Agaat

Why do we (young South Africans) dislike reading our own literature? That's a generalisation. Many of the young 'uns whom I know. Because it is about past, not our present into which the past is woven. Again, a generalisation. What about Zakes Mda? I enjoy Andre Brink but dislike JM Coetzee - the man and his work - intensely (don't get me started). Now, here I am, delving into Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (Kindle tells me I am 9% of the way - this means little to me though, I miss page numbers).

Thumbs up or down, I like to imagine you wondering, literally clinging to the edge of your seat. Don't disillusion me.

Let's get to specifics here. I managed about fifty pages of A Story of an African Farm before I placed it beside my bed and then on a bookshelf. What is it? The style? The subject matter? South African literature, to me, feels awkward, stilted, heavy with symbolism, with little relief. The stories are often manufactured and not enjoyable. Although I have argued differently before - why read a story without a plot? Perhaps Aristotle and Joseph Campbell were correct? Why else spend leisure time in someone else's world? (This doesn't bode well for me and my novel.)

I feel the same about contemporary North American literary fiction. Twisted into itself, moral tales, a game of academic critique. Maybe also because these are realities that I know, whether living them or watching them on big and small screens. Maybe I need distance to be able to face a story's moral tale - because, honestly, isn't there always some kind of symbolic warning? That's just how our brains work, folks, like it or not (always preaching my own paranoid doomsday tale of consciousness - dammit, and so it goes round and round and round).

Thumbs up! There you go! I threw it in here, sans reference to the book title, hoping you'll miss it as you scan down the page.

Perhaps it was the hype that attracted me - I enjoy translations, to wade through the logic of a language literally made foreign - I have been meaning to read Agaat (written originally in Afrikaans) since it was published. I have even taken it out from the library a couple of times, and stared at its very serious bulk, intimidated, before returning it. The Kindle version is far less intimidating (I yell in defence of my betrayal of the printed book - the very thing from which I make a living!).

Somewhere between high school and now, the desperate attempts of my Grade 11 Afrikaans teacher (truly desperate, she once told us we were horrible and left the classroom crying) sunk in. Afrikaans demonstrates meaning, it doesn't just present it; it embodies things that we don't have translations for in English; it has a different poetry, melody, physicality; it holds its own story of past and present tightly, while as an English South African, it sometimes feels as though I have no past - only a present and a future, here, in a country I love. That's it, too - it has loved this place for as long as it has existed.

In varsity, we were taught that new media has something in common with newspaper journalism, for a different reason: readers reading on screen scan, so serve them the who, what, where, when, why and how up front, in the first paragraph. It differs though, in that you should keep something back for the conclusion - something to keep this allegedly lazy reader reading. My posts ignore these 'rules' (I scoff at rules in this new realm of expression) and let you hang on (on my every word...?), hoping you'll bear with me to the end.

My point? My point is that I have a point, but I need to warm up before I find it. The translator, Michiel Heyns, no doubt in consultation with the author, has carried some of the conventions of Afrikaans into English, sometimes making the prose a syrupy river to wade through, but in others translating the physicality of a language, for which English has no equivalents. I am speaking (writing) specifically of the stresses: é and è. 'Thére,' she writes, and I know the character is nodding or pointing, verbally or non- or both, without her having to prosaically tell me that she is doing so or leaving it my imagination.

I am enamoured with this one little stroke, not only because it carries something of the language that I functionally understand, but also because I envy it. I envy its usefulness and its utility of written codes; its force and its subtlety... I imagine that I do not understand any Afrikaans, its culture or our culture, and I appreciate it more, for conveying meaning and context that written words alone do not; the written is uplifted to the verbal. Oh, how I envy a whole language (and others) that have this one little stroke that I cannot (says who?) use.

I confess though (why confess? why not recount or just explain?) that at first (the first 3%) I was a) confused and therefore annoyed (another characteristic of South African fiction, and perhaps of our culture(s)) b) reminded of A Story of an African Farm. At the risk of being superficial, I might have kept that book on-hand if it had used diacritics.

Rereading People's Act of Love: The end

For years now, the protagonist of my adolescent novel and I have been pacing the streets of our imaginary, historical city (which is also the base of any 'real' city, so perhaps he and I have a chance of Pinocchio-ing it out and finding - what?), wondering what we are doing here. Where we are going. Because a quest isn't complete without a path - a 'from' and a 'to' - right? Let's follow this alleged path, like - you guessed it - like a certain young woman and a rabbit with a pocket watch. There it is - a hole in the ground within which the laws of relativity jump into the quantum realm - without unifying jack.

To confuse the issue, Calim (my protagonist) and I are sitting outside the entrance to the hole (a sudden eruption in the pavement before us, or perhaps the work of municipal workers doing something municipal, or a hole we dug ourselves). We are just sitting there, a convenient place to sit, taking a break, not saying anything, not doing anything but considering these roiling contradictions that don't unify anything, when there is a movement within the hole - we hear it more than see it. (This doesn't make any sense, I know - a movement without the rabbit to-ing and fro-ing, but quantum physics forgives many literary licences.)

It's the plot of That Book, the one that either shook my soul or resonated with a soul that was already shook. Calim hears it too.

This is the book I want to write. A book that unifies nothing and everything and shakes all sorts of shaken souls. That is a little ambitious, so I am content to write a book through which themes creep like the roots of an oak tree trapped in a pavement that was laid around it, like a noose. You know the kind, the thick-as-your-thigh roots that heave up the concrete around it and you imagine the roots as roiling, but so slowly that it would take lifetimes and clever filming to see.

Ok, this too is a little ambitious, but I like the taste of that cliche: go big or go home.

So many post-modern authors (go ahead and call them what else you will; labels are for students - this adjective is merely a placeholder) bury their themes beneath accusations of relativity, as if beating the critics to the punch. Ah, isn't relativity wonderful (I keep typing 'real-' instead of 'rela-', which spell check says is incorrect and which my brain is inclined to agree with but my heart made of spongy hope protests)? No, it really isn't wonderful. It's a plug in a drain; it's a sad replacement for the security of religion.

People's Act of Love pulls no such punches. Life is... awful. Oh no, you yell! I can't bear to write another monologue about how awful life is. Let's compromise: life can be awful and sometimes it can feel... something else. I'm getting to that part.

This novel says what I have been saying, but better. As per my previous post, it offers you alternatives and you are almost giddy with it, with these academic offers, whose academic-ness convince you of their authority. At the same time, the novel asks you to empathise with cannibals and castrates (yes!), because morality is a set of emotional decisions made rational, like it or not. Then it asks you how you can empathise with such creatures, such fundamentally weak creatures, enslaved to an Idea. You take it as a judgement when really it is a question driving you towards the truth that such things exist in all of us and that perhaps we need to pass through each of these moral states to find a way to live.

Life is awful. So grow a pair. Make lemonade. Live within society because the alternative is bleak 'wildness', but find your way to reconcile yourself with it.

I like to believe (look how I've grown!) that somewhere in that reconciliation is... acceptance? Not accepting the awfulness, but accepting that being angry and lashing out is not going to get you or anyone else out of the awful. Hoping (personal projection here) that the way you find might be able to do something, even if only to record the lows and highs.

Richard Pare, Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia. Vladimir Shukhov, 1922. Photograph © Richard Pare 2007.

Rereading People's Act of Love: Month 2

Progress: I am on page 116. I dropped the metaphysical questioning for a while to indulge in power struggles, murder and torture, and, most importantly, dragons and direwolves. Yes, Game of Thrones. There are wolves in The People's Act of Love. But the interplay of good and evil that the direwolves represent is a touch more... endearing... comforting... just not crisis inducing. Also, I would really like a dragon.

Yes, I'm avoiding the topic.

Unnamed, uncreated, no medium or size. Renamed A Simulacrum I by a voyeur

We (the crowd of readers I represent) haven't engaged with Samarin since I picked up the book again, except in the third person. Instead, we have been immersed in the melodrama of the Czechoslovakian lieutenant Mutz and the village hottie Anna Petrovna.

But all their melodrama has done is reinforce one of the themes: we are all alone; fantastically, miserably alone. No surprise there. The plot dangles the impossible in front of the characters: companionship. We suspect a trick but it draws us in, convincing us of its sincerity, and then - we all know what happens next. The companion turns, disappointing and thrilling us, because (as per previous post) it is easier to look down than to look up.

During this interlude, the narrator adopts a more familiar voice as he details the private lives of these two characters, helping us to understand their motivations. He does it without losing that sense of distance, though - the emotional action that is happening is as opaque to us, the voyeurs, as it is to the characters.

And so he develops some of the themes, somewhat obviously (which again makes you expect a trick) by repeating words, descriptions and commentaries. Ok, so we're all lost in the crowd, and we can't tell monsters from angels, and we're disorientated by the setting and some of the more bizarre things alluded to, and we know that something is being hidden from us and dammit that is really, really frustrating.

And Samarin is always in the background, butting into conversations and generally unsettling the familiarity of the interlude.

Now, we always read what we are most preoccupied with onto books (onto most things, I would argue). Plot summary: my subconscious and I were oblivious to one another for a long, long time. Then we became more and more aware of a force pushing back against us, like a Cape Town wind when you're running. We fought (my subconscious was winning) until we realised that the real fight was with the outside. We drew up a peace treaty and then realised there was nothing and no one to fight. (Which, honestly, was a little demotivating.) So now we're negotiating the terms of a new treaty, but we're (I am) doing it slowly because, yes, I suspect a trick.

That dissociation between our street-facing and rooftop-overlooking parts of ourselves interests me. Or, alternatively, the lack of, which is possible. I could be (I am) dissociated myself, dividing my inner life into slices that I can consume and those that I can't.

The narrator is omniscient, but he is holding back. In a sense, we are seeing the characters through similar but not the same glasses as themselves - we see what they want to see. The same is not true of Samarin, and perhaps that is why he always hanging around. Not that we see through the opaqueness of his mental walls, but that he doesn't seem to have any. We're not privy to his internal life, but behind those gates, the two are one, and so he lives alone and not alone.

It's enough to make me suspect that he is the narrator. But that's silly, right?

And there we go! Metaphysical conundrums abound: at heart, are we all amoral? If we could throw away our peace treaties and blinkers, would we choose to? Whose story are we telling? Is union the way to companionship? Ah, here be wolves.

A Simulacrum II

A brief hiatus

Whether you realise (or recognise) it or not, we all have strategies to keep ourselves safe. Ones we have honed without knowing it over time. Sometimes those strategies are designed to keep us in a comfort zone in which we are unsafe. Because the hell we know is always better than the hell we don't (or that we imagine is waiting just ahead). And sometimes staying there is safer than walking a rickety bridge to a potential mirage.

For me, success is more daunting than failure.

My point is that I'm back. That working myself into the ground is not as easy as it sounds, because there is always more ground and it seems that I like to dig and that I could do this indefinitely because I have a will to survive that laughs in the face of self-made strategies. That it is waiting for the rest of me to finally choose to cross the bridge and the next and the next. That it has edged me onto the bridge while I wasn't looking, taken a step back, edged forward some more etc., and that I didn't fall off and that even if I had, or sometimes wanted to, my will would just laugh some more, right itself and enjoy the adventure.

That, in spite (literally) of the burnt part of me that makes me cynical of the things I hold most dear as if to protect them from others by beating them myself, I really like the part of me that just gets out of the way of the fire, taking the things I hold most dear with it.