The JM Coetzee | Athol Fugard Festival took place in Booktown Richmond recently. See photos from the festival. Denis Beckett shares his speech from the festival with LitNet. Read more about The South Africa Independent Publishers Awards 2015.
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Denis Beckett
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Darryl David smuggled me into this. He must have muti. I know that “only eight” books to read is eight books more than you have time to read. I know there is no such thing as flipping through the eight for the one that lights a bulb in your head. Worse, I’m scared of chutzpah. I don’t have any of that, not any more. I don’t have the crust to say that One Book is the champ. There are too many champs, different champs.
Then I get the books and find that half are by friends, or at any rate people it’d be hard to look in the eye if I bumped into them just after they’d failed to win a competition that I had judged.
Darryl says I need only comment on why the winner wins. But when I’ve won competitions I haven’t cared why I won. It’s when I didn’t that I wanted to know what the judge thought of my entry. So my penance for taking on this job is I give everyone a comment. Not that I expect everyone to like that, but they should know it’s offered in respect, for producing the product and for entering the contest. And they have a Delete button.
Living in South Africa looks like a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, which it is not. It is a cousin. It deals with categories – health, the economy, shopping – and it’s not for tourists. It’s for a specific and tightly defined audience; expatriates or executives coming to live here.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma doesn’t agree. She says it’s a “must-read not only for expats, but for all who want to embrace living in South Africa”, with which she touches on the nub. A must-read is a book that assumes it has a captive market. For me, if you’re talking a writing competition, you are talking of making readers – whether or not allegedly captive – want to read you.
Our authors – Regina Gräff and Derryn Campbell – have assembled information which the book conveys. “Mail is delivered to street addresses every weekday. You can also apply for a post office box address. Post boxes are located at post offices, shopping centres and petrol stations ...”
That’s the flavour for 300 pages. This is valid, it has a purpose, a use, a market. I thank Regina and Derryn for giving prospective temporary residents a straight, clear, good-looking punt for my country. But for their book to go further in this competition, it would need to show me that they are setting out to exploit the potential of the written word to make reading a joy.
Vrystaatse dorpe is delivered by a strong postman. Each of its pages, A4 + 25%, is already a weighty item, thick with gloss. In 608 pages you could bench-press this volume.
There must be 1 000 pictures. A full single text page carries 1 000 words, which is three, four, or five times more than the average bedside book. The Afrikaans is beyond suiwer, it is what loose Seffrican English usage would call lekker. In 1848 local Boere invite British Major Warden, in the capital, Winburg, to verkas, decamp, after Britain announces that it is occupying their country, and this the major does with befaamde spoed, renowned speed.
The book is a naked triumph, and a mystery. Who paid for this gigantic quantity of time, to say nothing of the printing? (Vrystaatse dorpe is printed in Shanghai; poignant, hey?) The dedication is to the three Afrikaans sister churches who gave birth to 75 of the Free State’s 80 dorps, but there is no mention of the sister churches putting any EFTs into the equation. One hopes, without vast confidence, that the Free State’s 19 metros came to the party. But … within three years Dorpe is in its second impression; something’s working.
All we are told of the provenance is that Dr Jan van der Merwe (an immigrant, born in the far north-west Transvaal and only arriving in the Free State for his doctorate in anthropology) is a research fellow at UFS and chairman of Bloemfontein’s Anglo-Boer War Museum.
Jan deserves abundant thanks and admiration and all sorts of prizes. Whether this prize is among them is tricky, partly for a rather neat, quintessentially South African reason. Is being the only non-English entrant a drawback, might it be a plus-point, or is it to be ignored? Instinct is for the third option, but I don’t claim to wholly carry that through. I rejoice in it being Afrikaans, like I’ll one day rejoice in finding something similar in Sotho. And I’m not impervious to the howls and squawks that selecting it would evoke.
For good or ill I don’t have to address that, as I have to say it’s not exactly “travel”. This is reference. You read it in one place over years, in stabs, when you wish to learn that Matlwantlwang adjacent to Steynsrus means “Place of small impoverished houses near the river” (which you guess is from black people being kicked out in apartheid’s heyday). Or to understand Fauresmith, merging Dominee Faure with Governor Harry Smith, perhaps a shloeping of the power-wielder, but also a nice note of Boer-Brit toenadering. Or that the town council of Dewetsdorp has not once, but twice, in 1927 and again in 2010, hosted councillor conflicts leading to murder most foul. No, “travel” might be the paperback on the back seat. This mighty tome is a wonderful work, but a travel work it’s not. It gets one hell of a proud place on my (sturdiest) bookshelf, though.
René Paul Grosselin’s Basotho People at Work comes from a decade of a photographer’s learning not to chase people and scenes, but to wait by the roadside until they choose to arrive. This is a delightful account of Lesotho life, with some pictures that let the reader smell the dust of the lowlands and some pictures that let the reader brace in the chill of the highlands. The whole of it lets the reader feel proud of the photographer’s getting his pale and formerly foreign face into the warp and woof of this Sotho world.
A prize for René …? Aahhhhhh, yus, tempted I am. I steel the nerves and say, René, this is a terrific book of its genre, one of the nicest, and I hope your awards will be lovely sales and lovely appreciation from the subjects of your lens, but finally the genre is a known genre, it’s not path-beating as such. For competitive purposes, I think some weight must lie on that.
David Robbins’s small newer book, 2010, Private Excavations, is Ambitious with a capital A. On the front cover I learn that it is “exploring the roots of dogma”. The back cover declares that it explores the historical linkages between single-truth convictions and totalitarianism, and it does this within the framework of describing Pietism’s impact on David’s Scandinavian forebears. The body of the book discloses several further sub-themes, including the ANC-Inkatha wars of the early 1990s and the lives and times of Swedish playwright August Strindberg and artist (The Scream) Edvard Munch. Seldom has so small a weight of paper borne quite so large a range of foci.
In this setting the statement that this is a “richly layered travel book” has mixed import. Of the “rich layering” there is no doubt whatever, but the“travel” belongs in fainter print … Yes, David travels, and he talks of his grandfather’s travels, but in its essence this is something else – it’s sociology and introspection and philosophy.
I take a passage like “Dogma: this more than anything else is the ultimate denial of the central principle of change, metamorphosis, renewal, death and then birth, waves and change and waves again, the perpetual rhythm of life itself.” If that’s travel writing, so was Darwin.
Much is fascinating about Private Excavations, but two big things to me were, one, the outing of Pietism or extreme Protestant fundamentalism and, two, the beating up of one-truth thinking or the idea that there is one right view and everybody has to have it.
I’d never heard of Pietism. Until David, if you talked about “fundamentalism” I thought you meant Muslim or maybe Catholic. No, the Prods are way up there as high in the guilt stakes as anyone. And while instinct tells me that of course Joe can believe X and Jill can believe Y, I had never glimpsed how much of a fight lay behind this simple freedom, or with what enormous implications.
Excavations is not just a good book, it’s an extraordinary book; it might be epochal. But for this competition … if you were judging rural landscapes and Picasso flung in Guernica, you’d scratch your head.
David reappears in the truest travel clothes. Searching Africa says it; it searches Africa. On the bus, at the airport, in the market, in the lobby, in shantytown, at the street corner, David pauses anywhere and talks to anybody. And he tells us what they said, and what he thinks about it.
He does so in one very excellent way and one … um, other way. What is excellent is his dedication to honest ingestion of the evidence. Subtle truths and quiet confessionals roll out on and on, rebutting the easy headline verities about what Africans do and are and think. David searches for the thread that underlies a complex continent. He does it with Africa-bug in his soul and Africa-love in his heart, but in firm refusal to simplify. In comparison with the flow we know – 45% the Wasteland Continent platitude and 45% the Plucky Continent platitude – David is a refreshing denial of that dogma that worries him.
And that other way? Aaaah, this is difficult. I could duck it – I should duck it. It’s so subjective. If there was an opinion poll on this, David would beat me hands down.
But David himself sets a benchmark about being honest, so I honestly tell David that for me, he writes too long, with too much human interplay between the nuggets. Someone stands up, or sits down, or scratches their chin, or looks out of the window, or pours tea, or lights a cigarette. And they converse too much, too, between the nuggets – that’s a good-looking marmalade, do you think it will rain, the bus won’t be long …
This reader, me, fairly or not, wants the searching of Africa to home in. What insights arise out of meeting the chap in the train, whether from what the chap says or from what David thinks of what the chap says? I embrace some small talk as part of the deal and as breathing space, but an overdose can drown a guy.
My own sin is the opposite: compressing words until they shriek; there are times that I don’t know what I meant, a year after having written it. I’m sure that public opinion would see my sin as the worse, but public opinion isn’t judging this competition. When David judges a competition that I take part in, he can bring his perspective to bear.
Anyhow, this is a book written between 1994 and 1997, published in 2011, being read in 2015. That’s a problem, and you don’t need to retort that Hamlet was written half a millennium ago. It’s different. Most of what David deals with is doubtless as valid now as it was then, but then you keep tripping on things like Asians returning to Kampala or the Angolan civil war closing and you don’t know what is not valid. It’s not like reading an old-days book, but a today book in time travel.
Ashwin Desai would definitely win the Shortest Entry Stakes, 180 little bitty A5 pages with leisurely print and numerous pictures.
Ashwin arrests me on the cover, with his title, The Archi-Texture of Durban. I comment on it, to my wife: What a smart term, why had I never seen it before, thought of it?
On the flyleaf Ashwin arrests me again: “In the Casbah where I grew up there were two kinds of guys; skapies and sharks. This book is dedicated to all the skapies like me who spent their lives trying to masquerade as sharks.” Aha, nice feeling, a book written for me.
On paragraph 1 of page 1, Ashwin defines Durban’s “true differentiating factor”. It is “a city of balance. Do not get me wrong. I don’t mean a city of peace and harmony. Rather it is a place where everything appears offset against everything else, nothing made for itself but rather made to compensate, the city of walkaround, paradoxes and disequilibrium carefully maintained at just the right levels”.
Is this an entry for Pseuds Corner or is it a powerful thought? I don’t know, but it’s arresting. It’s not every day I am arrested three times by one book, never mind before its second pararagraph.
Ashwin’s arrest rate can’t maintain that pace, or it would make work for cardiologists, but it never slips below the level at which the reader’s head is looking for the next arrest to come. Phoenix and Chatsworth are two extended brown wings keeping the garment, hospitality, manufacturing, and hair gel industries aloft. Durban is split into thirds – white, black, Indian – so no one can gang up on anyone else on street corners. Whites and Indians vote DA but thank God that the ANC is in control, as for wielding a baton to keep the poor in their place there is nothing like a liberation movement. In the art of hiding uncomfortable pasts, the pen is mightier than the sword, but the air-brush is mightier still. Eating crab curry is an untidy business, like regime change. The parallels between Christian and Hindu legend raise a question: Are Gods capable of plagiarism?
What changes is Ashwin’s ag-kak rate. It grows. Many of the times I mumble “ag kak” are standard territory, overstatements of apartheid idiocies or over-silly whacks at the customs of the bygone Establishment, or places where Ashwin, la PJ O’Rourke, looks so hard for the slick phrase that truth and meaning get their heads pushed underwater. Still, while one is wondering what funny/learned/thought-provoking comment you’ll find in each next paragraph, ag-kak mumblings stay fairly muted.
This competition’s easiest decision is on Peter Baker and On the Road to Lake Turkana. It’s disqualified, on multiple grounds. Baker is joint Makhulubaas of Booktown Richmond, under whose auspices this competition exists; he is thick as thieves with Darryl David, overlord of the competition itself; and his front cover cites a sentence from your detached and objective judge, D Beckett. No one can give a prize to a book that has his name on its cover, nooit.
So, no cigar, but a memorable book. Baker flashes me back to primary school days and how I loved writing the experience essays, the “My Day at the Zoo” or the “Our Holiday at the Sea”.
This is Baker’s “My Drive through Africa”, no holds barred. It covers everything. You’ll know about the disappointment of good Ethiopian beer coming in minuscule 300 ml bottles. You will learn the philosophies of land ownership in South Sudan or peacemaking negotiations in northern Mozambique.
Baker’s book evokes quite a bunch of words, headed by the word “refreshing”. His whole approach is refreshing, often in ways that are (refreshingly) otherwise. Take the thing about political correctness. People who suffer from this disease induce large amounts of yawn punctuated by puking on your shoes at their circumventing of hard truths. But people who rejoice in smashing and bashing PCness tend to be racist cretins who can’t forgive Africa for deposing its colonisers. Baker is here Ultra-refreshing. He fires broadsides at the mythologies of political correctness while exuding a wholehearted and truly compelling love of Africa. Fine combination.
The next 10 or so Baker words would be variations on the theme of “extremely energetic”: riproaring, roistering, buccaneering … For grasping life with both hands, Baker is in Olympic league.
I don’t think he’s heard of the notion “editor”. This is a mixed blessing. His writing feels like an articulate person talking a torrent. For a while, an articulate person talking a torrent is great to listen to, but that while has limits (another word that I don’t think Baker knows much about). And while it’s true that people can talk in clichés and we don’t even notice, writing in cliché bumps into, er, limits. When written cliché crosses the line the clichés start becoming small explosions in the reader’s head. Baker is given to “figures of speech”, polite word for “clichés”, that eventually explode like a barrelful of Tom Thumbs – fine tooth comb, head honcho, what the doctor ordered, as they say in the classics, the full nine yards, all things being equal … they roll on and on and on.
Baker’s book is also distinguished, not wholly positively, by a quandary it presents. Its appeal is its naturalness, but its naturalness is also its curse. The naturalness becomes too much. Too many times must we revel in his appreciation for the fine shapes of unencumbered young women, too many times we must join him in the savouring of a cold liquid. For naturalness to amount to greatness, it must be astutely edited so that it feels natural to everyone except an author who is outraged at seeing cargo-loads of his words fly away to Delete-button heaven.
When Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit started their career as Apostles of the Karoo, I suspected their professional life expectancy was low. Sometimes it’s more of a pleasure to have been wrong than other times, and this one is a definite sometimes. To have made the Karoo their meal ticket is triumph enough, but we have all benefited from the way they have made it into so many other meal tickets, co-creating and enthusiastically fanning the Industry of Karooism. It took me half a life to stop seeing the Karoo as the big empty space between the cities. To my children the Karoo has been precious since birth. I reckon theirs are going to see it as practically holy. Karoo activists deserve big thanks.
Chris and Julienne’s Karoo Keepsakes II strikes right chords from the start. Their distinctive and possibly unique little fat square format works exactly right for this book – in fact uncannily right. Inter alia it leads them to their second right chord, which is an uncommon unity of approach. (Almost) every entry is a spread in identical formula – full-page picture on the right, three mini-pictures in the outer left column and 6–8 paragraphs of story between.
One achievement of this approach is a balance between pic and print. In my view, this balance is hardly ever achieved. Your standard coffee table book induces you to look at the pictures, and maybe the captions, but to bypass the text. And few books in which text genuinely prevails get their pictures right – if they aren’t in glossy clusters nowhere near the relevant text they are probably obstructing the read. Well, Keepsakes hits this problem right on its head.
Additionally, this pattern presents marvellous freedom to the reader. Each vignette is self-contained. The index will take you to the dorp you choose, if you have one to choose, or you can read at total random. I dare say that every one of the big pictures (purists might want to inject an “almost”) is a photograph deserving time and care in its own right, while the minis give a terrifically whole feel to the spread, albeit sometimes that bit too small for scrutiny.
As to the range of topics, to say that the authors must have met half the population of the Karoo might be a stretch, but it’s not hyperbole. Few people on this planet can personally know as high a proportion of people across as large a land area. From the Calvinia traffic cop’s Elvis weekends to the Professor of Water to the Williston Band to the Nama Riel to the Cango crocodile cage to some 130 other tales, the reader is introduced to a wider catchment of people and practices than I think you’d think possible. Tall stories there are – sometimes you see the wink in the author’s eye – but on the whole we have here real tales of real people, made plausible by avoidance of shouting and overstatement, with low-key deep-chuckle humour and a prevailing flavour of respect.
I promise I didn’t beg Darryl for an out. You take on a job like this, you accept you have to come up with that name, no matter how severe the chutzpah drought. But Darryl offers. Of his own accord he says I can choose two winners.
Well, thanks Darryl, those would be Archi-texture of Durban and Karoo Keepsakes.