This week, BOOK SA is pleased to bring you two short excerpts from two very different but highly enticing books, Justin Cartwright’s To Heaven by Water and South Africa: A Traveler’s Literary Companion edited by Isabel Balseiro and Tobias Hecht.
The latter excerpt comes from Rustum Kozain’s contribution to the anthology, “Krot”. For more information on the Literary Companion click here; for more on Cartwright’s latest novel, click here.
Enjoy these excerpts!
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Complete prologue from To Heaven by Water by Justin Cartwright
DEEP IN THE Kalahari, two brothers, Guy and David Cross, no longer young, are sitting by a campfire. The sun as it descends is setting light – in an act of mindless arson – to the cirrus clouds that appeared unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon, so that for a few minutes these clouds look like the flags of a medieval army. The brothers have long and unkempt – pilgrim – hair. The older brother, Guy Cross, is reciting, staring upwards at forty-five degrees, as he is inclined to do when smoking dope:
Stirred for a bird ,─ the achieve of; the mastery of the
And indeed the embers of the brothers’ own little fire are unstable beneath the blackened, cherished kettle, and occasionally crumble and fall, to release for a moment from their depths gold vermilion, curiously free of smoke.
Guy Cross has tears in his eyes. He is easily moved.
‘Shit, that’s beautiful. Sorry, it gets me every time,’ he says.
‘No problem,’ says David Cross. ‘I am in my ecstasy.’
He feels a rushing, unstoppable love for his older brother, whom he has barely seen in the last forty years.
The stars are appearing as the lurid sunset subsides, soaking away beneath the rim of the vast, flat, inscrutable earth.
David Cross mouths: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
And the stars are now implausibly bright, scattered carelessly like lustrous seed across the southern sky.
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Excerpt from “Krot” by Rustum Kozain, a piece included in South Africa: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
“Krot,” Jacob said out loud to himself. Then, half muttering, half thinking: “I live in a krot.”
He wondered for a moment at that word, the consonants coming together quickly despite the vowel, which opened briefly like a dark mouth, then snapped shut. The scratch of the ‘kr’ stopping short on the ‘t’, like a cockroach startled and scuttling across the floor, disappearing behind a shelf or under a chair.
For months, dishes had been piling up, scraps of food shrivelling, dregs of coffee and tea growing mould in mugs, a sliver of cheese sweating until it shone like plastic. There were stacks of books and unread newspapers everywhere – not only in the study, but also in the bathroom, the bedroom, on the coffee table in the lounge, and in stacks on the floors. Over some single pages left where they had slipped from the coffee table, ran a cheerful silver trail where a snail had crawled, but otherwise everything had a crust of grime. Occasionally, the green leaves and purple flowers from the monstrous bougainvillaea outside, blown in through the gap underneath the kitchen door, also brought an unusual cheer into the house.
“Breaking down the boundary between nature and civilisation,” Jacob sometimes had joked to friends in lighter times.
Soon, though, the leaves and flowers would shrivel and gather a patina of dust. Even the cobwebs – impressive architectures with tunnels and spanning the corners of the ceilings – were dark with dust. In some of these were caught the husks of spiders and their insect prey. In the passage lay a few dead cockroaches, hunted by the cat and left there to dry. And fleas had also now established their colonies. If he tarried anywhere dusty, Jacob was sure to feel its bite.
No part of the house was in any order, so that no matter which part of the house he was in, the disorder was always there, persistent like the confusing memories of a nightmare at the back of the head.
It held him down, but his habits had for two years now strayed from order. Sometimes, when Jacob handed out dinner invitations on a drunken whim, he strained himself to clean and tidy the house. On these occasions, he managed to pull it into some shape, and could host a small dinner party without too much fear of shame or embarrassment at the rickety, dusty house he managed to rent. If he gave himself enough time, he could usually tidy the whole place, study and desk included. But some tension never disappeared, until after a dinner party, when, within a week, the house would descend back into its chaos as he himself relaxed back into himself, doing nothing but holding out against the slow but definite run of time.
It was clear to Jacob himself that the state of the house was related to the state of his mind, although his mind wasn’t in disorder. Neither had his mind become slothful. But it was as if the house and his mind had joined forces, shutting close; not shutting out, as his house may have shut out order, but, like his mind, not staying open to others, not welcoming scrutiny. It was his mind that disliked others wandering in, asking questions which he either had not resolved or refused to resolve. Though he enjoyed company, for the past two years he had slowly started to withdraw, except to socialise with a small group of people. But not at his house.
[P]Thoughts of the disorder exhausted him as much as thoughts about his life.
[P]Sometimes he felt as if the house were alive, growing slowly, a large malevolence that was starting to incorporate the disorder. When he returned from brief errands, a slight, fetid smell could be discerned when opening the front door, as if an entity, part vegetable, part flesh, had woken and been eructating somewhere at the back
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May 14th, 2009 @01:43 #
Cartwright, Kozain AND Hopkins -- one of my fave poems, nogal. What a treat.