Review: Vivien Horler

Marriageology – the art and science of staying together, by Belnda Luscombe (Oneworld/ Jonathan Ball)

There is not much fairytale magic about marriage in South Africa.

In 2016, according to Stats SA, a total of 25 326 marriages ended in divorce. And almost half – 44.4% – of those divorces took place within 10 years of the wedding. Most happened between five and nine years afterwards.

In one case I know of, the couple divorced well before her parents had paid off the wedding.

As we’ve read in dozens of self-help books , marriage has to be worked at, but what exactly does that mean?

Belinda Luscombe, an Australian living and working in New York, has written about and researched marriage for Time magazine for more than 10 years and has picked up some useful information. She has interviewed therapists, sociologists, demographers and researchers, read many studies, journals and books. And she got married. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Verwoerd – my journey through family betrayals, by Wilhelm Verwoerd (Tafelberg)

Most whites with a modicum of sense will acknowledge that almost 30 years after apartheid began to be dismantled, they are still advantaged.

And so are their children, even children born today. It’s what the often tiresome trade unionist and former city councillor Tony Ehrenreich correctly refers to as the apartheid generational advantage.

But what is a white person to do? How do you acknowledge the harm that has been done in your name and that of fellow whites, and move on? Is it possible to move on?

If you’ve ever grappled with this, spare a thought for Wilhelm Verwoerd, grandson of the man often referred to as the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.

He has found himself torn by his rejection of his grandfather’s beliefs and actions, and his love for his family; despite the subtitle of this painful memoir, it is dedicated to “my family”. How do you reconcile these polar opposites? Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Year of Facing Fire – a memoir, by Helena Kriel (MF Books Joburg/Jacana)

Helena Kriel gets about. When this memoir begins she has been commissioned to write the screenplay of a 1996 Hollywood film called Kama Sutra, and goes to India to do research.

Many years later she is the founder of Baby Rhino Rescue, an organisation with two sanctuaries that is trying to save rhinos from extinction. She divides her time between Hollywood and South Africa, “is happiest when in the middle of nowhere with just a rhino or hippo for company”,  and according to the cover blurb, “facilitates adventures through India”.

None of which is the focus of this memoir – the focus of this memoir is love.

Kriel comes from an atypical, non-observant Joburg Jewish family. Her father, Dr Kriel, smoked three packs of Camels a day and died of lung cancer. Her mother is a writer, beautiful and tough; her sister lives in a temple in India with her SA-born Indian husband; one brother, the beautiful Evan, 29, is gay, had something of a dissolute youth in clubs but is now a reformed character who is studying with a rabbi; and her second brother dives with sharks in Mozambique. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

War Doctor – surgery on the front line, by David Nott (Picador)

Here at the southern tip, caught up in our own news cycles, world dramas like Afghanistan and Libya, Haiti, Bosnia and Syria, seem a long way away.

Sometimes that’s just fine too. Who needs to know about barrel bombs and cluster bombs and what they can do to soft human flesh?

Fortunately for humanity there are people, like London surgeon David Nott, who know only too well the damage bombs do, and try in the face of horrific cruelty to make things better.

Welsh-born Nott works as a general and vascular surgeon attached to several major  London hospitals. But for the past 20 years, for several weeks a year, he goes to places of disaster and war and tries to make a difference. He has worked under the auspices of Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross, the Red Crescent and Syria Relief. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Cul-de-Sac– a memoir, by Elsa Joubert (Tafelberg)

This poignant memoir, first published in Afrikaans when Elsa Joubert was 95, is an exploration of extreme old age.

It is a time of life, she writes, which almost represents “the laying down of dreams”, where the only road that can be ventured on “with a minimum of anxiety is the road to the past”.

The Afrikaans version, published under the title Spertyd, came out two years ago. Spertyd means deadline; the English term for cul-de-sac is dead end; and the Afrikaans version that we grew up with was “straat loop dood”. Of the various alternatives, cul de sac seems gentlest translation.

Yet old age is not gentle. As the title suggests, you’re not going anywhere. At one point Joubert describes old people as being members of the “last shift”. Life’s options progressively close down.

And yet in the hands of a a writer as accomplished and reflective as Elsa Joubert, her memoir is not discouraging; it is rather a glimpse of another stage of life, if we live long enough to get there. Or as someone once said: old age is what happens if nothing else does. Continue reading →

 Review: Vivien Horler

Two Weeks in November, by Douglas Rogers (Jonathan Ball)

This is the “astonishing untold story of the operation that toppled Mugabe” in Zimbabwe in November 2017.

I watched the televised Sunday night press conference where the frail old man sat, surrounded by generals and a priest, shuffling his papers and, against all expectations, not resigning as president.

In the previous few days there had been reports of tanks on the streets of Harare – something was going on but, after 37 years in brutal control, Mugabe being toppled in a coup seemed unlikely.

Rhodesian-born Rogers, author of the delightful The Last Resort, about his parents clinging on to their tourist resort near Mutare in the east of the country during the land grabs, says a reported global audience of one billion people watched the press conference on the evening of November 19. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Love Song of André P Brink, by Leon de Kock (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

A three-and-a-half-year undertaking to produce a significant work on groundbreaking South African author André Brink has turned into a marketing nightmare for publishers Jonathan Ball.

The author is Leon de Kock, poet, novelist and professor emeritus in English Studies at the University of Stellenbosch who, apparently overwrought at completing this major book, allegedly called an Observatory restaurant worker the k-word, and then also made sexual advances to a second woman present.

De Kock was arrested and appeared in the Cape Times Magistrate’s Court on May 10 on a charge of crimen injuria. Instead of appearing in triumph at the Franschhoek Literary Festival over the weekend of May 17 to 19, he stayed away. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Blackridge House – a memoir, by Julia Martin (Jonathan Ball)

From a family home to a retirement flat to a single room to a single bed – this is the trajectory of so many people as they age. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

It was the experience of Elizabeth Madeline Martin, who was born in what was then Natal in 1918 and who died in Cape Town in 2012.

Elizabeth Martin was the mother of Julia Martin, the author of this fine, touching, and beautifully written memoir.

As dementia claimed Elizabeth, her memories drained away. She didn’t remember her husband, she often didn’t remember Julia, frequently confusing her with one of her own long-dead sisters. She told Julia: “My memory is full of blotches, like ink left about and knocked over.”

Continue reading →