Van Riebeeck’s time and the present, linking the two main stories of the book.
Over eight months, they worked out the basic story before Ryba began to draw. Over the next five years the process would push its creators’ individual talents, working relationship and bank accounts to the limit as they struggled to bring their idea to life.
Rebirth begins in 1652 with the decision by the Council to banish Van Riebeeck to Africa. It then moves to Johannesburg in the present day, where the last four remaining vampires in Africa, infected with a blood disease called IDV, have been quarantined by the Council, banned from feeding on mortals and forced to satisfy their bloodlust by means of an arrangement with the warder of Sun City prison, who provides them with victims on a regular basis.
Parallel to this runs the story of Dr Eduardo Gusto, a disgraced IDV expert searching for a missing child, whose blood holds the key to a cure for the disease. Jumping between the present and the past, the story moves towards a gory climax that will also involve a bored young man named Westerford, who works in a book shop in downtown Johannesburg, and Cassia, the vampire. It’s a complex, layered, multi-character story that satisfies the requirements of its genre while still allowing space for enough ambiguity and nods to recognisable aspects of South Africa’s history and present to provide a fulfilling reading experience to those who are not comic- book fans.
For Ryba, who grew up on a diet of superhero comics and animated films, the greatest challenge was to create a style for the book that was his own while still nodding to the artists who had inspired him. For Browde, whose background in poetry certainly helped him with the minimalist requirements of the form, it was a process that made him realise he “needed to kind of extend that because it’s similar in some ways in that the language has to be condensed. Somebody once said poetry is language under pressure and it’s the same in a comic. This is language under pressure but it’s a different pressure, it’s the pressure of the visual context. It was very challenging.”
Longform comic books are popular in the comic world and have often had crossover literary success with writers and artists such as Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes achieving success beyond the confines of comic-book shops. Wouldn’t it have been easier for Browde and Ryba to set their sights a little lower? Perhaps by starting off with a single comic intended as the first in an ongoing series? Ryba nods but explains: “We didn’t have enough cred to just put out a story and hope it was going to catch on, but we believed in ourselves and felt that when people read a full story they would see what we were capable of.”
Rebirth is also a story about the dark underbelly of Joburg, a city Browde describes in the book as “still a place for prospectors and dealmakers . ask for too much and the city will chew you up and spit you out.”
Working on the book gave the pair a chance to explore their city in new ways. As Ryba explains: “We would go out at 3am and take photos in town. We didn’t feel safe some of the time and that says something about the city but at the same time it was a good thing to get to know it a bit better.”
With the panels drawn and the captions written, all that remained was to put the two together. This, too, was not as easy as it seemed. It turns out there’s a good reason comic-book creators give a credit to the person who is responsible for lettering – the choice of how text is presented, ranging from the selection of fonts to the shape of the text boxes and the integration of sounds into the panels. At first they approached US experts for samples but weren’t happy with what they received, so Ryba convinced Browde’s partner, Thenjiwe Nkosi, an artist, to work with Browde on the lettering. After teaching themselves Adobe Illustrator using online tutorials, the couple produced the lettering that Ryba describes as “the best I’ve ever seen”, providing the final piece of the puzzle.
Ryba believes “people who don’t read graphic novels, even if they don’t want to read it, should be proud to have it on their coffee table because it’s the first piece of pop culture that’s cool to come out of South Africa.
“We’re ambitious and we want to raise the standards. We have a South African voice and we want people to see that we are as good – or at least getting as good – as international artists. We have something to offer.”
Now all that remains is to hope people will be as impressed by the book as its authors are – and snap up the 3000 copies they’ve printed at their own cost (with additional backing from an investor) faster than they can letter a “SNAP!”
Ryba is already working on a new comic-book series he hopes to enlist writers, including Browde, to work on. Meanwhile, Browde is finishing a book about his grandfather, advocate Jules Browde, SC, in time for his 94th birthday in May this year.
Rebirth is available from comic-book stores nationwide and from www.rebirthgraphicnovel at R325.
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by Sophy on Dec 18th, 2012
Alexander Matthews, editor-at-large of Business Day’s award-winning magazine supplement, WANTED, has compiled what can only be described as a books guide par excellence.
Released earlier this month, WANTED’s December 2012 issue has no less than SIX pages dedicated to helping you choose some summer reads. Within these pages, reviewers from Finuala Dowling to Tony Leon take a look at a range of local and international titles, including those by Books LIVE members Rustum Kozain, Diane Awerbuck and Paul Holden:
All of the titles listed, as well as other knickknacks from the issue, are available at WANTED‘s pop-up store, edit[ed], which is open at the Taj Hotel Cape Town until the end of January 2013.
FICTION Home Remedies
By Diane Awerbuck
With Home Remedies, Awerbuck returns to some of the institutions she explores in her earlier fiction; the short story collection, Cabin Fever, and her debut novel, Gardening at Night. She uses the larger-than-life figure of Saartjie Baartman to consider how much more there is at work beneath the structures we consider permanent and how easily the walls come down around us. The novel is accomplished for its essential rendition of a kind of ordinary madness that permeates every society and every home and for Awerbuck’s intelligent and often witty use of language. SK
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- Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars by Sarah Wild
EAN: 9781431404728
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by Lindsay on Nov 27th, 2012
This year’s collector’s edition of The Big Issue is the biggest yet, with 92 pages featuring 60 of South Africa’s top writers, thought-leaders, poets, photographers and illustrators.
Contributors include Nadine Gordimer, Max du Preez, Ben Trovato, Zapiro, David Bullard, Jodi Bieber, Antjie Krog, Terry Crawford-Browne, Eusebius McKaiser, Damon Galgut, Rustum Kozain, Diane Awerbuck, Karen Jayes, Beverly Rycroft, James Whyle, Leonie Joubert and Joanne Hichens.
The price of the magazine is raised to R30 from the usual R20 to allow the vendors to earn an end of year bonus. They will receive 50% of the cover price for each magazine sold. It’s a truly impressive issue featuring many of our fantastic local authors and it will be on sale until 24 January or as long as stock lasts, so go get yourself a copy!
The Big Issue’s much-anticipated annual Collector’s Edition goes on sale today. Sixty of South Africa’s top talents in literary, cartooning, photography, illustration and poetry circles have joined the fight against poverty and unemployment this festive season by contributing work pro bono to The Big Issue’s 2012/2013 Collector’s Edition.
All 60 contributors submitted work under the theme of ‘My Big Issue’ to create the bumper 92-page edition, printed on high quality paper and featuring the legendary flugelhornist, singer and defiant political voice Hugh Masekela on the cover.
For a preview of what’s inside the magazine, read The Big Issue‘s break down of who wrote what:
The Big Issue has armed its 350-plus vendors with an exceptional product this festive season to ensure they are able to earn their own year-end bonus.
The 2012/2013 Collector’s Edition, printed on high quality paper and released on November 23, is a massive 92-page issue featuring 60 of South Africa’s top thought leaders, writers, photographers, poets, cartoonists and, new for this year, illustrators.
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- A Bantu in My Bathroom: Debating Race, Sexuality and Other Uncomfortable South African Topics by Eusebius McKaiser
EAN: 9781920434373
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by Luso on Oct 16th, 2012
Journalist and author Liz McGregor relates her e-publishing journey, in which she took a leap of faith and put Khabzela: The Life and Times of a South African, her biography of the DJ who contracted HIV and died at the height of his popularity in 2004, onto Amazon.com:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Writing Khabzela
By Liz McGregor
I have just despatched a book into cyberspace, courtesy of Amazon.com, and it’s a wonderful feeling. Khabzela. I actually wrote it seven years ago, soon after returning to South Africa after several years in London, working on The Guardian’s comment and analysis pages. I had watched with some frustration the way South Africa was portrayed: Aids was now the prism through which it was viewed. The government had just won the case against the pharmaceutical companies, forcing them to allow generic anti-retroviral drugs and thus make it affordable to treat the hundreds of thousands of South Africans infected with the HI virus. Now the blame shifted to the president, Aids dissident, Thabo Mbeki. Perceptions of South Africa were reduced to villain vs victim: uncaring, remote Big Man president as the only obstacle to life-saving medication for his hapless, helpless people.
When I got back to South Africa in 2003, I found of course, that it was a noisy, fractious democracy but the silence on the subject of HIV/Aids was deafening. This couldn’t surely be pinned on one man.
Then Khabzela, the hottest DJ on the hottest youth radio station in South Africa, Yfm, came out on air with his positive HIV diagnosis. I interviewed him but he was already suffering from dementia and he died a few months later, having refused to take ARV medication. Mbeki’s confusing messages about the cause of Aids might have contributed to this refusal but certainly didn’t explain it.
For the next year, aided by a writing fellowship at the edgy, innovative Wits research institute, WISER, I explored his life in an attempt to understand why. I interviewed his family, his childhood friends, his girlfriends, his colleagues at Yfm and in the taxi industry, his sangoma and the dodgy white miracle peddlers he turned to in his increasing desperation. Finally, I sat down with the piles of transcripts of numerous interviews. How to write it? Khabzela and I were both South Africans but apartheid’s rigid racial divide meant we could have grown up in two different countries. I now had control of how to frame his story. How not to emulate the same pigeon-holing I had been so critical of in London? Unless I went about this with maximum self-awareness, I too was going to shape the story to fit my own preconceptions. And no matter how empathetic I was, I could not claim to be familiar with the intimate agonies and yearnings of a black man who had grown up under apartheid.
I decided I could not use the traditional biographical tool of omniscient narrator. I made myself a peripheral character in the book, trying to be upfront about where I was coming from. For the rest, I used as far as possible verbatim quotes from my interviewees so that they got to tell their stories in their own words. I was simply the conduit, channelling it all together into a coherent narrative. I remember falling into quite an intense depression in the months I was writing Khabzela. Analysing it afterwards, it was clear why. The interviews had been done while Khabzela was dying and shortly after his death. Virtually everyone I spoke to was still in the throes of shock and grief – and fear. If it happened to Khabzela, it could happen to them too. These were the voices that were swilling around in my head in those long, lonely months of writing.
Khabzela died in 2004. This book was first published the following year, in 2005.
It became a best-seller in South Africa’s undemanding terms: selling nearly 5,000 copies. The author gets 10% of the proceeds, going up to 12% for the second print run. In the seven years since its publication, I have made enough to pay the bills for almost two full months.
But, as with the research and writing of the book, it has taken me to interesting places. Zackie Achmat got me to address activists at the then ground-breaking Treatment Action Campaign. And later to sit on a panel at an Aids conference he chaired, consisting of celebrities’ experience of Aids. I sat next to John Smit, then Springbok captain, who was remarkably articulate on the subject. In the cavernous waiting room of the HIV/Aids unit at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, I stood on a plastic chair and, aided by a translator, related Khabzela as cautionary tale to the captive patients: this is what will happen to you if you don’t take your medication.
I was whisked off to a castle on a lake in Salzburg to pontificate on biography-as-mirror-of-society in the illustrious society of Claire Tomalin and Vikram Seth. And now Khabzela is taking me on yet another journey.
Publishing has been revolutionised since I first handed over my manuscript in 2005. Then the author was reduced to bystander as the publisher, with exclusive licence over one’s work, took control of print runs, distribution, pricing and marketing. I have a different publisher now but I think that, generally, the relationship between publisher and author has shifted with the coming of the digital age to become more of a partnership.
My latest royalty statement showed ever dwindling sales. I knew Khabzela was being prescribed at US universities but to get the physical copy there is expensive: the cost of posting a single book to London, for example, is R165. Digital publishing transforms all that. It also offers the prospect of once again having control of the manuscript I had sweated and wept over. I dug out the contract I had signed in 2005 and sent it to Kundayi Masanzu, the copyright guru at ANFASA, the non-fiction writers’ association. He confirmed I had not ceded rights to the electronic version of Khabzela and gave me sound, practical advice on how to go about establishing this fact with the publisher. That took several weeks. In the meantime, I began re-editing and updating the original manuscript. I found it reassuring to re-read it in the light of the current crisis in the mining industry. Only a few years ago, we were also in crisis: then hundreds of thousands of people were dying of Aids with no hope of affordable treatment. Now South Africa is the poster boy of the international Aids community, with the biggest HIV/Aids programme in the world, largely funded by the government. I thought: this crisis too shall pass.
Amazon is remarkably user-friendly. I downloaded their idiot’s guide to converting a Word document to an e-book and managed to get pretty far before deciding I needed professional help. After hitting several brick walls – every publisher in South Africa seems to be in the process of converting their backlists into e-books and anyone with the necessary skills is kept very busy – I found Masha du Toit in Cape Town. She completed the conversion swiftly and effectively. My friend, Dirk Hartford, the founding CEO of Yfm and the man who spotted and cultivated Khabzela, sent me some of his old pictures of him and I chose a particularly evocative one, cropped it on my Mac and Masha turned it into a digital cover. Loading the book into the Kindle shop is fairly simple: you are given a few choices. On pricing, for example. If you opt to price it at anything over $9.99, you can only opt for a 35-65% royalty split with Amazon. They get the 65%. Price it under 9.99 and you get 70%, although 30% then gets lopped off in tax for sales in the US. I chose an arbitrary middle ground: $5.99. Who knows if it will find any takers at all? But, it’s a good feeling, being in control. And launching Khabzela off on another life, out there in the ether.
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by Sophy on Sep 19th, 2012
Salman Rushdie’s long-awaited memoir, Joseph Anton, was released worldwide yesterday rivalled only by JK Rowling’s forthcoming The Casual Vacancy as the publishing event of 2012.
In Joseph Anton, Rushdie tells the story of his years in hiding following Ayatollah Khomeini’s condemnation of The Satanic Verses and the issuing of a fatwa calling for his death. Rushdie spent a decade living under the pseudonym “Joseph Anton” – an amalgamation of the first names of two of his favourite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov – and flanked by an “absurdly sexy” group of Special Branch officers.
On the shelves for under 24 hours, the book has already received applauding reviews as well as having been announced as a contender for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the UK’s top non-fiction award. However, with this book’s success comes further Rushdie controversy. Iran’s Ayatollah Sanei has used the uproar surrounding Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s anti-Islam film, Innocence of Muslims, to revive and raise the price on Rushdie’s head to $3.3m, a move publicly denounced by a pack of bestselling authors but dismissed by Rushdie himself.
David Remnick has highlighted Rushdie’s “brilliant memoir” in a blog post for The New Yorker:
Twenty-three years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his death warrant on Salman Rushdie and forced on the novelist a decade of hellish seclusion, Rushdie is publishing this week a brilliant memoir of those years of endurance, called “Joseph Anton.” (Rushdie’s security detail asked that he devise an alias and “Joseph Anton”—the first names of Conrad and Chekhov—is what he chose.) Readers of the excerpt from Rushdie’s new book that was published here earlier this month could readily sense the shaming helplessness of his experience and his astonishing capacity to tell the story straight. There is in the memoir a kind of absolute honesty, a willingness to pass clear-eyed judgment on everyone involved—including, most ruthlessly, himself. “Joseph Anton,” which is written in a deliberately distancing, yet scrupulously accurate, third-person voice, is, in its way, as important a book as “Midnight’s Children,” the novel that gave birth to the Rushdie phenomenon, in 1981.
While much of what follows below is captured in Remnick’s post above, we’ve taken the time to provide you with our own list of choice links, sourced under the guidance of Sunday Times Books Editor Tymon Smith.
If you reckon 656 pages (albeit 656 pages of illuminating prose) is too much to chew through, The Daily Beast has distilled the book into its 11 most significant bits. Follow that with this extract, the only one to appear pre-publication, and you’ll be ready to talk about the book at least around the dinner table:
1989
Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door
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Ahead of the book’s official release, interviews with Rushdie were granted to a handful of journalists around the world. Among this prestigious pack was Darryl Accone, Books Editor of the Mail & Guardian:
Darryl Accone speaks to Salman Rushdie [44:32m]:
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It’s 10.59am on Friday September 14. At the Mail & Guardian offices in Johannesburg, I’m in the editor’s commandeered office, waiting for the phone to ring. It does.
“Hi, it’s Salman Rushdie,” says the voice on the other end at exactly 11am. Rushdie is in his London home at the start of two months of promoting his new book, Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape), a memoir of his life and times. It will be published globally on Tuesday September 18, in what is certainly among the most eagerly anticipated publishing events of the new millennium.
- Salman Rushdie: the fatwa, Islamic fundamentalism and Joseph Anton: The Guardian
- Becoming ‘Anton,’ Or, How Rushdie Survived A Fatwa: NPR
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Awarded an even greater privilege, literary doyenne Michele Magwood was flown to London to attend the official launch. Among the evening’s guests were Stephen Fry and Ian McEwan.
Read Magwood’s report on the launch in full, as published in the latest edition of the Sunday Times:
The security and celebrities and the trail of taxis pulling up to the blitz of paparazzi were more fitting for an actor or royalty. Instead, the buzz on Friday night in London was for one of the most-awaited books in years from one of the most controversial authors of our generation, Sir Salman Rushdie.
The literati gathered at a smart Knightsbridge club as the diminutive, greying Rushdie worked his way through the deafening crowd. He had just flown in from his home in New York to launch his memoir, Joseph Anton.
Stephen Fry held court at the bar as guests surged in. They included novelists Ian McEwan and Hanif Kureishi, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman and rock stars David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler.
The four-times-married Rushdie is author of 11 novels and recipient of dozens of awards, including the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children. But it is for his novel The Satanic Verses he is best known.
On Valentine’s Day in 1989, a BBC journalist called to tell him he had been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual leader, who deemed the book to be “against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran”, which Rushdie denied.
He was forced into hiding, an exile that lasted for nine years as he moved around, watched over by the Special Branch. His protectors needed a pseudonym for him, and asked him to choose a non-Asian one. Rushdie combined the names of two of his favourite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov.
Judging by the book, which goes on sale this week, it is a moving and thought-provoking account of the personal toll the deadly threat took on him. It was, he said, an examination of the freedom of speech. “What happened to me is the precursor of the story going on today.
“Publishers are more reluctant to publish books that are critical of, or even about, Islam.” The timing of Joseph Anton is apt, with protests erupting over the film Innocence of Muslims.
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by Sophy on Sep 18th, 2012
The Mail & Guardian captured a series of podcasts of poets Breyten Breytenbach, Rustum Kozain and Oswald Mtshali reading from their work at the Mail & Guardian Literary Festival, which took place in Johannesburg earlier this year.
In the podcasts below, listen as Breytenbach reads “This is a Season”, Kozain reads “Memory” and Mtshali reads “The Miner”:
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by Luso on Sep 14th, 2012
Celebrated writer Ben Okri, winner of the 1991 Booker Prize for The Famished Road, delivered the 13th Steve Biko Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town on Wednesday. The occasion marked the 35th anniversary of the death of Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist and Black Consciousness leader, in a Pretoria prison following sustained torture and beatings by the security police.
Okri’s five-part talk, entitled “Biko and the Tough Alchemy of Africa”, was Pan-Africanist in its spirit and content. He used the space to talk about how, living in another part of the world as an African, South Africa’s Struggle was also the background to his life. He exhorted South Africans to see themselves as a people capable of great things and to continue to inspire the world through the kind of courage and determination exhibited during the Struggle.
Okri ended the talk with the resonating words “Our future is greater than our past, bless you all.” These are words of his that are engraved in the gates of a war memorial in Hyde Park, London.
UCT has made a podcast of the lecture available online:
Steve Biko Memorial Lecture:
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Rebecca Davis and Wamuwi Mbao contemplate Okri’s compelling address:
There are some writers who come across as engaging and easy in prose, but in the flesh appear stumbling, awkward and dry. Ben Okri is not one of those. Managing to rock a beret in a way Juju could only dream of, Okri utterly charmed a packed audience at UCT’s Jameson Hall on Wednesday night. A friend commented after his address: “I was eating out of his hand. And I’d give it a Michelin star.”
The Steve Biko Memorial lectures are performances of public wisdom, testimonies in tribute to Steve Biko which take place every year in commemoration of the day the Black Consciousness hero died in police custody. Previous keynote speakers have included figures like Mamphela Ramphele, Ndjabulo Ndebele, Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. These figures have all exercised public thought before an audience, speaking on subjects that reverberate through Biko’s ideas and expand the history and legacy of his role as an intellectual in society.
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