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A friend made the dour observation recently that being on the longlist for an award is like waiting for someone to ask you to dance.

Neither she nor I was asked last night when the Sunday Times Fiction Prize longlist was winnowed from twenty-nine to a shortlist of five. The prize, at R75,000, is SA’s largest literary award.

We chaff may take consolation in this image, which I have pilfered from the Times‘ website. It’s the longlist, stacked - a frozen moment of promise.

If I was a literary bookie, meanwhile, I’d place extremely short odds on Marlene van Niekerk and Agaat to take the prize. It’s the thickest book of the bunch, close to the center. (Another friend points out that, in Agaat’s case, a translation is being judged, not an original work in English, which is quite irregular. But then again, SA’s literary politics are much like the real thing, haphazard - and what’s more, he’s on the shortlist.)

• Full Sunday Times fiction shortlist here; and non-fiction shortlist here.

Cat: The Margin

Tags: Ben Oswest, Fiction, Fiction Prize, Literary Award, Novels, South Africa, Sunday Times, The Margin, The New Suffolk Hymnbook

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by Chris Walton
Published by Jacana.
reviewed by Ben Oswest

This review originally ran, in edited form, in the Sunday Independent. Here’s the link (subscribers only):

• Quick pace and sardonic tone make publisher’s indulgence a romp

And here’s the review in full:

At first glance, this enjoyable Gothic sex farce dolled up as a murder mystery appears to be the product of pure indulgence on its publisher’s part: for what have Zurich, Switzerland and its inhabitants during the years of the First World War to do with South Africa today?

But one of the secret pleasures of Chris Walton’s Sound Bites is lifting evidence from its pages to fit a theory about its implausible release here: the theory that South African culture – the whole shebang, its producers, consumers, bureaucrats and police – has matured to the point where incidental voices singing unfamiliar notes are made room for, because of a general agreement that the local milieu – a milieu shaped mainly by voices more pleasing to those with a nationalist bent – offers everyone some agency, a small ledge on the mossy cliff on which to trill.

Keep reading »

Cat: The Review

Tags: Ben Oswest, Chris Walton, Dada, Ferruccio Busoni, Fiction, Goethe, Jacana, Lewis Nkosi, Mating Birds, Novels, Schiller, Sound Bites, South Africa, South African Literature, Switzerland, The Review

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