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Emma Brockes' She Left Me the Gun Launched with Nancy Richards at Kalk Bay Books

British author Emma Brockes cut an elegant figure, tall and willowy and confident, at the launch of her memoir She Left Me the Gun at Kalk Bay Books last week. She kept her audience giggling as she spoke about her South African-born mother’s lowly regard for the English. Those who had the great pleasure of hearing the award-winning Guardian journalist had an evening they will not soon forget.

They discovered that the faults of the English, according to Brockes’ late mother, included: “coldness, snobbery, boarding schools, tradition, the royals, hypocrisy, fat ankles, waste and dessert, or pudding, as they called it, a word she thought redolent of the entire race!”

Brockes was joined by local radio personality Nancy Richards in an intriguing discussion. Richards reflected on the “lightness of touch” with which Brockes had handled the more horrifying aspects of her mother’s life.

Brockes spoke of simultaneously knowing and not knowing that something utterly ghastly had happened in the previous generation. Her mother, Paula, had endured under the formidable shadow of Brockes’ grandfather who was a paedophile, alcoholic and drug addict. At the age of 24, she had her father arrested and prosecuted for child abuse. “Because it was 1950s South Africa, this was a substantial accomplishment. However, the case went all the way to the High Court in Johannesburg, where the children were called to testify against their father. Because he was able to represent himself, he decimated the witnesses, his own children, right down to the six-year-old, and got off scot-free,” she said.

Brockes also told of the challenges she had researching the case, and reconnecting with her mother’s remaining brothers and sisters. Her story is truly remarkable.

Liesl Jobson tweeted live from the event using the hashtag #livebooks

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Book details

• She Left Me the Gun by Emma Brockes
  EAN: 9780571275847
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Andrew Donaldson: Icelander and Stuffness

By Andrew Donaldson for The Times

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

Someone to Watch Over Me, by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (Hodder & Stoughton)

In the fifth in Sigurdardóttir’s Thora Gudmundsdóttir series the lawyer comes to the aid of a young man with Down’s syndrome who has been convicted of burning down his care home and killing five residents. Ignore the rubbish about “Iceland’s answer to Stieg Larsson”; this is way better – terrifying and compelling.

THE ISSUE

The great forgotten American novel has been in the news again, particularly Stoner, by John Williams (1965).

What of forgotten South African novels begging rediscovery? One that comes to mind is Sylvester Stein’s bitterly funny 1958 masterpiece, Second Class Taxi. Its protagonist, Staffnurse Phofolo, is “idle and undesirable”, and courts immediate arrest for having no pass. Not that he’s bothered; he has a warm greatcoat and a drain pipe he calls home. But real life comes calling in the form of various do-gooders – liberals, church people and, of course, the ANC (thinly disguised as the African Congress of Equality). Readers are urged to hunt down “Stuffness” (as he’s often called). He’s unforgettable.

CRASH COURSE

Self-proclaimed grandmaster of Hindi crime fiction Surender Mohan Pathak’s 300 or so novels have sold some 25 million copies. Which is not bad for an author only sold at platform stalls at India’s railway stations. Bookstores won’t stock his work – despite a near-fanatical following among third-class travellers.

“Educated people in India don’t want to read Hindi and they certainly won’t be seen dead with one of my books,” Pathak told The Times of London recently. With the recent English translations of three Pathak titles, The Last Goal, Daylight Robbery and The 65 Lakh Heist, he is, however, now attracting the attention of literati with a penchant for slumming.

For an idea of the style of Pathak and others, The Times published this pithy extract from Sudhandira Sangu’s 1933 guide, The Secret of Commercial Novel Writing: “(1) The title of the book should carry a woman’s name – and it should be a sexy one like Miss Leela Mohini. (2) Your story must absolutely include a minimum half-dozen lovers and prostitutes [and] preferably 10 or a dozen murders. (3) If you try to bring any social messages, forget it. Beware! You are not going to lure your women readers.”

THE BOTTOM LINE

“Despite all the powers of contemporary science, the seemingly straightforward anatomical question, is there a G spot? remains unanswered.” – What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, by Daniel Bergner (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Book details

• Someone to Watch Over Me by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
  EAN: 9781444734423
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Sunday Read: Excerpt from Cotton Tenants by James Agee and Walker Evans

The New York-based publishing company Melville House has scored a critical hit with its latest book, Cotton Tenants. The work was created from an unpublished manuscript of Jame Agee’s, discovered in the writer’s archives at the University of Tennesee. Agee’s writing is accompanied by photographs from Walker Evans: the two worked their way together across the landscape of America’s Great Depression, documenting the devastation wreaked by poverty on human lives.

The scenes in Cotton Tenants, stripped of their historical and geographical markers, might have been written today, by writers visiting any number of places around the world – though it’s doubtful how many would achieve Agee’s spare intensity in their reportage:

Nobody escapes malaria and its returns; and in its milder forms, such as diarrhea, nausea, headache, dizziness, sudden departures of strength, and retching of bile, everyone takes it for granted. Every so often, though, you get such a bad spell of it you mighty nigh have to quit work. Soda and Calotabs are the common remedies. The Tingles like this one, to begin a meal: a pinch of Epsom salts three times a day for nine days; skip nine days; resume; go on until relieved. About a pound generally fixes you up.

Or if you are constituted luckily, the various poisons with which your system is loaded will assemble themselves into the safety valves locally known as risings and more widely known as boils. After a while, the valve blows off. That is the signal for another rising.

• Complete article: Slate
• More Sunday reads

Book details

• Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee, Walker Evans
  EAN: 9781612192123
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Podcast: Taiye Selasi Reads from Ghana Must Go and Explains How Toni Morrison Pushed Her to Write

Michel Martin spoke to Selasi on NPR’s Tell Me More, Martin asked her about how she started writing, commenting that Taiye Selasi’s intimidating CV shows that she could have become a diplomat.

Selasi said that she’s known that she wanted to be a writer since she was four years old, saying that it was mostly out of fear that she went to Yale and didn’t study creative writing, then went to Oxford thinking she could channel her love of writing into journalism, “only to find that, as I think many creative people do, that the passion would not go quietly into that good night”.

Selasi read from her latest novel, Ghana Must Go, and discussed how the idea for the characters in the book had been in her head for a long time before she wrote them.

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• Not playing? Listen at NPR

Selasi also spoke to Mary Carole McCauley from The Baltimore Sun, sharing the story of how Toni Morrison pushed her to write her first manuscript: “I went to Professor Morrison’s house, and she told me she’d give me a year to show her a manuscript. That deadline, for which I will be forever grateful, prompted me, inspired me and pushed me a little with fear to write “The Sex Lives of African Girls.”

Taiye Selasi’s debut novel has been in publication for less than a week. But even before a single copy was sold, the glamorous 33-year-old was being hailed as the newest star of the literary world.
Selasi’s publisher, The Penguin Group, is promoting “Ghana Must Go” big-time. Penguin describes the family saga as “one of the most eagerly anticipated debut novels of the year.”

• Complete article: The Baltimore Sun

Book details

• Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780670919864
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Photographs from the Swaziland Leg of Kingsley Holgate's Izintaba Zobombo Expedition

The Kinglsey Holgate Foundation has shared photographs from the Swaziland chapter of Holgate’s Izintaba Zobombo Expedition.

The purpose of the expedition is in aid of several causes, including the fight against rhino poaching and helping to prevent malaria. Holgate, adventurer and author of Africa: In the Footsteps of the Great Explorers, is pictured holding a cockerel which was given to him by the Shewula community in Swaziland:

• View the gallery on the Kingsley Holgate Foundation Facebook Page

Book details

• Africa: In the Footsteps of the Great Explorers by Kingsley Holgate
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781431702220
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Berlinda de Bruyckere gesels oor JM Coetzee se kuratorskap van haar uitstalling by die Venesiese Biënnale

Die wêreldbekende Suid-Afrikaanse skrywer JM Coetzee tree tans as die kurator van Belgiese beeldhouer Berlinde de Bruyckere se uitstalling by die 55ste internasionale Venesiese Biënnale op.

Berlinde de Bruyckere het Coetzee genader vir ’n teks om haar werk te inspireer en hy het die kortverhaal “The Old Woman and the Cats” aan haar gestuur. Die kortverhaal verskyn ook in Cripplewood / Kreupelhout, ’n katalogus wat saamgestel is om die uitstalling te vergesel.

Die Burger se Kirby van der Merwe het met De Bruyckere gesels oor haar beeldhouwerk en die rol wat Coetzee in die huidige uitstalling gespeel het.

Jy sien eers net ’n groot, dreigende vorm totdat jou oë gewoond raak aan die donker.

Dit is ’n reusagtige dooie boom wat lyk asof dit op dié plek omgeval het.

Die Venesiese Biënnale het pas geopen vir joernaliste en ek gesels met die Belgiese beeldhouer Berlinde de Bruyckere in ’n hoek van haar uitstalling.

Die boom is die produk van haar samewerking met die skrywer J.M. Coetzee, Suid-Afrika se uitgeweke Nobelpryswenner.

• Volledige onderhoud: Die Burger

Boekbesonderhede

• Cripplewood / Kreupelhout deur JM Coetzee en Berlinda de Bruyckere
  EAN: 9780300196573
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• The Childhood of Jesus deur JM Coetzee
  Boek se tuisblad
  EAN: 9781846557385
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