In India she is known as an an author, socialite, celebrity, former beauty queen and model, columnist, designer and pen behind a number of popular television serials. A mouthful indeed.
Shobhaa is also a role model to many young Indian women.
Born Shobhaa Rajadhyaksha on January 7, 1947, in Maharshtra, Dé went on to graduate from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, with a degree in psychology. After finishing college, this disarmingly beautiful woman, who also sports a tattoo on her bicep, made a name for herself as a model.
The Sunday Independent’s books editor muses over three current books. The piece is worth the click-through for her email conversation with Ben Trovato alone:
I accidentally slept through the launch of Rian Malan’s Resident Alien, his first published work since My Traitor’s Heart, written two decades ago, because I was feeling under the weather. However, I perked up when I read this new collection, packed with Malanisms.
Herein lies all the provocation, and the often-searing perception about the places, the writers and politicians we love and loathe.
“I called it as I saw it,” says Malan in his introduction, and those who have forgiven him for challenging the US Agency for International Development’s mechanism for ascertaining HIV/Aids stats during the depths of denialism in South Africa and the aims of the aids lobby, which Malan set out so eagerly to discount, and even those who have not forgiven him for this, will do well to buy this book.
My Favourite Books is a site we love not only because it has a name that can be sung to the tune of a song from The Sound of Music. As a site dedicated to reviewing books, a recent feature is a review of A Sealed Fate by the Lisa Gordonv- esoteric fiction that gets a 6 out of 10:
A Sealed Fate is a debut novel by Astrologer Lisa Gordon who poses at the centre of her story, the question of fate versus free will.
To escape the pain of failed relationships and careers, both Valda and Larissa take themselves to Dubai seeking not only success but a reason and purpose in life. Valda does indeed find success and to her astonishment, love, but all is threatened when she is introduced to a billionaire Sheikh. Her clandestine relationship with the Sheikh propels her into a murky web of deceit and she turns to Larissa for help.
Alert! Most of us, in the past few weeks, have had a rather thrilling glimpse of South Africa and the world from a non-human perspective, courtesy District 9 (Andries du Toit’s inspired review here). And we all know the classic Groucho Marx saying, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read”.
But what’s it really like, running around spaceship Earth on all fours, sniffing and snuffling here, there and everywhere, waiting with grave patience for the next serving of dog food (and sometimes furtively purloining a mouthful of cat food), and generally leading a dog’s life?
Alexandra Horowitz, author of the just-published Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, a fascinating exercise in the construction of subjectivity, purports to have an idea. Here’s the review by novelist Cathleen Schine:
The literature about dogs is not quite the same as the literature about, say, Norwegian rats. Dogs get the literary respect: there are brilliant memoirs about dogs like J. R. Ackerley’s “My Dog Tulip” and Elizabeth von Arnim’s “All the Dogs of My Life”; there’s James Thurber and Virginia Woolf and Jack London; there’s Lassie and Clifford and, of course, Marley. White rats, on the other hand, get most of the scientific attention. Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” attempts to rectify that situation, exploring what science tells us about dogs without relegating our pets, emotionally, to lab rats. As a psychologist with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, as well as an ardent dogophile, Horowitz aims “to take an informed imaginative leap inside of a dog — to see what it is like to be a dog; what the world is like from a dog’s point of view.”
Alert!Kevin Bloom’s book, Ways of Staying, has made it to Sweden, along with André Brink’s A Fork in the Road and JM Coetzee’s Stranger Shores. Specifically, the books have made it to the journal Aftonbladet, where journalist Tor Billgren has published a piece that taps into the general alarm of the SA citizenry about violent crime, using the books to help him get to the bottom of the question, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Bloom has handily arranged a translation of the article from the Swedesh. Here’s the original, which counts as a carrot for his book:
Jag har under det senaste året annonserat ut två lägenheter för andrahandsuthyrning, den ena i Malmö och den andra i Stellenbosch, Sydafrika. Det finns två stora skillnader på hur svaren i de respektive länderna är formulerade. Den första är att nittio procent av dem som svarade på den sydafrikanska annonsen desperat undrade om lägenheten är tillgänglig under fotbolls-VM nästa år. Den andra är att de sedvanliga adjektiven ”rökfri” och ”skötsam” kompletterades med ordet ”vit”.
Att det fortfarande råder närmast total segregering i Sydafrika, femton år efter det första demokratiska valet och efter femton år av ANC-styre, är förstås ingen nyhet; det är det första som slår en när man anländer. Den huvudsakliga orsaken är det enorma underskottet på utbildning hos de färgade och svarta befolkningsgrupperna – något som inte bara är en baksmälla efter apartheidtidens undermåliga ”bantu-utbildning”, utan även ett resultat av 300 år av rasistiskt styre under holländare och britter. I det perspektivet är det naivt att ha för stora förväntningar på femton års politiskt reformarbete.
And here’s the translation; many thanks to Bloom for sending it in:
* * * * * * * *
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
a translation of Tor Billgren’s original article
During the past year I have advertised two flats for subletting, one in Malmö and one in Stellenbosch, South Africa. There are two big differences in how the answers are formulated in the respective countries. The first one is that ninety per cent of those who responded to the South African advertisement were desperately wondering if the flat is available during the soccer World Cup next year. The other is that the usual adjectives “smoke-free“ and “well-mannered” were complemented with the word “white”.
That an almost total segregation prevails in South Africa, fifteen years after the first democratic election and fifteen years into ANC rule, is of course not new: it is the first thing that strikes one upon arrival. The main reason is the enormous lack of education among the coloured and black populations – something that is not just a backlash from the worthless “Bantu education” of the apartheid days, but also a result of 300 years of racist rule by the Dutch and British. From that perspective, it is naïve to have big expectations after only fifteen years political reform work. (more…)
The Sunday Independent’s Maureen Isaacson writes about: how social pressure influences book reviewing; becoming a victim of guerrilla marketing and publicity machinery; and Clive James’ new collection, The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008.
The attentive reader of this page may have noticed the absence of the true knife job, which author Clive James says that the Germans call a Verisse.
In the main we try to avoid carving up victims. We do this ostensibly in the name of balance, I think because we want to look like nice people or because we fear retribution. This does not mean that we want to hurt the writers who are, without fail, sensitive souls, but it is difficult to strike the balance between caring for them and caring for our readers, who are still paying VAT on books.
What it does mean is that we are not always strictly honest and that beating about the bush has become the South African way of literary life.
Alert! BOOK SA may not have, as yet, been able to track down VS Naipaul on his current visit to South Africa, but we have received this article from Mail & Guardian journalist Percy Zvomuya – a review of Patrick French’s exhaustive biography of Naipaul, The World is What it Is, that expands into a wider treatment of the writer’s relationship with the post-colonial world.
BOOK SA is pleased to bring you the article complete:
VS: a review of The World is What it Is
by Percy Zvomuya
At the Calabash Literary Festival last year, Nobel Prize winner and St Lucia-born poet, Derek Walcott, stood up to read a poem with the title “The Mongoose”.
It was an attack on his rival and fellow Nobel laureate, Trinidadian-born VS Naipaul. “The plots are forced, the prose/ sedate and silly/ The anti-hero is a prick named Willie”. Making reference to Naipaul’s visits to prostitutes, Walcott charged, “He doesn’t like black men but he loves black cunt.”
Naipaul’s visits to prostitutes, his abuse of his wife and mistress and other details are contained in The World Is What It Is (Picador), Patrick French’s authorised biography of the writer, a book that came out last year. In what may be the most exhaustive account of the man, French looks at the evolution of Naipaul’s craft and books. French interviewed Naipaul over several years and had unrestricted access to papers, notes, letters and diaries belonging to Naipaul, his late wife Patricia and Margaret Murray, his mistress of two decades.
Perhaps there is no third world figure that excites as much hatred and scorn as Naipaul. He writes beautiful, clean prose that has won, not just the Nobel, but the Booker Prize too. But any adulation is always followed by a disclaimer. Literary scholar Terry Eagleton perhaps put it best: “great art, dreadful politics”. In post-colonial studies, he has become the “outsider obsessed by disgust for his colonial origins, the reductive wog with a taste for the high table”. One person quoted in French’s book even said: “I don’t think he has come to a solution about his own origin. He wanted to be white.”
The lecherous details are quite titillating, but it is the stories of his relationship with the third world and of how he learnt his craft that are most compelling. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he paid tribute to India, his ancestral home, England, his adopted home (he is a knight), and pointedly refused to acknowledge his native Trinidad and Tobago, as it would “encumber the tribute”.
One of the reasons why he is despised is the reckless, off-the-cuff remarks he routinely makes. A friend’s daughter was once described as “fat”, and “she did what fat girls do, she married a Zulu”. (more…)
Alert! Books journalist Percy Zvomuya has gone through Robin Malan’s A-Z of African Writers with a fine-toothed comb – and found the newly-launched guide to African writing in English somewhat wanting.
His piece on the book is not so much a review as a first re-penning- Zvomuya’s survey of the continent’s literature draped like an early second draft over Malan’s, making for a rather jagged palimpsest – and BOOK SA has been given permission by the Mail & Guardian to reproduce his critique here in full.
As many will no doubt point out, Zvomuya’s inclusion of Angolan writers Ondjaki and José Eduardo Agualusa in his list may go somewhat against the spirit of Malan’s book, which focuses on original English writing, not translations (both these authors write in Portuguese; then again, Malan also includes Pepetela in his book, who also writes in that language) – but his emphasis on the extant wealth of central African and Nigerian authors calls for less quibble.
Alert! The good people at Chimurenga have sent out an email advertising their new “Chimurenga Library” project-slash-exhibition, which will see avante-garde partying take place at Cape Town’s new Central Library on Darling Street every Wednesday from tomorrow, 6 May to 17 June. This includes performances by artists and poets like the Buckfever Underground, Neo Muyanga and Rustum Kozain; a series of literary panel discussions; and a bed, which will be at party-goers’ disposal (!).
The non-partying aspect of the exhibition, meanwhile, runs from 2 May – 21 June. Here’s the email in full, which includes a link to the programme: (more…)
Got Aliceinwonderlanditis? It wouldn’t be surprising, given the pandemonium taking place in the upper echelons of our political parties and institutions of state.
In Cape Town, of course, we wouldn’t jump down a rabbit hole to escape – we’d simply dive off the unfinished highway bridge that juts out over Buitengracht Street on the city’s Foreshore. (The time-space continuum would open up and a new universe would swallow us before we hit the ground, you see.)
Hmm, there has to be a better way back to sanity – and Ann Donald’s hit upon it. Her weekly column verges into reviewing territory as she takes up a book – Dennis Davis and Michelle le Roux’s Precedent and Possibility: The (Ab)Use of Law in South Africa – that reminds her that “rational minds and sober judgments helped South Africa defeat the worst of apartheid excesses, and formulated a map to the future”. The very same unfinished bridge features on the book’s cover. Find out why: (more…)
Remember “rani of raunch” Shobhaa Dé from the Words on Water festival last year? Well, if you’re not already a fan of the “Indian Jackie Collins” here’s a bit of background and reviews of three of her novels from IOL’s Meneesha Govender: Sisters, Strange Obsession and Second Thoughts.
