BOOK SA – Magazine

“We prefer former military,” says the man, Selezi, who is on private-security detail in Glenhazel, Johannesburg – a largely Jewish suburb that funds a private army to keep itself safe.

Kevin Bloom is visiting; he wants to know more about Selezi’s situation. Within a few moments he has adopted the guard’s point of view and surveys his surroundings like an outsider – a true outsider, not merely a white person from another suburb.

Funding a private army is, of course, one “way of staying” in South Africa – one solution for a community seeking to hold its place, one experience that South Africans of a certain group share. We first saw Glenhazel’s militarized GAP unit in Jonny Steinberg’s Thin Blue – but only its schemata, its technical outline. Here, in this excerpt from Bloom’s book, Ways of Staying, is a live-action close-up:
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You asked for it – and your wish is BOOK SA’s command, naturally!

Fiona Snyckers‘ Trinity Rising centres on South Africa’s very own “me generation” – as epitomised by one Trinity Luhabe, daughter of a struggle-hero-turned-BEE-magnate and the kind of girl who keeps “lose my virginity” on her to-do lists.

Let’s look in at Trinity on her first day at varsity:
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In the blurb for Naka Pillman’s An African Cameo we find this arresting sentence: ” A nationally renowned Japanese artist falls in love with an uncouth South African businessman. He promised her the world and flew her to Johannesburg, only to lock her up as a sex slave and to work as a servant in the flat of his mistress.”

The book is a fictionalised account of events that actually happened and, as Jane Rosenthal pointed out in her review, it “throws up the effect of apartheid and the racist mentality it ‘normalised’”.

The author, who lives in George, is ninety years old, and spins her tale with the grace of a calligrapher. Here is a small taste:
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Bryan Rostron’s Black Petals is being launched next week at the Book Lounge. There has been a low warbling of anticipation in SA Lit circles since details of the book were released back in February – not least because publishers Jacana have come up with another winner of a cover.

The novel is about an archivist, Macaulay Vogel, in search of a peculiar kind of truth, the truth of his former self, whom he doesn’t recognise in the police file that he discovers with his name on it.

Which brings us to the moment of today’s book excerpt: the moment when Macaulay Vogel comes face to face with “Macaulay Vogel”:
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The announcement, yesterday, of the publication of Sarah Lotz’s new novel, Exhibit A, caused the plates to rattle in London.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate a touch. But such was the outpouring of enthusiasm (on BOOK SA, on Facebook, in the literary ether) that we were left with no choice but to drop everything and work the phones to secure the very first peek inside book – expressly for your pleasure, dear reader.

Exhibit A, it seems, is being positioned within the family of SA crime novels currently marauding across the land – but on the fringes, playing the role of the clever cousin rather than the full-blooded scion. For a plot summary, click here; and for a taste, read on:
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When winter makes its first hint of arrival at the Cape, then Xhosa boys prepare themselves to become men.

They prepare to become bakhwetha, initiates who undergo a series of trials in the wilderness (or, in Cape Town, on plots of land that border the N2 highway) – trials that culminate in circumcision.

Come June, with winter at its coldest and wettest, the stories start to appear in the newspapers: the stories that tell of boys who didn’t make it into manhood. Instead, they died, or were mutilated, because their operations were botched. We saw the stories last year and will again this year. But despite the ubiquity of these stories, they don’t haunt the imaginations of everyone who reads them as perhaps they should, because many of us don’t know what it’s like to be an umkhwetha in the first place.

New novelist Thando Mgqolozana has now lifted the veil on Xhosa initiation – a brave, taboo-busting move – recreating the world of a victim of botched circumcision in his book A Man Who is not a Man. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you an excerpt:
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Sue Rabie’s Boston Snowplough is in the running for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize, in the Best First Book – Africa category. The winner will be announced at the Time of the Writer tomorrow night.

It’s a thriller set in and around the small town of Boston, KwaZulu Natal, which becomes cut off from the outside world by a massive snow storm.

“Into this crisis drives a woman in a sports car and a bus full of local people heading for Harrismith. Their saviour is David Roth, a recent arrival in Boston and the owner of a grader, the only vehicle that can negotiate the snow-clogged roads.” But he doesn’t reckon hitting a few sinisterly-positioned bumps along the way. Here is an excerpt:
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Jassy Mackenzie’s Random Violence cracked the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize shortlist for Best First Book – Africa region. The winner will be announced on Wednesday at the Time of the Writer.

Mackenzie’s main character, Jade, has something in common with the character in Aryan Kaganof’s latest story: she wears a Glock.

Now, a Glock can be a handy accessory in certain situations – as this excerpt shows:
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When Jane Bennett’s Porcupine was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, you could hear the cheers rising up from universities around the world.

They were particularly deafening in Cape Town, where Bennett, an academic by trade, makes a habit of dazzling students – she calls them “colleagues”, I believe – with her energy and incisiveness, deployed at the African Gender Institute.

Porcupine is a book of short stories, “exploring maverick, impossible and incredulous moments in South Africa and elsewhere”. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you this excerpt:
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Tim Keegan’s third novel, My Life with the Duvals, has been shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Best Book – Africa Region category.

The book is a “darkly ironic comedy of family life and family tragedy” – set in and around a certain Cape Town university.

The following excerpt marks out both the novel’s high literary tone and its mischief-making mood. Do you recognise anyone here?
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