Darlings of Durban
Shafinaaz Hassim
Publisher: Kwela
ISBN: 9780795710964
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Many women identify with the Darlings, and the novel is enjoying huge success as a new iteration of chick lit which shows an aspect of Durban that is real to many.
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Chick lit is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A kind of light commercial fiction addressed to British women readers of the late 1990s and early 2000s and subsequently imitated in the United States and beyond. The term appeared from 1996 as a flippant counterpart to the lad-lit fiction of that time.”* The dictionary refers also to Helen Fielding’s book Bridget Jones’s diary as the primary example of the genre. For a while now, I have opined that the first female novelists, those revered by countless English literature departments for decades, such as Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, were writers of literature that could be defined as chick lit. Their novels were about the minutiae of the lives women lived. I have to confess that my guilty pleasure, even while studying English at Rhodes University in the last century, was devouring heart-searing novels by DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, among others; my refuge would be to escape into a delicious chick lit novel for a few hours. My favoured novelists during that time were the original women writers mentioned above, but I have also delighted in novels by Helen Fielding, Kathy Lette, Marian Keyes, Caitlin Moran and others who write in the same genre. There is a very respectable space in the literary sphere for novels by women, possibly written more for women than men, with the witty, self-deprecating humour that many women have mastered to minimise how difficult it is to run households and careers and still be relevant.
It was with horror that I read the review by Imraan Coovadia of Shafinaaz Hassim’s recent novel, Darlings of Durban. He questioned why the novel didn’t delve into the underbelly of Durban’s complex political machinations, and said he does not recognise the Durban Hassim wrote of.
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I’d like to defend the novel as a classic example of chick lit which has no desire to – nor does it set out to – examine political issues in the way Coovadia expects.
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I’d like to defend the novel as a classic example of chick lit which has no desire to – nor does it set out to – examine political issues in the way Coovadia expects. Hassim has written a story about a group of women whose families move in wealthy circles. Many are Muslim, but Natasha is of mixed heritage, with parents whose struggle credentials have earned her father a ministerial position in parliament. Having worked and lived in Durban for the past 13 years, I have met many women like the Darlings, many of them rich businesswomen. Hassim writes about their loves and lives in the tradition of Jane Austen, where domesticity and issues of the heart are a primary focus. The novel reminds me of Happiness is a four-letter word by Nozizwe Cynthia Jele. Here, too, a group of women form close friendships, and their lives and loves become the driving force behind the novel.
In Darlings of Durban, Natasha runs a successful business and is dating the handsome Sizwe. Natasha’s heritage of Pedi and Zulu on her mother’s side and Muslim and Tamil on her father’s side make her hesitant to commit to the marriage Sizwe so badly desires. He can’t wait to make her his makoti. However, Natasha’s mother’s struggles to be accepted by her husband’s family make Natasha anxious about experiencing the same. Her life is all she wants it to be, and she has no desire to be trapped into a marriage. Yet.
Her best friends, the titular Darlings, have a WhatsApp group which has become their lifeline. There is the rich and beautiful Sofia, whom Natasha met when her husband sold Natasha her Porsche, and the cousins Farhana and Razia, whose marriages and lives are more complicated than the others’. These women are her support group, and it is through their interactions that the novel plays itself out. Their lives are not uncomplicated. Farhana deals with a son with an unpleasant addiction and a husband whose self-absorption makes him neglect his family’s needs. Razia has a husband with a cruel streak who undermines and belittles her by bringing women to their marital home. Even Natasha finds herself confronted by a stalker who is set on taking revenge on her for some unknown slight.
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Darlings of Durban is a great holiday read.
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Darlings of Durban is a great holiday read. While it deals with serious issues in some of the relationships of the women, the novel is not meant to be scoured for national political commentary. When Coovadia states that he has no idea where the readership for this novel might be, it seems that the success of the novel, with its multiple launches and coffee mornings, has proved him wrong. Many women identify with the Darlings, and the novel is enjoying huge success as a new iteration of chick lit which shows an aspect of Durban that is real to many.
*https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095606915
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