TNSH Signing at the CTBF
I’m scheduled to sign copies of The New Suffolk Hymnbook at the Jacana stand during the Cape Town Book Fair, on Sunday 17 June at 1pm. Here is the poster Jacana has designed to promote the stint:
{tag archive}
Sound Bites
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):
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.
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A Token of Consolation
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.
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Amateur Riktus Photography
The predecessor to NR Studios: Amateur Riktus Photography, a small sampling of which can now be viewed on the photoblog (as a series of low-res scans of prints that were glued inside a scrapbook). I took the pictures with an old Zenit camera (”Made in the USSR”) from 1996 to 2000 using Ilford B&W film. Here is a favorite:
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Whiteman
by Tony D’Souza
reviewed by Ben Oswest
{Boswestblog is back! - after a three-month absence. Thanks for readers’ patience. More to come…}
An edited version of this review originally ran in the 4 February 2007 Sunday Independent.
To the outsiders who have tried their luck in Africa, when it comes time to write a novel about it, the first struggle is with political realism. Should their story be set in the actual African country where they did their deeds, or, more delicately, in a territory that bears all the clues, but remains nameless, or masquerades under a pseudonym? The artless title of Tony D’Souza’s first novel reveals his choice: Whiteman is an clear declaration in favour of reality.
