The Oslo House of Literature was an impressive sight recently with the gathering of several big names in African literature - including Petina Gappah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Niq Mhlongo and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Nigeria’s Tolu Ogunlesi (Conquest and Conviviality) was also there and reports back on the experience:
In a piece I wrote after my first visit to Oslo in September 2008 I observed: “To the eyes Oslo is not a very appealing city. To my mind parts of it were plain depressing. In my journal there is a note I made, as follows: ‘Norwegians think [Oslo] is an ugly city. I think so too.’ But it is a city of proud inhabitants.”
Returning a little over a year later for a week-long celebration of African literature organised by the Oslo House of Literature, I’m more forgiving. The city is not that ugly after all. But with a population of about half a million, it will always be a Tiny City in my estimation. Half a million people will be a housing estate in Lagos, I think.
There are no direct flights between Lagos and Oslo. A Lufthansa flight deposited me in the German city of Frankfurt, where I would catch a connecting flight to Oslo’s modest airport. (The last time I was in Oslo I came by train, an endless journey from Gothenburg in neighbouring Sweden to Oslo’s Central train station).
Dis die lekkerste ding in die wereld om in die bed te klim met ‘n goeie boek. Vir sommige is dit ‘n riller, vir ander ‘n liefdesverhaal of te wel ‘n hygroman. Party lees Mills&Boon dat hul tone krul van die lekkerkry, vir ander is die tipe boek ‘n bespotlikheid (hulle lees dit waarskynlik slegs in die privaat, agter geslote deure). Lili Radloff se genoeg met die neerhalende aanmerkings - liefdesverhale is van die top verkopers in die land en wat is tog fout met ‘n bietjie liefde? Ena Murray is een van ons grootste liefdesverhaal-skrywers met 24 omnibus versamelings.
Elke vyf sekondes verkoop ’n Mills & Boon-boek in Engeland, volgens die M&B-webwerf, en in sowel Amerika as Engeland behou dit steeds die grootste aandeel van die boekemark.
Volgens Romance Writers of America (RWA), die vernaamste nie-winsgewende organisasie in die genre, het romantiese fiksie twee jaar gelede meer as $1,37 miljard (sowat R13 miljard) net in Amerika gegenereer en laas jaar was byna 14% van alle gepubliseerde boeke romantiese fiksie, aldus Business of Consumer Book Publishing.
In Suid-Afrika kan geen ander genre, wat syfers betref, by liefdesverhale kers vashou nie. Uitgewers publiseer maandeliks ’n verskeidenheid nuwe boeke, asook omnibusse van bestaande titels met die 74-jarige Ena Murray met ’n hele 131 titels op haar kerfstok. Volgens die toonaangewende Nielssen-indeks was daar in 2008 vier en in 2009 drie van Ena Murray se omnibusse onder die toptienverkopers van plaaslike fiksie.
Natasha Kruger is the winner of the 2010 SA Reading Race, held earlier this year in Johannesburg. The young lady managed to work her way through 158 books in 10 months, learning English along the way. The Reading Race, now in its 15th year is designed to draw children to libraries and to foster a reading culture.
Read this special report from the London Book Fair’s Lucy Holland-Smith:
This year’s winner of the Johannesburg “Reading Race” managed to get through 158 books in just ten months, it has been revealed
The annual event, which takes place at the Rhodes Park Library in the eastern part of the South African city and is now in its 15th year, is designed to encourage children to read more, according to Johannesburg’s official website.
While the eventual winner notched up an impressive 158 books, a total of 16 children were acknowledged for their efforts.
Edith Khuzwayo, a librarian at the Rhodes Park facility, said that while the library undoubtedly benefitted from the publicity brought by the race, the primary aim of the event was indisputably to highlight the joys of reading.
Ter viering van die bekende, bekroonde en (meestal) beminde skrywer JM Coetzee se verjaarsdag vandag bied BOOK SA vandag drie artikels deur drie skrywers - André P Brink, Karina Magdalena Szczurek en Kirby van der Merwe. Lekker lees oor Coetzee die mens, sy werk en sy geboorte dorp. Coetzee se treffer Disgrace, is nou ook beskikbaar in Afrikaans as In Oneer.
’n Mens sou kon sê dat ek John Coetzee leer ken het meer as 200 jaar voordat ek hom ontmoet het.
In die jaar 1760 het die boer Jacobus Coetzee (oftewel Coetsé) van Piketberg van goewerneur Ryk Tulbagh verlof gekry om ’n reis in die binneland te onderneem.
Gebaseer op sy “Relaas” van daardie reis, het J.M. Coetzee in 1974 sy onvergeetlike Narrative of Jakobus Coetzee geskryf, waarmee hy hom onmiddellik gevestig het as een van die grootste skrywers wat Suid-Afrika nog opgelewer het.
Toe ek nie so lank gelede nie uitgevra is oor my kennis van Suid-Afrika, het ek soos die meeste Europeërs met ’n paar pront sleutelwoorde geantwoord: apartheid, Nelson Mandela, 1994 – die betekenis van elke woord vaag en ver verwyder van die sentrum van my alledaagse ondervinding en bewussyn.
Vir my persoonlik het hierdie situasie baie vinnig en drasties verander namate ek my doktorale studie in Salzburg op die Suid-Afrikaanse literatuur begin toespits het.
Hulle leef in ’n behuisingskema aan die buitewyke van die dorp Worcester, tussen die spoorlyn en die nasionale pad. Die strate van die skema het boomname, maar nog geen bome nie. Hul adres is Populierlaan 12.
Al die huise in die skema is nuut en identies. Hulle staan op groot erwe van rooi kleigrond waarop niks groei nie, geskei deur draadheinings.
In elke werf staan ’n geboutjie bestaande uit ’n kamer en ’n toilet. Hoewel hulle nie ’n bediende het nie, verwys hulle daarna as “die bediendekamer” en “die bediendetoilet”. Hulle gebruik die bediendekamer om goed in te stoor: koerante, leë bottels, ’n stukkende stoel, ’n ou klapperhaarmatras.
Alert! Today is Nobel literature laureate JM Coetzee’s 70th birthday. He was born on 9 Feb 1940 in Cape Town, and his fruitful life as a writer has brought him not just the Nobel, but two Man Booker prizes among countless other literary awards. South Africans on the Afrikaans litwatch seem more invested in the significance of the date than others - see these links - but with this post BOOK SA joins the, erm, fun.
To mark Coetzee’s 70th, we thought it a good idea to pull out one of his less well-known works and give it a thumbing. In my estimation, The Master of Petersburg is one of Coetzee’s greatest novels - it surely must rank within the top three - but despite its quality and the bracing, almost gnomic challenges to the intellect that it presents, it languishes in relative obscurity.
In sum, the novel tells the tale of how Fyodor Dostoevsky, who has secretly returned to Petersburg to look into the death of his son (he’s a fugitive from creditors who financed his gambling habit; he mustn’t be caught by them), becomes the novelist who writes The Possessed - that magisterial work, centred on the tortured “nihilist” Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, about the psyche of revolutionaries.
The pressure of art that is brought to bear on Dostoevsky in the midst of his trials of grief is rendered implacably by Coetzee. As his character tries to unravel the mystery behind his son’s death, seeking out perhaps the most dangerous man in the city, Nechaev (a true nihilist), his writer’s imagination captiously records and stores details for uses independent of the current mission, and, indeed, independent of Dostoevsky’s needs and feelings. It’s an almost monstrous turning of the screws - Doestoevsky becomes the one who is possessed, both by the quest for his son’s secret, and by his almost inhuman need to “make use of” this quest for a mere tale.
The Master of Petersburg, then, is Coetzee’s definitive statement on the power - or perhaps “grip” is the better word - of art. The novel, published in 1994, appears between Age of Iron (1990) and Boyhood (1997). On this 70th birthday of the Master of Cape Town and now Adelaide, BOOK SA recommends that its readers schedule the novel into their 2010 lists.
As it happens, the book is available, complete and for free, at Scribd:
Alert!Maskew Miller Longman, sponsor of an annual, multi-language literature competition - which is in the area of youth novels this year - has just announced the dates of the writing workshops that will accompany this year’s awards process.
From the press release:
To help aspirant writers with the submission of their youth novel, Maskew Miller Longman will be hosting writer’s workshops across various provinces in South Africa. Rachelle Greeff, well-known author of various short story anthologies, novels and children’s stories will facilitate the workshops and provide guidance and useful tips on how to write interesting and engaging novels for South Africa’s youth. Rachelle regularly conducts writing courses and is also the book editor for Rapport.
To qualify to attend one of these workshops, you simply need to send a brief motivation letter and one page CV, to Bernice Snyman @ Fax (021) 531 0716 or e-mail: Bernice.Snyman@mml.co.za. Remember to indicate which workshop you would like to attend and please include your contact details.
Workshops will be limited to 25 delegates.
Dates for the workshops are as follows:
Polokwane 23 February 2010
Johannesburg 24 February 2010
Durban 25 February 2010
Cape Town 26 February 2010
Entries for the awards are being accepted in all eleven official languages, and the prizes per language are R10 000 for first place and R5 000 for the runner-up. Deadline for submission is 30 April 2010.
The One World anthology of short stories includes pieces from Africa by Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauri Kubuitsile, Petina Gappah, Molara Wood, Chika Unigwe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who’s also the collection’s co-editor), Jude Dibia, Adetokunbo Abiola, Wadzanai Mhute, Ovo Adagha and Ken Kamoche. Here’s a relatively new video promo for the book:
@laurenbeukes Goodness, 13 000 tweets! That’s… that’s… that leaves me lost for words, actually. And I thought I was busy on Twitter in reply to laurenbeukes#
Anyone else out there seen Google’s “Social Circle” yet? It’s started showing in my search results: http://bit.ly/asd3vj#
Patrick Coyne’s “A Guide to South Africa’s Mountain Passes and Poorts” is being launched in Durban on 18 Feb: http://bit.ly/buEOTK#
Twitter is reporting that District9 is an Oscar nominee for best picture! http://bit.ly/bPwvvE#
Wow, the JD Salinger of cartooning, Bill “Calvin and Hobbes” Watterson, gives 1st interview in 21 years: http://bit.ly/br6BuA#
@laurenbeukes Twitter users in SA: 500k. FB users in SA: 4.2 mil. Twitter is my fave by far, but can’t compete w/FB’s reach. So need both. in reply to laurenbeukes#
WISER and JWTC invite you to a public lecture: Saree Makdisi of UCLA on ‘Overcoming Apartheid in Palestine’: http://bit.ly/co9a00#
* BNW = Brave New World, as in, Facebook may displace Google as “the internet” sooner than we think (@laurenbeukes) #
@laurenbeukes It’s a BNW*, requiring us to play around w/Facebook and other services. Sorry you can’t access FB; there’s always mobile in reply to laurenbeukes#
Centre for Humanities Research announces upcoming seminars and lectures: http://bit.ly/9oYE0r#
A take on life with the recently-deceased JD Salinger, by his daughter, who also published a book on the subject (to mixed reviews). Her overall portrait of “Fortress Salinger” has been contested by her siblings, but her willingness to delve into detail is reason enough to give what she writes more than a passing glance:
I grew up in a world nearly devoid of living people. Cornish, where we lived, was wild and woody, our nearest neighbours a group of seven moss-covered gravestones that my brother and I once discovered while tracking a red salamander in the rain, two large stones with five small ones at their feet marking the passing of a family long ago. My father discouraged living visitors to such an extent that an outsider, looking in, might have observed a wasteland of isolation. Yet, as one of my father’s characters, Raymond Ford, once wrote in his poem The Inverted Forest: “Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest, With all foliage underground.” My childhood was lush with make-believe: wood sprites, fairies, a bower of imaginary friends, books about lands somewhere East of the Sun and West of the Moon. My father, too, spun tales of characters, both animal and human, who accompanied us throughout our day. My mother read to me by the hour. Years later, I read that my father’s character Holden Caulfield had dreamt of having children in such a place someday; “we’d hide them away”, he said, in his little cabin by the edge of a forest. He and his wife would buy them lots of books and teach them how to read and write.
Alert! Michael Chapman, Professor of English and Dean of Human Sciences at UKZN - and a noted critic and anthologiser - has published his lengthy introduction to the new issue of Current Writing, “Conjectures on South African Literature”, in full on his website.
Taking his cue from Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature”, Chapman wonders aloud whether “[if] the 1990s identified the challenge of “difference”, the challenge now might be “connection”. Is literature in South Africa today post-apartheid or post-postapartheid?”
Read his meaty take:
My title alludes of course to Franco Moretti’s influential article, “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), in which he makes the point that world literature is not so much an object as a problem: a problem that asks for new perspectives and critical method. His point is germane to this 21st anniversary issue of Current Writing, thematically entitled “Beyond 2000: South African Literature Today”.
Our impulse to look beyond 2000 was spurred by Leon de Kock’s article, “Does South African Literature Still Exist..?” (2005). It is a question that is applicable not only to the essays in this double issue, but also to several of the critical works and articles of the last decade to which I shall refer in this Introduction. How do we delineate a field, ‘South African Literature’, in relation to descriptive and definitional terms that have begun to be used with some persistence: post-apartheid literature; South African literature in/after the transition; South African literary culture ‘now’ as distinct from ‘then’; South African literature in the transnational moment, the “transnational” being the formulation of Bill Ashford (2007) and others before him to denote the nation caught in movement – possibly transformational movement – “in-between” local and global demands. If post-apartheid usually means after the unbannings of 1990, or after the first democratic elections of 1994, or in/after the transition, then beyond 2000 begins to mark a quantitative and qualitative shift from the immediate ‘post’ years of the 1990s to another ‘phase’.1 It is a phase in which books tangential to heavy politics, or even to local interest, have begun to receive national recognition. An example is the double prize-winning novel, The Rowing Lesson (US 2007; SA 2008),2 by Anne Landsman, in which a father-daughter relationship exceeds the shaping force of any local scene. There is also, prominent on the shortlists, Michiel Heyns’s Bodies Politic (2008),3 a novel set in early 20th-century suffragette England. It is a phase in which the dominant figure of the 1990s, J M Coetzee, in his quieter, suburban Australian novels (2005; 2007), appears to have gone beyond his traumatised vision of his home country: that is, beyond Disgrace (1999). As I place Coetzee beyond Disgrace, however, the film version of his novel is about to be released on the South African cinema circuit (August 2009). If Landsman or Heyns inhabits a landscape outside of any apartheid/anti-apartheid narrative, the winning book in the Sunday Times-Alan Paton Prize category for non-fiction, Peter Harris’s In a Different Time (2008), returns us to the trial of the Delmas Four: ANC Mkhonto we Sizwe operatives who, in the late 1980s, militarily opposed the apartheid state. As the lawyer who defended the Four – at times against their own reluctance to grant the charges or the court even a modicum of legitimacy – Harris’s vivid ‘translation’ of legalities into human drama alerts us not only to a recurrent feature of literature from this country – its genre-crossing potential – but also to the fact that ‘then ‘ and ‘now’ retain a power of symbiotic memory. Phases of chronology are ordering conveniences rather than neatly separable entities.
