Review: Vivien Horler
The World According to Merle, by Merle Levin (Melinda Ferguson Books)
Merle Levin wanted to call this memoir Rolling Shit Backwards, with a picture of a dung beetle on the cover. This was vetoed by the powers that be, but she has nevertheless dedicated it to “the ordinary, innocuous, unnoticed black beetle that quietly does its job of saving the planet by rolling shit backwards”.
The lesson of the dung beetle, which she studied as a child with her wise nanny in the Kalahari Desert, is that it fixes its course on a star to navigate homewards backwards, and finds value in what is thought to be waste.
For her 75th birthday, Jeff, her husband of 55 years, gave her a little metal sculpture of a dung beetle which now sits on her writing desk. “He reminds me daily of many important lessons – the teachings of small things, the teachings of ‘shit happens’.”
All this sounds rather serious, while much of the memoir is funny – although not all of it. But running through it is Merle and Jeff’s love affair, their utter conviction they were right for each other from the moment they met as students.
Merle’s parents fought viciously and Merle, then about six, would crouch in the dark on the tiled floor outside her parents’ closed bedroom door, listening to shouting, crying, swearing and the sound of things being thrown.
She decided then she would never marry – only to marry Jeff within weeks of meeting him.
Jeff was an architecture student, and several years later designed and built the perfect modern house on a plot on the outskirts of Joburg. Trouble was, it was Jeff’s dream, not Merle’s. When she told him, in floods of tears, that she could not imagine living in the house, he picked up the baby, stared out of the window, and then said: “Okay.”
He added: “If you’re not happy, I’m not happy, and our children won’t be happy.”
She writes that sealed the deal of her love for him forever.
Not too long after that the couple and their two small children emigrated to Canada to start a holistic health centre in Toronto. They knew no one there, had no business experience, and were entirely unprepared for dark winters lasting eight months a year.
But they made a success of it, living there for 40 years. And then, as it does, South Africa called them back – just in time for Covid.
For years they had owned a delightful cottage above a lake in rural Ontario, which offered swimming in summer and skiing in winter. The children grew up there. (Apart from being about love and laughter, there is quite a lot about buying houses in this book, which is okay by me.)
The couple lived like swallows, spending the Canadian winter months in Hermanus, and summers in the north. But Covid, during which Jeff nearly died, gave them perspective. It was time to sell the Canadian cottage and settle fulltime in South Africa.
The move ended up being deeply painful to Merle. Things did not go as they had expected, and the final packing up of their Canadian lives was a kind of a tragedy. The new buyers drove a Tesla.
Merle and Jeff settled in Hermanus where, instead of their stately Canadian maple, their house was shaded by a giant, prolific fig tree. Merle loved the fig tree. It died.
Much worse was to come, but Merle and Jeff floated above it all – literally. There was still love, and laughter, and the occasional miracle.
She resolved to face the future resolutely, to be gracious and kind, and never to stop rolling the shit backwards.
When I started reading Merle I kind of wondered why they’d bothered. This was a story of an ordinary, middle-class, white, Jewish South African family doing their thing. But as it went along, I laughed and gasped and felt enormous sadness when things went awry. Merle and Jeff got to me.
The World According to Merle is definitely worth a read.