Category Archives: My Book Pile

These are books I have in my possession, and may get around to reviewing.

Bedside table books for January

These are among the books that landed on my desk in January. The first five are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Fire, by John Boyne (Doubleday)

Fire is the third in John Boyne’s four novels named after the elements of Water, Earth, Fire – and Air, which is due to be published later this year. I haven’t read Earth, but thoroughly enjoyed Water, and Fire looks like a cracker, judging from the first 20 or so pages.

Freya is a beautiful, successful surgeon whose speciality is skin grafts for burn victims, but it would seem she is not a particularly nice person. A horrific experience as a child may have poisoned her life.

But the reader is asked to consider whether it did in fact poison her, or if she was always going to be that person. The book is described as a psychological journey, asking the age-old question: nurture, or nature?

Pearl, by Sian Hughes (The Indigo Press)

Not many authors have the skill or the luck or the talent to get their first novel on to the Booker Prize longlist (for 2024), but Sian Hughes has managed it, as well as being shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award 2024.

The Booker Prize judges described Pearl as an exceptional debut novel, both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation.

It is based on the classic medieval poem of the same name.

Marianne’s mother goes missing from their village home in Cheshire when Marianne is eight, also leaving behind her husband and infant son. Marianne believes her father knows more than he is telling.

When Marianne has her own daughter, she realises she is looking for her mother’s eyes to meet hers. “The midwife asked if there was a family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief.”

The Granddaughter, by Bernhard Schlink (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Kaspar is a childless elderly German bookseller who comes home from the shop one day to find his apartment in disarray, a spilt wine glass, and initially no sign of his wife. Then he finds her, dead, in the bath.

She had been troubled, for years, he understands that, but he is surprised at how unmoored he is by her death. She was originally from East Germany; they had met at a music festival in 1964, and she had joined him in West Berlin in January 1965.

But there is a great deal more to her story, of which it turns out Kaspar knows little. Determined to uncover her past, he is eventually led to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and a young girl who appears to accept him as her grandfather. Kaspar decides to fight for her.

Le Monde’s comment on this novel was: “Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now”, while Le Figaro describes it as: “The great novel of German reunification.”

Thirst, by Giles Foden (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

If the name Giles Foden looks familiar, that’s because he is the author of the bestselling The Last King of Scotland, the novel on which the 2006 film was based, for which Forest Whitaker won an Academy Award.

This novel too is set in Africa, this time closer to home, in Namibia, in 2039.

Cat Brosnan, a young scientist is trying to find a much-needed but forgotten water source somewhere in the trackless Skeleton Coast.

Cat is not the first member of her family to seek the aquifer – her mother had also done so, abandoning her daughter in Ireland in the process, and never returning.

But Cat is not the only one. Some need the water for survival, but others are out there searching, including big corporations and mining companies. Heat, desert, water wars – sounds a bit scarily dystopian.

Cher – The memoir, part 1, by Cher (HarperCollins Publishers)

On page two Cher tells us that when she thinks of her family history it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel (if Dickens had ever found himself in Arkansas).

“Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Depression. It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy.”

I remember lying in bed in the dark after my bedtime, listening to the Hit Parade on my little transistor radio, singing along to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, or Let it be Me.

They were big.

Sonny Bono somehow fell by the wayside, but Cher prospered, moving on to stellar careers in music and film. According to Wikipedia she is the only solo artist with Billboard number-one singles in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2020s. She’s 78 – so when I was listening to her on the radio, she was just 19.

She’s clever, smart, strong-willed and independent, and her movie roles reflect this.

This looks like a fun read, and there are lots of pictures – but it’s over 400 pages, and is only part 1. Goodness. Do even committed fans need more than 400 pages?

Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)

Finally the English version of the Afrikaans police thriller of the same name, and it’s all you’d expect of Deon Meyer, Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido.

It’s layered, complicated and a hefty tome with some memorable characters. You’re holding thumbs for Benny and Vaughn, but also for some of the baddies – and they really are baddies – but you kind of warm to them.

And meanwhile the clock’s ticking – will Benny be in time for his wedding?

See the full review of Leo on The Books Page on Sunday February 2. Leo was listed in Exclusive Boos’s 2024 Christmas catalogue.

 

 

 

Christmas Books

 

If you’re thinking of books as a summer holiday read or as Christmas gifts, there’s an embarrassment of riches out there. It could mean a one-stop shopping expedition, which is always a pleasure at this busy time.

Exclusive Books has produced its annual festive catalogue, Get in their Good Books, which is clever. Here are brief descriptions of some of the books they’ve posted, and at the end a reference to other books in the catalogue that have already been featured on The Books Page.

The top two books on my Christmas list are gorgeous picture books which also contain a wealth of information. Many Makhanda residents who have gone without water for months fear they face a dry Christmas. – Vivien Horler

Wood, Iron and Steel – Shipwrecks mapped off the Western Cape, by Bruce Henderson & Kelly Graham (Wreckless Marine/ Quickfox Publishing)

The arresting cover picture of this book is a multibeam image of the bulk carrier Daeyang Family, which ran aground off Robben Island in March 1986. The ship was carrying a cargo of iron ore from Brazil to its home port of Incheon in South Korea. The 28-member crew was helicoptered to safety.

This book features 60 shipwrecks dating from 1698 to 2009, including wooden sailing ships trading between Europe and the East, iron-hulled steamers and modern steel vessels.

As the blurb tells us: “Every wreck had a life before it was lost, and every loss is a tale of its own.”

Wreckless Marine is a Cape Town company that has worked closely with the Council for Geoscience SA’s minerals and energy unit, as well as the SA Heritage Resources Agency’s Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage.

The wrecks were surveyed over three years as part of a project to map the Western Cape’s seafloor. “Cutting-edge scanning technology enables us to view them as never before, while on-site dives and extensive research have added to what is known about each vessel.”

In his introduction, Cape Town author and shipping journalist Brian Ingpen gives a timeline of relevant dates in the Cape shipping industry, from circa 600 BC when the Phoenicians may have been the first navigators to round the Cape, to the sinking of the Seli 1 in 2009.

Many Cape Town readers will remember the sinking of the SA Seafarer off Green Point on 1966, the Antipolis and Romelia off Oudekraal and Llandudno respectively on the same stormy night in 1977, the Daeyang Family off Robben Island in 1986, and the Treasure in 2000 north of Robben Island, which led to an enormous penguin rescue effort.

Each entry about the 60 wrecks features pictures where they exist, details of the ship and its loss, dive pictures of the wreck and also the somewhat surreal multibeam images of the wrecks in situ.

Kirstenbosch – The most beautiful Garden in Africa (2nd edition), by Brian J Huntley (Struik Nature/ Penguin Random House)

As we all know, Scotland is famous for its heathers.

But we who live in the Cape Floral Kingdom say pah! As this magnificent volume tells us, six species of heather grow “in the much-romanticised heathlands of Scotland”. On the Cape Peninsula – just the peninsula – we have 104.

Ericas are one of the three major fynbos families – the others are restios and proteas – and there are 816 species globally. Fynbos has 682 of them.

Kirstenbosch tells the story of the garden from the earliest years, its history, its people, its setbacks (there’ve been a few). And the book is magnificently illustrated with eye-wateringly beautiful photographs.

In the late 19th century it was felt the Cape needed its own botanical garden, and the first site suggested was, logically, the Company’s Garden in the city centre. But apparently it was on the wrong side of the mountain, and constrained by the growing city.

Brian J Huntley, first CEO of the National Botanical Institute at Kirstenbosch, spent 19 years in the garden. He writes that in 1911, Henry Harold Welch Pearson, professor of botany at the SA College (later to become the University of Cape Town) and some like-minded chaps were looking for a spot for the garden. He had in mind somewhere on the slopes south of the old Groote Schuur zoo.

But they carried on hiking, heading through the avenue of Moreton Bay figs and camphor trees planted by Cecil John Rhodes, “and reached the site that became, and remains, the iconic point of entry into Kirstenbosch – the verdant sweep rising to the grandeur of Castle Rock, flanked by the rugged, forested eastern face of the Table Mountain massif. Pearson exclaimed: “This is the place.”

Anyone attending a Kirstenbosch summer concert on a late Sunday afternoon, their gaze lifting from the stage to the mountain on their left, knows he was right.

Nomad Heart – Adventures on and off the set, by Ian Roberts (Jonathan Ball)

I’d never heard of actor and musician Ian Roberts, until I realised he was the guy in the Castrol oil ads set at the Karoo Oasis. We’ve all seen them. But he’s probably more famous for his role as Sloet Steenkamp in the long-running series Arende, a series I’d never watched and had no idea was set in a prisoner-of-war camp ion the island of St Helena during the Boer War.

And now I’m sorry I’ve never seen it since I’ve been to St Helena and visited the beautiful, peaceful Boer cemetery there.

Roberts and his siblings grew up on an orange farm in the Eastern Cape, running wild in the holidays and attending school at posh St Andrews in what was then Grahamstown.

After the army and a stint as a clothing manager in what was then PE, he enrolled as a speech and drama student at Rhodes.

He’s acted in venues from Long Street to Los Angeles and has been in Shakespeare plays as well as films, such as the Oscar-winning Tsotsi.

It’s been a long and interesting career in music and the stage, and now it turns out he can write, too, with delicious spurts of humour.

Run. Risk. Reward. – My epic trail-running adventures, by Ryan Sandes, with Steve Smith (Penguin)

Ryan Sandes is a legend, a national treasure. I first heard of him in 2010 when he became the first runner to have won all four of the 4 Desert races, which are six-to-seven-day self-supported races through various deserts including the Sahara and the Antarctic.

The following year he comfortably won the Leadville Trail 100 in just 16:46:54, half an hour ahead of the next competitor and nearly eight hours ahead of the cut-off time. This race resonated with me because the following year I went to Leadville, which is so high up in the Colorado Rockies that these days they try not to allow to have babies born there, because the atmosphere is so thin.

I was interested because I was researching some family history and both my grandmother and her sister were born in Leadville in the 1880s – and survived. At 3 096m above sea level, even walking up a slight incline in the road made me breathless.

What Sandes did in the Leadville 100 was run 100 miles (160km) in the mountains above Leadville, with a course that takes you up and over a mountain, and then back, all within 24 hours. You start in the dark and end in the dark.

The story of this astonishing feat was told in Trailblazer, also co-authored by Steve Smith in 2016.

Now Sandes and Smith have a new volume, and this one opens with Sandes and his running partner Ryno Griesel on an epic marathon across Nepal, being hunted by bandits. Later while running 700km up Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, he encountered some very grumpy Namibian soldiers, and then there was the time, running the circumference of Lesotho with Griesel, they had to fight off an attack from local herdsmen.

Maybe this book should have been called Running for My Life.

The feats and tests – including Covid – contained in this volume look sure to be as extraordinary as those recounted in Trailblazer.

The Housefly Effect – How nudge psychology steers your everyday behaviour, by Eva van den Broek & Tim den Heijer (Bedford Square Publishers)

A wise old fisherman friend once told me while geelbek is a popular menu choice for Afrikaans speakers, English speakers tended to shun it. Until it was renamed, in English, Cape Salmon. And then it became popular with everyone.

I don’t know how true that is – I tried to Google it and didn’t find anything – but it matches what the Dutch authors of this fascinating book say in their introduction:  “When you give a fish a different name, people suddenly eat far more of it.”

This is all part of what has been dubbed “the housefly effect”, a small change in the environment that makes desired behaviour easier, more fun, or the obvious choice.

This book introduces the reader to many “houseflies”, like the sweets that line the supermarket till queues in an effort to prompt you to make an impulse buy, to those that help you drive more safely or live more healthily.

In a reference to gambling “houseflies”, the authors point out you swop your cash for chips in a casino not for security reasons, but because using chips means you don’t feel the pain of spending real money. Also you’ll see people around you winning, because the more prominently a slot machine is positioned, the more often it delivers a modest prize.

Sneaky. But it looks as though this title is bristling with insights.

I Will Not Be Silenced, by Karyn Maughan (Tafelberg)

This memoir tells us Karyn Maughan was 12 when she first knew she wanted to be a journalist. And she was determined.

I don’t remember the year, but fresh from a media studies and journalism master’s, she approached the Cape Argus news desk and asked if she could report for us, for free.

This was at a time when there was a determined effort to “transform” what had been an almost entirely white newsroom to one more reflective of the diverse population. That meant it became difficult to take on aspirant white reporters.

But the general attitude was that if she wanted to write for us, for free, well that was okay.

It soon became apparent to me – I was news editor at the time – that she was good. In some cases she was better than staff reporters and interns who were earning a salary. After a couple of months I went to the editor and said this was unconscionable – we at least needed to pay her lineage (payment per published line).

Eventually she was taken on full-time, for a proper salary. And her career was launched.

I tell this story to indicate something about Karyn’s determination. She wanted it, she could do it, and she succeeded.

So when she says, as she does in the title of her book: “I will not be silenced,” believe her.

Karyn became the Argus’s high court reporter, which she says she loved. And then she transferred to The Star, and in 2006 reported on Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. She was not to know this would be the start of 20 years reporting about Zuma’s legal problems, which eventually became her own as Zuma turned on her and state advocate Billy Downer.

Karyn writes: “I witnessed, again and again, how Zuma and his supporters viciously targeted anyone who sought to hold him accountable for his conduct… This is not only my story, and the reason I’m writing it is not just personal; it is also to honour all those who were targeted for speaking up long before I was.”

As Zuma has possibly already realised: Karyn Maughan is no push-over.

The Hidden Girl –  A novel – by Lucinda Riley (Macmillan)

Even as a young girl growing up on the Yorkshire moors in the mid-1970s, Leah is unusually attractive. And when she catches the attention of an arty neighbouring family, her life changes.

She becomes a top international model, but it turns out she has a past, involving the tragic tale of two young siblings in Poland in World War 2.

Her family’s secrets threaten to overwhelm her life, and she is reminded of a prediction by an old woman, regarded by the neighbourhood kids as a witch, who told her there was evil ahead of her, a doomed man who would come to find her on the moors. “You must be on your guard,” she tells the terrified child.

This hefty novel – more than 500 pages – also has a past. It is described as an international bestseller, yet has only just been published. Lucinda Riley’s son Harry Whittaker tells us in a foreword that The Hidden Girl was originally published under the title Hidden Beauty by Riley, then calling herself Lucinda Edmonds, in 1993, when she was just 26.

Her writing career had a hiccup in the late 1990s, and she died in 2021. When Whittaker read Hidden Beauty for the first time, he says he was enormously impressed. It was about thwarted ambition and forbidden love, revenge and murder, culminating in a fatal, forgotten prophecy.

So Whittaker decided to refresh and update the 1993 text, his duty being to “modernise perspectives and sensibilities without ripping out the heart of the novel”.

It looks promising, although Riley/Edmonds’s prose is a bit too adjective-heavy for me: “Rose Delancey dropped her fine sable brush into the jar of turpentine. She put down her palette on the paint-spattered workbench, and sank into the threadbare armchair, pushing her heavy titian hair away from her face…”

What Nelson Mandela Taught Me – Timeless lessons on leadership and life, by Zelda la Grange (Tafelberg)

It must have been tough, after 19 years spent largely devoting her life to Nelson Mandela as private secretary and aid, to have seen him go. Suddenly her raison d’etre was gone, along with her more-than-fulltime job. Not surprisingly she wrote what turned out to be a bestseller about her years with the leader, Good Morning, Mr Mandela.

And now she has written a second book, as well as making a living giving talks about him. She’s rather milking this, I thought, when I saw the book. But hey, she probably spent more time than anyone else with Madiba in those 19 years and clearly feels she still has something to say.

This volume however opens with an error of judgment for which she has beaten herself up. In January 2015 she flew to the UK to give a TEDx talk in Oxford, and while waiting, sleep-starved in an immigration queue at Heathrow, she fired off a series of tweets focusing on remarks by Jacob Zuma. She commented that whites were no longer wanted in South Africa, and that if she were a white investor she would withdraw her money. She added: “Oh wait. Whites’ tax is good enough for Nkandla but then you constantly have to be brutalised.”

Well, a bit like Helen Zille and her colonisation tweets, La Grange’s remarks  set off a firestorm. Unlike Zille, she was quickly mortified by what she’d said, especially when some people asked her: “Have you learnt nothing from Nelson Mandela?”

She realised she had of course, including the advice that you never respond in anger.

And so here is a volume of some life lessons. In the little I’ve read I found it somewhat on the preachy side: “What do you want to be known for? Being an angry, bitter person who can’t adapt to change, or someone who is willing to give up a little for the sake of the greater good?

“We should all do things we know we can do. Give your thoughts wings and interrogate your cognitive bias. The thing is, everyone belongs. It is what made Madiba so loved. He made us all belong…”

I think this will resonate with many people.

Matriarchs, Meze and the Evil Eye – A memoir, by Costa Ayiotis (Melinda Ferguson)

Having detailed his venture into the restaurant business – the late lamented Limonia in Hout Bay –  in his first book, My Big Fat Greek Taverna, he has now written a prequel memoir about growing up in what he calls “a trinity of chaos” – a South African home containing his mother, his Greek-Egyptian grandmother and his aunt.

His father was nominally there too, but he was mostly away on business. The focus of the family was little Kostaki, the prince, who was beloved by all three women.

The problem was that “giving three strong-willed and independently minded women free rein in … a busy household kitchen is courting disaster. We were your average dysfunctional family with one added ingredient: three women who all wanted to be the prima donna.”

He loved them equally, he says, but life wasn’t easy. “On a good day, they were a triumvirate of benevolent volatility. On a bad day, they were a trinity of chaos.”

This looks hilarious.

Crimson Sands – A novel, by Jeremy Vearey (Human & Rousseau)

The Bondelswarts are a Nama ethnic group, today based in southern Namibia, but at the time this epic historical novel begins in 1905 the group straddled the territory on both sides of the Orange River.

The Bondelswarts rose up against the Germans in SWA between 1903 and 1906, and were brutally suppressed. About 15 years later, when South Africa had a mandate from the League of Nations to govern SWA, the Bondelswarts rose up again, in a fight thought to have been sparked by an increase in the dog tax.

Once again the Bondelswarts were crushed, with the deaths of around 100 Bondelswarts, including some women and children.

Wikipedia says the activist and scholar Ruth First, herself murdered in Mozambique by the apartheid government many years later, described the attack on the Bondelswarts, which included an aircraft sent to bomb them, as “the Sharpeville of the 1920s”.

This is the historical background of Crimson Sands, by the respected/notorious former policeman Jeremy Vearey, and focuses on Dirk Aruseb, a teenager who is fetched from an orphanage in Pella in the Northern Cape to join the Bondelswarts.

Dirk was always on his own, known in his orphanage as the Bosluis Baster for his straw-coloured peppercorns and grey eyes. But now he has a cause, to fight the German Schutztruppe, and he is taught the mechanics of war in the Bondelswarts’ stronghold at Schansvlakte in the Great Kara ountains of Namaland.

The cover describes Crimson Sands as an epic story of war across territories from Tsumeb to Upington, from internment camps in Luderitzbucht to the Fish River Canyon.

(This novel is not included in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue)

The Books Page has in previous months featured a number of other books included in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue, such as:

  • The brilliant The Glass Maker, by Tracy Chevalier, about the history of Venetian glass;
  • The gripping thriller Fire and Bones by forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs;
  • Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin’s memoir of his mother’s death and his life’s slump;
  • A Short Life, a novel by Nicky Greenwall, the strange story of two car accidents on Constantia Nek on the same night, and how they change lives;
  • The family epic The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese set in Kera Kerala, India.

 

 

 

 

 

Bedside Table September

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four – Exit Wounds, There are Rivers in the Sky, How to Say Babylon, and The Dark Wives, are part of a list of Exclusive Books’s top reads for September. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Exit Wounds: A story of love, loss and occasional wars, by Peter Godwin (Picador Africa)

I pounced on this memoir, having thoroughly appreciated Peter Godwin’s earlier two: Mukiwa, a coming-of-age tale about growing up white in Rhodesia during the war for independence, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about the collapse of his family as Zimbabwe itself goes into a death spiral.

His father dies in the second memoir, by which time Godwin is living in the US, having married a Yorkshire woman he met while a student in the UK. They have a son, and there is a line that struck me: their little family speaks with three different accents.

There was another bit that nearly reduced me to tears: Godwin and his sister want their mother, now elderly and poor thanks to crippling inflation, to leave Zimbabwe and go back to England, but she is resisting them. She’s lived there for 40 years or so, working as a doctor, and when her children pile on the pressure, she sends them a Rudyard Kipling poem purportedly in the voice of a Roman centurion ordered home to Rome after decades in Britain:

“Legate, I come to you in tears – My cohort ordered home!/ I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?/ Here is my heart, my soul, my mind – the only life I know./ I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!”

But she eventually did leave, as we discover in the opening pages of Exit Wounds. She stays in London with her daughter Georgina, while Peter often flies to see her from New York.

But he says sadly: “There is a sad symmetry to our relationship. I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of hers trying to summon mine.”

There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak (Viking/Penguin Books)

This novel has an extraordinarily broad sweep, from the ancient city of Nineveh to Victorian London, then on to Turkey in 2014 and finally back to London in 2018.

The cover blurb tells us this is the story of a lost poem: The Epic of Gilgamesh, two great rivers and three remarkable lives, all connected by a single drop of water, one that keeps being recycled from raindrop to earth and thence back to sky… it’s the sort of story that gets me using the word thence.

I suspect this novel may be a touch higher grade, but it gets enthusiastic shouts from the likes of the great British classicist Mary Beard (“A brilliant, unforgettable novel”) and the best-selling writers Philippa Gregory (“The story flows like the rivers from ancient Nineveh to present-day London, with characters of the distant past as bright and vivid as those of today”), William Boyd, Arundhati Roy and Ian McEwan.

How to Say Babylon – A Jamaican memoir, by Safiya Sinclair (4th Estate)

Safiya Sinclair grew up in Jamaica, desperate to be a writer and live her own life, but she and her family were dominated by her father, a member of a militant Rasta sect who rejected Babylon, his term for the corrupting influence of the West.

She made it – she has written three prize-winning books and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.

How she escaped her repressive background is the subject of what the Spectator calls “this electrifying memoir”, which was also one of the Guardian’s “best memoirs and biographies of 2023”.

Writer Elif Shafak – see above – said of Babylon: “I absolutely adored this book… Heartbreaking and heartwarming.”

The Dark Wives – A Vera thriller, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

I’m an enormous fan of Ann Cleeves’s various series of detective thrillers: the Shetland novels, the Two Rivers novels and of course the Vera Stanhope novels, as personified in the TV series by the brilliant actress Brenda Blethyn. (“What’s that, pet?”)

In The Dark Wives, an early morning dog walker finds a body (early-morning dog walkers have a lot to answer for) on a common near a care home for troubled teens. He turns out to be Josh, a staff member.

Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope is called in, and finds her only clue is the disappearance of Chloe Spence, 14, one of the home’s residents. Then a second body is found near the Three Dark Wives, standing stones in the Northumbrian countryside, and “superstition and folklore begin to collide with fact”.

Ann Cleeves has dedicated this detective thriller “to teens everywhere, and especially to the Dark Wives – uppity young women with minds of their own struggling to find a place in a difficult world”.

The Super Cadres – ANC misrule in the age of deployment, by Pieter du Toit (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Quoting ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe, former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo said in his report, into the allegations of state capture, that the strategic deployment of comrades was an important part of the ANC’s strategy to control the levers of state power.

And we know where that has led. In the prologue to what is clearly an important book about the state of our nation, Pieter du Toit writes that as the party’s secretary general during its most destructive decade, its chair since 2017 “and one of the most enthusiastic defenders of its “ruinous cadre deployment policy, [Gwede Mantashe] bears more responsibility than most for [the party’s] fate in the 2024 elections.

“Mantashe represents a refusal to reform. And the downfall of the ANC.”

In his introduction, Du Toit writes that cadre deployment was formalised as far back as 1997 as a mechanism to ensure the party’s complete dominance over power in the state.

The system, introduced during Nelson Mandela’s time at the helm of both party and country, “but formulated and implemented by [Thabo] Mbeki, ensured that the ANC’s culture of patronage politics and rent-seeking would flourish. Mbeki’s intention with cadre deployment was to ensure the supremacy of African nationalism and party control. But what it eventually led to was the severe weakening of the state, institutional corruption and the rise of a predatory class of ANC deployees focused on large-scale resource extraction”.

Du Toit says his book exposes the depravity of cadre deployment. He goes further, he says, and attempts to explain how the ANC’s super cadres, a class of political power brokers and party headmen, consolidated their power and how the ANC squandered almost every opportunity to modernise SA after 1994, bringing the country to the brink.

Blood Brothers – to Operation Smokeshell and back, by Leon Lamprecht (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

As a female, I was never conscripted into the SA Defence Force, and when I was of an age to have boyfriends and a brother in the military – all in the navy for one thing, so based at Saldanha, Gordon’s Bay and Simon’s Town – it seemed a more innocent age.

As a result I’ve never been particularly interested in the slew of books that have been written about the ghastly experiences of the troepies (and fighters on the other side) in the then South West Africa and Angola.

Journalist Deon Lamprecht was with 61 Mech in Angola, and has now written three books about the war. This one is about a battle he was not part of, which wreaked terrible damage on both sides.

But he says this book is not about glorifying a long-ago war – the battle of Smokeshell took place on a single day in June 1980 – “it is about camaraderie, mutual respect and social support in the here and now”.

It also talks about the horror that can still surface among the men who fought there, and the physical pain and disability some of them suffer to this day.

Bedside Table for August

These are among the respectable haul of books that landed on my desk this month. The first three – Irascible Genius by Kevin van Wyk, Hot Tea and Apricots by Kim Ballantine, and The Tea Merchant by Jackie Phamotse, are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month. A fourth novel, A Short Life by Nicky Greenwall, also one of Exclusive’s top reads, will be reviewed on The Books Page on Sunday, September 1. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Irascible Genius – A son’s memoir, by Kevin van Wyk (Macmillan)

I remember reading the late lamented Chris van Wyk’s brilliant and best-selling Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, and marvelling. Most other memoir writers describe what happened in their lives, while Van Wyk has you there in the Riverlea yard with him and his friends, playing cricket.

In his memoirs of life in Johannesburg’s Riverlea, Van Wyk comes across as charming and genial, and yet judging from the title of this book by his older son, the writer was certainly clever, but a man who could be distinctly short-tempered.

In a preface, Kevin writes that as his father got older, the family would find his descriptions of what had outraged him funny. He would look at their bemused smiles, and say: “Ag, you know I can be full of shit sometimes.”

Chris van Wyk, who also wrote poetry, children’s books and biographies, died of cancer in 2014. In the months leading to his death Kevin was often the person to drive him to his treatments, and the pair shared many philosophical discussions.

Kevin went to Wits to study law, and has since held various positions as a legal adviser in the banking, hospitality and telecommunications sectors.

The publishers say on the cover: “If storytelling runs in the genes, Kevin may just be proof that his father’s spirit lives on.”

Hot Tea and Apricots – A memoir of loss and hope, by Kim Ballantine (Self-published)

When you think how intricate and complicated the human body is, all the processes and bits that have to work right and in concert so that we can get on with our lives, it’s amazing how little, generally, goes wrong.

Except sometimes of course it does, spectacularly. Kim Ballantine, a Johannesburg-based industrial psychologist who made her living from talking, was taken ill on her 40th birthday.

It starts with a violent coughing fit, followed by the desperate feeling she cannot breathe. This is because, it turns out, her throat has gone into spasm. A trip to A&E follows and she is eventually diagnosed with chronic spasmodic dysphonia, a condition of severe layrngeal spasms.

The best treatment is to have regular Botox injections into her vocal chords, which relaxes them, but which also means she cannot speak.

However, not only does her job depends on her voice, she is also a wife and mother to three young children. How is it possible she will never speak again?

In the face of this tragedy she turns to sign language – her children learn it with her – as well as writing.

This is a story of family, friendship and faith.

The Tea Merchant – part 1 of a two-book series, by Jackie Phamotse (Penguin Random House)

Luna is a young Khoisan nursing graduate, desperate for job. Waiting for a job interview at a Bellville clinic, she meets Amora, who is Xhosa. After nearly 12 hours, Luna finally goes in and does not like the doctor interviewing her.

Later that evening there is a murder in which both nurses are complicit. But they seem to have got the jobs. Three years later something else happens and they leave town at speed, along with transfer papers, to work in a clinic in Clanwilliam.

There, during a fire on their first night, Luna meets Cameron Coal, who is desperately trying to save his family’s rooibos tea farm. But Cameron’s brother, improbably called Sole Coal, has a secret that could shatter their world.

Jackie Phamotse is a writer, businesswoman, social activist and philanthropist, according to a note about “The Author”. Her debut novel, BARE 1: The Blesser’s Game, was awarded the African Icon Literary Award in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018. She lives in Sandton.

The note adds that Phamotse’s work “revolves around the narrative of women and children in Africa. Her stories are raw, well-researched and highly thought-provoking”.

I don’t think I’m in the target audience for this novel.

Familiaris, by David Wroblewski (Abacus Books/ Jonathan Ball)

This is a saga set “in the middle of nowhere” in northern Wisconsin in 1919, about a young couple who buy a farm and launch a dog breeding project (domestic dogs’ Latin name is canis familiaris).

I have been reading it on and off for several weeks now, and keep breaking off not because I’m not enjoying it, but because it is very long – nearly 1000 pages – and that’s just too much for me to read in a week. So I keep having to find something shorter to review each Sunday.

The young couple, John and Mary Sawtelle, buy the farm with the somewhat unwilling help of Mary’s stepfather – well she blackailed him, and quite right too.

They go off to the farm with a former ice seller and his enormous horse (he stole the horse when its owners were going to sell it and break up their partnership),  John’s taciturn handyman buddy and a guy John persuaded to enlist in the war, and was grievously wounded. He bears a bitter grudge against John because he was rejected by the army and saw no action.

And then there’s the local shopkeeper whose fey daughter can predict the future, which is not necessarily a blessing.

This is a prequel to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I’d never heard of, but which was published in 2008, becoming a New York Times bestseller and being selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. It is reportedly a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and focuses on John and Mary’s grandson.

Life Lessons – How to fail and win, by Alan Knott-Craig (Tafelberg)

This Alan Knott-Craig is the son, not the former CEO of Vodacom. He’s had his ups and downs in business, having founded, funded or run 21 companies including Cellfind, iBurst, Mxit and HeroTel. The blurb on the cover says he shares what he has learnt, “mostly by losing”.

Self-improvement books or books on how to succeed are generally not my thing, but having dipped into this one on behalf of you, dear readers, I am charmed.

His father was a huge force in his life, and he says until the age of 25 he had no freedom of choice. After school Knott-Craig senior told him if he wanted to study, he would pay, otherwise Knott-Craig junior was on his own. If he wanted to go to the University of Port Elizabeth, now Nelson Mandela University, his dad would pay, otherwise not. If he wanted to do accounting, his dad would pay, otherwise not. If he passed, his dad would pay, otherwise not.

So he went to UPE, studied accounting, and achieved 50% (“any grade over 50% is wasted effort”, a sentiment shared by my son when he was doing maths at UCT).

At the end of the book are scores of useful life lessons which mostly make a lot of sense. Make friends with the alpha male; have someone big in your life, preferably someoin with tattoos, who has your back; if you have to eat shit, don’t  nibble; government money is bad for you; excellence trumps loyalty; how do you avoid becoming addicted to a corporate salary?; go in through the front door (“when you find yourself in bed with crooks and politicians, it’s easy to start copying their tactics… don’t give in to their ways. There’s only one honest way to live and do business. Out in the open. Through the front door”.)

Lucas Mangope – A life, by Oupa Segalwe (Tafelberg)

Lucas Mangope, leader of the apartheid homeland of Bophuthatswana, who died in January 2018, was a controversial figure, seen as both a leader of his people and a “tinpot dictator”.

He was both a traditional leader and an elected politician, who despite having attended the same college – St Peter’s Secondary School in Rosettenville, a British missionary school like Lovedale College in Alice (now Dikweni) – along with the likes of Joe Matthews, Andrew Mlangeni, Oliver Tambo and Fikile Bam – chose another path.

He was the eldest of nine children, born to minor royalty in the village of Motswedi in December 1923, the same village in which author Oupa Segalwe grew up.

This biography has attracted media attention, and I heard a radio interview with Segalwe in which he said Mangope was a revered figure – something like Nelson Mandela – in his community.

In a shout on the cover of this biography, Andrew Manson writes: “People either hate him for being a vicious tyrant or venerate him and the good old days of ‘Bop’. Here we have an assessment of Mangope that is well researched, balanced and fair.”

Segalwe spent his early career as a news reporter in community and state media organisations, and this shows in his writing which is crisp, clear and interesting.

The Corporate Revolutionary – Mervyn King’s life in law, business and governance, by David Williams (Tafelberg)

A quick google of Mervyn King’s life is so dizzying that one doesn’t know where to begin. Suffice it to say he is one of SA’s Great and Good, a guru of corporate governance and sustainability, an advocate, a judge, and a businessman who rewrote the way businesses should operate.

He has been chair and director of many organisations including the Kirsh Trading Group, Frame, FNB Merchant Bank, Operation Hunger, SA Chamber of Business, the Automobile Association of SA, the Global Reporting Initiative in Amsterdam, the International Integrated Reporting Council in London and more.

He believes “accountancy can save the planet”, and advocates that companies should report on society and the environment, not just profit.

In 1992 the Institute of Directors in SA asked him to set up a committee to produce a code of governance for directors and managers in the new SA. At first King demurred, feeling he was too busy, but Nelson Mandela worked his charm, and the result was the King Codes of Corporate Governance, which have been updated several times over the past 30 years, “influencing organisations globally”, according to author David Williams in his prologue. King chaired the committee for 27 years.

Williams writes: “The impact of Mervyn King’s governance work was local and then global – changing the way boards think and the way companies operate, establishing the need for engagement with society beyond work and profits, all with the ultimate aim of saving the planet itself.”

 

 

Bedside Table Books for July

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first three: The Forgotten Names, by Mario Escobar, The Paris Affair by Maureen Marshall, and The Future, by Dion Chang, Bronwyn Williams and Faeeza Khan, are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for July, along with This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, which was reviewed on The Books Page on Sunday, July 21.

Some of the books mentioned below will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Forgotten Names, a novel by Mario Escobar (Harper Muse)

Remember the story of Moses? Pharoah had ordered the killing of all Hebrew boy babies in Egypt, but one mother could not bear it. She put her little son into a basket and pushed him off into the treacherous waters of the Nile.

It so happened that very day Pharoah’s daughter went down to the river to bathe, and came upon the basket caught in the reeds, with the baby in it. She took him home and brought him up, and changed the course of history.

The mothers in this extraordinary story did something similar. Early in World War II Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon”, ordered the deportation of all foreign Jews in France. In one internment camp, Venissieux, a group of people – clergy, civilians, the French Resistance and others – realised an ambiguous order from the Vichy government forbade the deportation of children abandoned by their parents.

So the mothers of 108 children gave up their rights to their children, not knowing if they would ever see them again. And of course they did not.

Fifty years later, French law student Valerie Portheret was doing research into Barbie when she came across the story of the children of Venissieux, and resolved to track them down and reunite them with their true identities. It took her 25 years, but she did it.

The Forgotten Names is a novel based on this extraordinary episode. WW II, and specifically the experiences of Jews in Europe, continue to be a rich source.

The Paris Affair, a novel, by Maureen Marshall (Grand Central)

It is 1886, and an impoverished Fin Tighe is an engineer, working on an exciting project: the building of the Eiffel Tower, which is to be a centrepiece of the upcoming Exposition Universelle and an advertisement for Parisian technological skills.

But not everyone in Paris is keen on the tower, fearing it will ruin the city’s skyline (today, of course, if your apartment has a view of the tower its value is at a premium). And even though the design has been accepted by the organising committee, the furore has meant the government is withholding its promised five million francs.

Now everyone working on the project is told to do what they can to raise money. Fin, who is gay and the illegitimate son of a British earl, meets Gilbert Duhais, wealthy and connected, who persuades him to claim to be the earl’s heir as a way of raising money.

Fin’s enthusiasm for the Eiffel project is palpable: “The mathematical precision involved – hundreds of thousands of joints and angles measured to the 10th of a millimetre – not even the Romans would have dared anything close at the height of their arrogance.”

While homosexuality is not illegal in the Paris of the time, it is not approved of, and Fin finds himself vulnerable. And when a friend is murdered in the rooms above a secret gay club, Fin finds himself in an increasingly dangerous situation.

Looks intriguing.

The Future – More than 80 key trends for South Africa, by Dion Chang, Bronwyn Williams & Faeeza Khan (Tafelberg)

If things seem to be speeding up and the world appears to be less comprehensible than before, it’s not that you’re getting old (although that could be a factor too) – things really are becoming stranger, according to the Flux Trends team.

This book is based on the Flux Trends annual State We’re In Trend, an annual summary of where the world is now and where it’s heading. “Not only does it feel as if we’re losing a sense of reality, but that the world is unravelling,” say the authors.

The current decade “started with the pandemic, which sped up the undercurrents of change already underway since the last decade: a contactless economy, a lockdown life audit that fast-tracked the ‘future of work’, simmering geopolitical tensions, the harsh realities of climate change and the reconfiguring of our social contracts”.

So the authors have produced this book to help us navigate uncharted waters. It describes key trends with insights on what to do so that companies and individuals can turn challenges into strategy.

The trends described fall under six broad headings: technology, retail and marketing, the economy, the natural world, diplomacy, and socio-cultural.

You are Here, by David Nicholls (Sceptre/ Jonathan Ball)

From the first two chapters you have an idea of what’s going to happen. Marnie lives in London where she works from home as a copy editor. She is lonely, but also resistant to getting out more.

Michael is a geography teacher, based in York, who has been increasingly solitary ever since his wife left him. He feels happiest on long solitary hikes, and certainly doesn’t want to see friends or meet people.

Both of them are friends with Cleo, Michael’s boss, who tries hard to get them out of their shells, but they are uncooperative. Until one day both agree to join a group hike across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, a distance of 190 miles.

Not all of them plan to do the whole hike, and Marnie is a complete novice, but judging from the first couple of chapters she does agree to go further than planned. And then, according to information on the back cover, “Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship… But can they survive the journey?”

A charming humour shines out from the first few pages I’ve read. David Nicholls’s novel Us was long-listed for then Booker, and one critic says: “No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls.”

GQ writes: “Witty and moving at the same time, it’s a figurative and literal journey that might even have you hunting for your walking boots.”

This looks fun.

And now for a slew of SA historical non-fiction.

Rhodes and his Banker – Empire, wealth, and the coming of Union, by Richard Steyn (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The first Johannesburg branch of the Standard Bank opened in October 1886, just after the diggings had been proclaimed. The bank has been central to SA’s story, and one of its earliest bosses was Lewis Michell, a Cornishman, who arrived at the Cape in the early 1860s.

In Richard Steyn’s preface he tells us Michell had helped expand the bank into southern Africa’s leading financial institution before and during the Anglo-Boer War.

Rhodes banked with the Standard, and eventually he and Michell became friends. Michell came to admire Rhodes as “a great man”, and worked hard to promote Rhodes’s reputation in South Africa and Rhodesia.

When Rhodes died in 1902, Michell left banking and spent the rest of his life promoting and protecting Rhodes’s legacy, also writing the first Rhodes biography, becoming chairman of De Beers Consolidated Mines, and playing a key role in the Rhodes Scholarship programme.

Steyn tells us Michell was a committed diarist and letter writer, and was able to comment on many of the issues and the people of the day.

This looks interesting.

Botha, Smuts and the First World War, by Antonio Garcia and Ian van der Waag (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The ground of Smuts, Botha and World War 1 seems to have been comprehensively covered, most recently by Richard Steyn, who is the author of Jan Smuts: Unafraid of greatness and Louis Botha: A man apart.

However, it has been welcomed by historians, with Professor Gary Sheffield of the University of Wolverhampton, Kings College London and the University of Buckingham writing: “The authors, by placing the SA experience into the wider context of the war effort of the British Empire, have written a book that is relevant to global as well as national history”, describing them as having taken an innovative approach.

Another reviewer, Professor Alex Mouton of Unisa, says Botha and Smuts’s military and political careers have until now not been covered in comprehensive fashion, and that there is a significant gap in the historiography…” which this book has plugged.

Commando – A Boer journal of the Anglo-Boer War, by Deneys Reitz (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

In 1899, aged just 17, Deneys Reitz joined a commando and rode off to war. He was well connected, being the son of the former Orange Free State president FW Reitz, and becoming a protégé of Jan Smuts.

He turned up wherever the action was, and kept a journal. He was with Smuts in Namaqualand when the peace was declared. After the war he became a bittereinder, refusing to swear allegiance to King Edward VII, and going into exile in Madagascar, along with a brother and their father.

While in Madagascar, and aged just 21, he wrote the manuscript of Commando, based on his war journals. Eventually, desperately ill with malaria, he was persuaded to return to what was now the Union of South Africa by Smuts’s wife Isie, who nursed him back to health.

The manuscript, written in Dutch, was translated into English and edited and abridged, to be published by Faber & Faber in 1929. This edition reportedly omitted negative remarks about the British, notably Lord Kitchener.

Now, nearly 100 years later, Emeritus Professor Fransjohan Pretorius of the University of Pretoria, has retrieved and annotated the original manuscript, which runs to 1 147 pages, and Jonathan Ball Publishers has published it, once again in English.

I loved the Faber& Faber version for its freshness and youth and first-hand account of extraordinary times. I look forward to reading this edition too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bedside Table Books for June

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The top three – Moederland, by Cato Pedder; The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo; and Mr Einstein’s Secretary, by Matthew Reilly – are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for June. Some of them will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Moederland – Nine Daughters of South Africa, by Cato Pedder (John Murray)

Despite its title, Moederland is written in English by the British-born great-granddaughter of former SA prime minister Jan Smuts.

It looks at the stories of nine women across four centuries of South Africa’s history: Krotoa, a Khoikhoi translator for the Dutch East India Company; Angela of Bengal, a former slave; Elsje, a German child immigrant who was married at 13 and had her first child at 15; Anna, who was mistress of Vergelegen in the 1700s; Margaretha, a farmer who resisted the abolition of slavery; another Anna who trekked; Isie, wife of Jan Smuts; Cato, the author’s grandmother; and Petronella, the author’s aunt, who fell in love across the colour bar.

Pedder writes she is named after her grandmother, Smuts’s daughter Catharina, who too was called Cato (pronounced Cuh-too, not Kate-o). She says in her prologue that this name ensures “…I am forever connected to a country 6 000 miles from home, to a culture freighted with shame”.

This history has been reviewed on The Books Page website by Annamia van den Heever, but I’m mentioning it here as I have just received it and it is one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month.

Mr Einstein’s Secretary, by Matthew Reilly (Orion)

This is a novel by a best-selling thriller writer. It is the story of the fictitious Hanna Fisher who was born in 1902 and lived through many tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century.

The cover blurb tells us that all Hanna wants to do is study physics under Albert Einstein, but in 1919 her life is turned upside down, and she is flung into a new life as a secretary, a scientist, a sister and a spy.

Hanna meets racist gangs in Berlin, gangsters in New York City, works with some of the greatest and most egregious minds of the 20th century, goes through some terrible times, and desperately tries to stay alive.

This novel, described by the Guardian as “a thrilling, action-packed adventure from cover to cover”, looks like a blockbuster of note.

The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

There is an old adage that novelists should write about what they know, and in this debut novel Claire Lombardo obviously took that to heart. Her book is about a family of two parents and four grown daughters, and in her acknowledgements she thanks her siblings, three sisters and a brother to whom she says she owes a great deal.

This novel tells the family saga of David and Marilyn, he a Chicago GP and she a housewife and later hardware store owner, and their four daughters. The story loops forward and back between the past of the milestones of the couple’s relationship, and the present, which sees all four sisters going through varying degrees of crisis.

So far it’s a wonderful warm novel, and I’m loving it.

Crash and Burn – A CEO’s crazy adventures in the SA airline industry, by Glenn Orsmond (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

One of the problems in the airline industry is that it attracts people who love aeroplanes – hence, too many pilots and not enough accountants end up running things.

That’s the view of chartered accountant Glenn Orsmond, who was CEO of Comair twice and the founding CEO of 1time. After 30 years in the airline industry, he was the boss under whose watch in 2022, in the wake of Covid, Comair crashed and burned.

Shareholders, lenders and suppliers lost money, employees – including Orsmond himself – lost their jobs, and thousands of travellers lost the fares they had paid.

Orsmond’s career in aviation began in 1991 with Bop Air, the national airline of the ostensibly independent homeland of Bophuthatswana. Soon after the homeland’s reintegration into South Africa, Bop Air applied for a licence to operate in SA proper, facing competition from SAA, Flitestar, Comair and Nationwide.

This looks like a rollicking account of a career and a really interesting book.

Saltblood, by Francesca de Tores (Bloomsbury/ Jonathan Ball)

In 1685, in Portsmouth, baby Mary Read is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes the split-second decision to turn Mary into Mark, so she will continue to collect his inheritance.

Mary becomes a footman in a great house and later joins the navy, but being a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing to be. Eventually she becomes a pirate.

The novel opens in 1721, with the pirate Mary/Mark in gaol, condemned to the gallows. It appears Mary Read was a real historic character.

Saltblood has had some ecstatic reviews, such as “a complete triumph. A glittering jewel of a novel; a treasure chest of delight”, but the one I liked best was: “Master and Commander meets Thelma & Louise”. Which sounds promising.

Birds of Greater Southern Africa, a Helm Field Guide, by Keith Barnes, Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe; illustrated by John Gale and Brian Small (Sunbird Publishers)

This is a magnificent tome, beautifully illustrated and featuring thousands of birds – resident, breeding and migrants, as well as vagrant species – found in nine African countries: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.

It also includes birds found in the waters of the Mozambique Channel, the African sector of Antarctica, the Southern Ocean and the islands of these waters including Tristan da Cunha and the Prince Edward Islands.

There are maps, and discussions about landscapes and habitats. Each entry includes  pictures, physical descriptions of the bird concerned, the difference between adult and immature birds, their status and habitat, and the sounds they make.

Only one caveat: this is a field guide but you might need a porter – it weighs a ton (about 1kg).

 

 

 

Bedside table books for May

It’s been a wonderfully book-rich month, and there are books on every surface in my house. These are some of the offerings that landed on my desk this month, of which I will review a few in full in coming weeks. The first two – Show Me the Place by Hedley Twidle, and The Comrades’s Wife by Barbara Boswell – are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for May, along with Diva by Daisy Goodwin, a novel based on the life of Maria Callas, which will be reviewed in full on Sunday June 2 on The Books Page website. – Vivien Horler

Show Me the Place – Essays, by Hedley Twidle (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Thirty-six “is no longer young, promising or even emerging”, writes academic and essayist Hedley Twidle in a delightful piece on learning to surf, 20 years too late.

No matter, it is fun, even when he and his friend Alex battle to cope with 2-foot waves off Milnerton lighthouse and have to dodge the odd nappy in the surf. It is also humiliating out there, “being whistled off a wave by a seven-year-old”.

It’ll take five years to get even half way good, says Alex gloomily, even if they surf every day. But they press on, till Covid strikes and the beaches are declared off limits. “The world needed people who loved surfing without feeling the need to surf themselves,” says a resigned Twidle.

Other essays are about seeking Rhodes’s chopped off bronze nose, attending an academic conference in Brazil where a British colleague is obsessed with relationships in her department back home, spending weeks in a Scottish bothy with a pair of grumpy anarchists, meditating for seven hours (it hurts, physically), and the tragedy of his mother’s dementia.

“Hedley Twidle is an essayist of rare brilliance,” is a shout on the cover of this book.

The Comrade’s Wife, by Barbara Boswell (Jacana Media)

This is a tautly plotted novel about a divorced Cape Town academic in her mid-40s who meets a delicious man of a similar age online. He is handsome, urbane, educated, apparently wealthy, and he fancies Anita big time, as she does him.

He turns out to be a rising star backbench MP for the ruling party, so that he travels a great deal. This becomes a problem for Anita who wants more of him, despite Neill pointing out that she knew he was a devoted comrade from the get go.

There are a couple of red flags, but Anita tells herself to be a grownup, because when she has Neill’s attention she has all his attention. He is also kind, generous and a tender and fantastic lover.

Within months of meeting, they marry, but sudden work commitments mean Neill is unable to accompany Anita on their honeymoon trip to Vic Falls.

And so it goes on. When the relationship is good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad…

It turns out scorned wives are not powerless.

This is a triffic read.

Hunting the Seven – How the Gugulethu Seven assassins were exposed, by Beverley Roos-Muller (Jonathan Ball)

The 1980s were a terrible time in South Africa. The Struggle against the apartheid government was ratchetting up, and in response the authorities were becoming more viciously heavy handed.

Early on March 3, 1986, Gugulethu residents heard an explosion, followed by gunshots. Minutes later, all was quiet again. For those who were looking, seven bodies lay sprawled in NY1. There was an unusually high police presence.

What had happened? The official version was that seven heavily armed young black men had been planning to ambush a police van returning to the nearby Gugulethu police station.

But it happened that Chris Bateman, a Cape Times reporter who could speak isiXhosa, arrived at the scene and was amazed by the number of senior police milling about. This was unusual in an under-policed area.

The scene was overlooked by a hostel lived in by dairy workers. Bateman found three hostel dwellers who had seen what happened. Two men told a similar story: there had been an explosion, and they had run to the windows to see what was going on. Outside a man lay in the dirt under a big tree. A policeman walked up to him and shot him in the head.

A third hostel dweller said he had seen a man near the bushes on the opposite side of the road. A policeman confronted him, kneed and kicked him till he was down, and shot him.

These reports were key to establishing the truth of what really happened that day.

But most of this became known, thanks to testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Beverley Roos-Muller takes matters further: the men’s families denied they were activists. Why had the police shot them? Roos-Muller went hunting for answers.

When Love Kills – The tragic tale of AKA and Anele, by Melinda Ferguson (Melinda Ferguson Books)

Author Melinda Ferguson describes this tale as echoing a Shakespearean tragedy, “a story that broke my heart”.

The rapper AKA – Kiernan Forbes, 35 – was shot dead along with his friend, chef and entrepreneur Tebello “Tibz” Motsoane, in Florida Road, Durban on the night of February 11, 2023.

This was big news around the world. He was a talented rapper and producer, although he did not impress author and publisher Melinda Ferguson much. In an author’s note she writes: “…for me, his chaotic personal life had blurred his genius”.

Somehow, in all the publicity around his death, little was said about the death of his fiancée, Anele Tembe, more than 10 years his junior, who fell from the 10th floor of the Pepperclub Hotel in Cape Town in April 2021.

In fact not everyone was silent about Tembe’s death. There was speculation AKA’s assassination might have been an act of revenge. Was it an inside job? Was it a suicide, a dreadful accident, or a murder?

Ferguson says this book, which is controversial, is not a biography of either of the couple. “Rather it’s a twisted love story involving a highly talented and flawed man, a bright and flawed young girl and some significant characters who crossed their paths.”

Sizzlers – The hate crime that tore Sea Point apart, by Nicole Engelbrecht (Melinda Ferguson Books)

I was still working on the newsdesk of the Cape Argus when on January 23, 2003, ten men were tied up and attacked at Sizzlers, a gay massage parlour in Sea Point, Cape Town. It was a very big story at the time.

Extraordinarily, after the killers had left, one of the victims, Quinton Taylor, who had been shot in the head twice and had his throat slit, dragged himself to a nearby petrol station and raised the alarm.

Eventually two killers, Adam Woest and Trevor Theys, were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

And then, in 2018, Woest became eligible for parole, despite the fact that none of the victims’ families had been contacted, much less consulted, and nor had Quinton Taylor. Eventually the sister of one of the victims, who lived in Canada, took matters in hand. Woest was not going to be released if she had anything to do with it.

 

 

 

 

Check out some of the local publications in this year’s Homebru catalogue

South African readers have always had access to a cornucopia of books from abroad, but the proportion of new books available in any one month contains an increasing number of books published in this country.

May is Exclusive Books’ annual Homebru campaign, when the spotlight is on the homegrown voices defining the SA literary landscape.

“South Africans have always had a way with words, and while meanings may differ, we understand each other all the same,” said a spokesperson for the book chain.

“That why this year’s Homebru campaign is a celebration of words: the unique and quintessentially SA words that bring us together, help us express ourselves and give us an avenue to tell our story.”

There are 58 books in the 2024 Homebru catalogue, ranging from fiction and nature books to poetry, current affairs and children’s reads.

To see the full selection, visit the Exclusive  Books website. But here are a few of the Homebru books sent to me. – Vivien Horler

Place – South African Literary Journeys, by Justin Fox (Umuzi)

Olive Schreiner’s Karoo, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s lowveld, Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico, Dalene Matthee’s Knysna forest, Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast and Stephen Watson’s Cederberg – these are among the places travel writer Justin Fox explores.

A former editor of Getaway magazine, Fox goes on a series of magnificent journeys around our country and into the landscapes that inspired generations of South African writers.

He has chosen landscapes that are still wild and largely unspoilt, and writes: “My choice of literary works is all about places of the heart, both for the authors and myself. The selection is personal, reflecting my own literary and literal geographies… In each instance, setting is no mere backdrop but an integral part of the work and a reflection of the author’s heart-land.”

This is, he says, a book about a series of journeys around SA, “with an old kitbag of books instead of maps to guide us”.

How to Fix (and unf*ck) a Country – Six things to reboot South Africa, by Roy Havemann (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Roy Havemann has consulted to the SA Presidency, the Treasury, the World Bank and private companies. He joined the national Treasury in 2002, eventually becoming former Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s speechwriter. (Which makes me wonder who actually wrote Mboweni’s foreword…)

In his introduction Havemann says some countries are stable and prosperous, while others are failed states. But none of this is destiny. History is full of examples of countries that have pulled themselves out of – or got into – a hole.

He points out that once successful countries like Argentina, are successful no longer. North Korea, with plenty of natural resources, is poor. South Korea, which has no minerals and a relatively small population, is among the richest places in the world.

Havemann says there are six priorities – things we could do practically to get us moving in the right direction, all beginning with the letter “E”: Eskom, Education, Environment, Exports, Equality and an Ethical and Effective state.

In a brief shout on the cover, News24’s respected business journalist Carol Paton says: “This book will make you smarter. Packed with lively anecdotes and lessons from history, economics, and the world, [it] explains the hole South Africa is in how we can climb out.”

As Mboweni says in his foreword: “This book aims to create a conversation. My hope is that it stimulates a discussion on growth. We need it.”

Bullsh!t – 50 fibs that made South Africa, by Jonathan Ancer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

What is it with books that employ swear words in their titles and then don’t have the courage of their convictions but coyly hide behind an asterisk or an exclaimation mark, like Scope magazine’s topless models and their strategically placed stars.

In my opinion, if you want to say bullshit, or fuck, just say it. The asterisks fool no one.

Right, rant over.

Jonathan Ancer, a quirky and clever former colleague has written an intriguing book about the lies that some or all of us believe.

The first he picks at is the 1994 election, which was, he says, “an agreed fiction”.

Organising the first democratic election was an impossible task for the brand new IEC. They had no voters’ roll and just four months to do it all.

Ancer quotes the political scientist Professor Steven Friedman who in 1994  headed the IEC’s information analysis department. He says a lot of the 1994 results were absurd, especially in KwaZulu-Natal.

“For example, by any credible population estimate, in some voting stations you had 800% of the adult population voting. The whole thing was dodgy.”

Before election day, Friedman wrote a paper on what would constitute a fair and free election, and said there was a single major criterion: whether the losers accepted the results.

“It’s a legitimacy issue. If the losers accept the results, then does it matter if five votes go astray here or there?”

He believes if the IEC had been purist about the results, conflict would have been inevitable. “In my view, it was not a lie but a ‘negotiated truth’ or an ‘agreed fiction’.”

The historian Bill Nasson says in his foreword: “Combining journalist raciness with a magpie mind and an alligator’s nose for a swamp, Ancer is a shrewd recorder and interpreter of SA’s steaming pile of follies, crimes, misfortunes and absurdities.”

Prescription: Ice Cream – A doctor’s journey to discover what matters, by Alastair McAlpine (Macmillan)

This is an interesting and even inspiring book which I’m not going into detail about here as it will be the subject of the Sunday book review on May 26 on The Books Page.

 

Among the other books in the Homebru catalogue are Margie Orford’s vulnerable Love and Fury, Ivan Vladislavic’s The Near North, and Graham Coetzer’s Hunting with the Hawks, all three of which have been either reviewed or mentioned in previous weeks of The Books Page.

 

 

 

Bedside Table Books for April

Here is a taste of the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four are from Exclusive Books’ list of top reads for April. Another, One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall (Macmillan) was reviewed on this website on Sunday April 21. Some of the rest will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Love and Fury – A memoir, by Margie Orford (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Most readers know Margie Orford for her crime thrillers, the five Clare Hart novels (a sixth is due to be published next year). She’s been described as the “queen of SA crime-thriller writers” by The Weekender.

I didn’t know about her impressive academic pedigree. She was a Fulbright Scholar with a master’s degree in comparative literature from the City University of New York, and has a PhD in English literature from the University of East Anglia. She is an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and was also an executive board member of PEN International.

This memoir opens in London, where Orford finds a small home overlooking Hampstead Heath, a refuge after the collapse of her marriage, and three “vagrant years” after she fled Cape Town.

She is thoroughly depressed, and says for months she had been trying to write a suicide note “…but my writing, which I regard as separate from me – something life and death-giving, beneficient and tyrannical as the Furies… – vetoed me”.

She casts about, she says for a way to leave life that would not disturb anyone.

And then she goes for a wintry walk on the heath, comes home, tears out all the pages of the “to whom it may concern” death notes, and is ready “for the shy night creatures of the mind to slip out of their shadows so I could befriend them”.

And she adds: “This book kept me alive; I will give it that.”

James, by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

I don’t know how much of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn you remember, but it’s set in the 1850s or so and is about a barely educated teenager who fakes his own death to get away from a drunken, abusive father.

He teams up with a runaway slave, and the pair set off on a raft down the Mississippi River, having a variety of life and death adventures on the way. It was first published in 1884.

In this novel Percival Everett, a Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA, rewrites Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim, and gives us a unique insight into the strategies a literate and intelligent slave had to use not to stand out from the crowd.

Everett, whose novel Erasure was adapted to become the film American Fiction, uses different dialects to indicate when Jim is speaking in his own voice, and in that of an uneducated slave when he is talking to whites: “Lak I say, I furst found my hat up on dat nail. I ain’t put dat dere… How dat hat git dere?”

The American writer Ann Patchett describes James as “funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting… a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history… Who should read this book? Every single person in the country.”

The Excitements, by CJ Wray (Orion)

“Revenge is a dish best served old” is the subtitle of this fictional romp starring two very old ladies, the Williamson sisters, who are Britain’s most treasured World War II veterans.

Because they represent a literally dying breed, they are in demand at commemorative events, and always give their money’s worth. They are adored and watched over by their great-nephew Archie, who accompanies them on a trip to Paris to receive the Legion d’Honneur.

Archie knows some of their wartime history in the Wrens and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (risibly known as Fany), but it turns out not as much as he thought. As the cover points out, there’s a reason sweet Auntie Penny can dispatch a would-be mugger with her umbrella.

Now the sisters are in Paris, probably for the last time, to have some excitements, settle some scores and avenge lost friends.

One reviewer says: “Not all heroes wear capes, some wear M&S cardigans! A triumph!”

The Excitements looks delightful.

How to Stop a Train – The story of how Mohandas Gandhi became the Mahatma, by Stephanie Ebert and Kathryn Pillay, illustrated by Paddy Bouma (Pan Macmillan Children’s Books)

I don’t usually review children’s books but I thought this story, which is of course set in SA, would be interesting. How do you convey what was a pivotal moment in Gandhi’s life, a deeply political act, in a way that’s meaningful to children?

Gandhi’s ejection from a train because he refused, as an Indian, to move from first class to third class, where the South African Railways thought he belonged, marked the beginning of a journey, “a journey to teach everyone that you can change the world without using violence. A journey to make the world a better place. A long journey that begins with one small word: No.”

Besides simply telling this story, the authors provide context, describing the SA of the time, notes for parents and a glossary of terms such as civil rights and indentured labourers.

It’s an inspiring story which tells youthful readers that across the world Gandhi’s ideas helped people to stand together, put their bodies in the way of danger, stare down injustice and say one little word: “No. You may not treat people this way.”

Hunting with the Hawks – Untold crime stories from the elite SA crime-fighting unit, by Graham Coetzer (Tafelberg)

Graham Coetzer has spent 13 years working on Carte Blanche programmes, doing what he says he loves best: “exposing the people who scam, exploit, bully and otherwise do harm to ordinary South Africans”.

In the preface he says this volume is not masquerading as a PR exercise for the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, the body founded in 2008 to target organised crime, economic crime and corruption.

He was inspired to write the book since the nature of the Hawks’ work means most of us never get to hear first-hand accounts of their stories. “Despite often risking their lives for us, they get very little recognition.”

So here’s a behind the scenes glimpse of some of the work they do.

I’ve read only one of the case histories, that involving a trafficking and racketeering operation run, originally in Blouberg in 2017, and headed by a woman, Shantel Reyneke-Bridger.

She ran brothels, sold drugs, and was involved in extorting money from her male clients, who were terrified of being exposed. She also employed many young women, some of them under age, ensured they became drug addicts, and kept them in thrall with the help of violent heavies.

She and her two major partners, her husband and her boyfriend, who all lived together, made a lot of money, yet their brothels were dirty and squalid. Where did all the money go, Coetzer wondered. To casinos, it turned out – all three had serious gambling problems.

Now all three are serving 20-year sentences.

Not a comfortable book to read, I suspect, but ultimately showing that crime can be tackled.

The Invincible Miss Cust – A novel, by Penny Haw (Sourcebooks)

About two weeks ago I reviewed a new book by Penny Haw, The Woman at the Wheel, about the wife of Carl Benz, who invented the first “horseless carriage”. Bertha Benz was a staunch supporter of her husband and I found the book extremely interesting.

The Invincible Miss Cust is about another determined woman, and I think of the two books possibly even more readable. It is relatively new, published in 2022, and I got it from my book club.

Aleen Cust was the first woman veterinary surgeon in Britain and Ireland. Despite completing the practical and course work to become a vet set by the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh in 1897, she was denied registration by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons because of her gender. It was to be more than 20 years before the college relented and admitted her, in 1922.

This meant despite having better marks than many of her fellow (male) students in the final exams, she had to sit at the back of the graduation hall and watch her classmates graduate.

But she did not let this set her back – she found work with an Irish vet in Roscommon and worked alongside him for years. Penny Haw speculates in this, her first historical novel, that Cust and the Irish vet had an intense relationship, although there is no proof of this.

But even the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suspects it was so.

My only criticism of Miss Cust, and it’s not really a fair one, is that since it is published by a US publisher, all the spellings are American despite the fact author Penny Haw is South African and Miss Cust was Anglo-Irish.

I found this a really enjoyable and inspiring read.

 

Bedside Table Books for March

Bedside Table March

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for March. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Near North, by Ivan Vladislavic (Picador Africa)

Ivan Vladislavic has the extraordinary ability to write about everyday subjects and make them interesting. This new account of life in Johannesburg, by the man who wrote the brilliant Portrait with Keys, opens with a description of the lights going out during an episode of load-shedding.

“In a moment, every room breathed its last: the resigned sighs of electronic devices shutting down.”

There’s a search for candles, but all Vladislavic’s partner can find are tea lights. They’re hungry, but everything in the fridge needs cooking. “Looks like it’s either cornflakes or a restaurant.”

So they go out looking for an open restaurant, but like Riviera, the streets of Rosebank and Saxonwold are dark.

In a blackout, Vladislavic muses, those who can afford such things worry about electric fences, security cameras and burglar alarms that aren’t working; those who can’t worry about walking down unlit streets or having to unlock doors in the dark, or the neighbour knocking over a candle.

Parkview turns out to be on a different grid and the lights are on, but it’s a Monday night and most of the restaurants are closed.

Finally they find a small Italian diner where they and a group of strangers eat, chatty and happy to have also discovered a place that’s open and offering hospitality.

And that’s it, the first chapter in this volume. Nothing much, but we all been there  – and will be again.

The Near North is described as a vivid account of the old mining city in times of crisis, “finding meaning in the everyday and incidental”.

Vladislavic is an award-winning writer of novels, stories and essays, and is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Wits.

The Hidden, by Fiona Snyckers (Macmillan)

It’s been the worst terror attack in the US since 9/11, and the FBI are under enormous pressure to find and arrest the ringleaders. But these people are survivalists, with the ability to lie low in the dense forests of the Pacific North West.

This is the US in a post-Trump world, with a woman president, and domestic terrorism declared a federal crime.

Becca Abrahamson has a secret. While she may seem just another suburban housewife, she has deep ties with survivalist communities, and the FBI believes she is involved in the attack.

Fiona Snyckers, who is based in Johannesburg, has published eight novels, one of which, Lacuna, won the SA Literary Award for best novel in 2020.

SA writer Gus Silber says of The Hidden: “A propulsive and nerve-wracking tale of terror in the American heartland. The Hidden hits home with the urgency of a breaking news bulletin.”

The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder, by C L Miller (Pan Macmillan)

Exclusive Books says this murder novel falls into a similar category to those of Richard Osman’s popular Thursday Murder Club series. Novels about what they call “cosy” crime rarely focus on harsh realities, profanity or violence.

“The murders take place off stage, and are often relatively bloodless (eg poisoning), while sexual activity (if any) between characters is only ever gently implied and never directly addressed.”

A former antiques hunter investigates a suspicious death at an isolated English manor, which sees her back in the ruthless world of tracking down stolen treasures.

In a foreword author C L Miller reveals that before starting to write, she consulted her mother, Judith Miller, a regular expert on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, until her death last year. Miller senior told her daughter that what made antiques valuable was not necessarily their intrinsic value but their provenance, in other words their stories.

And Miller junior said once she had thought about that, this novel began to form in her mind.

Publisher’s Weekly says of this debut novel: “Miller’s winning debut exposes the dark underbelly of the antiques trade. Miller nails the pace and mood of a good mystery on her first try…”

Bounce – How to raise resilient kids and teens, by Naomi Holdt (Macmillan)

KZN-based psychologist and mother Naomi Holdt says there never was a time when rotten lemons weren’t tossed at people. We’ll all be knocked down by foreseen circumstances from time to time, and however much we try to protect them, so will our children.

So the question she sets out to answer in this book is how, despite “these lemon-drenched sucker punches”, can we ensure our kids get back up again?

It can be done, but it starts with the parents (doesn’t everything?). “The little things that you say and do have the power to completely change the trajectory of your child’s life.”

A parent’s role is not to prevent your children from falling, but to let them fall, knowing you are there to support them while they get up again. Because it’s in the struggle that we learn we can.

Bounce is not an academic book full of stats and data – it’s intended to be a workbook. One section lists 20 attributes of parents of resilient children, which points out that these parents tend to be resilient themselves, prioritise themselves and their partnerships, put consistent boundaries in place, prioritise play and fun, can let go, allow their kids to mess up, and are able to say sorry.

It also provides advice for anxious parents, gives tips on childhood depression and resilience, has advice for grieving children, tips for divorced parents and a “how to” guide on boundaries and discipline.

She says it’s impossible to get stuff right all the time, but if parents focus on the relationship first and always, the rest somehow falls into place.

Back Up – Why back pain treatments aren’t working and the new science offering hope, by Liam Mannix (New South/ University of New South Wales Press)

University of Sydney professor Chris Maher says in a foreword to this volume that low back pain is the number one cause of disability, affecting an estimated 540 million people at any point in time. In Australia the problem costs the health system A$4.8 billion annually and is the most common reason why middle-aged Australians retire early.

In this book Australian science journalist Liam Mannix, who, like his father was a chronic back pain sufferer, describes the new science of pain and how we think about it, and says recovery from back pain is within our own control.

The book is the result of years of interviewng experts on back and chronic pain. As many as one in five Australians have chronic pain, ranging from headaches to arthritis and endometriosis.

He looks at the back itself, whether we’re built “wrong”, at common beliefs about our backs that turn out to be plain incorrect (“good posture is important, strengthen your core, lift with a straight back…”) and he talks to people who’ve suffered and experienced the “old science” of back pain.

The second half of the book focuses on the new science, how neuroscience has revolutionised the way scientists think about pain and what that can tell us about sore backs.