boswestblog.com

Boswestblog will be on sabbatical for the rest of the month, while urgent literary and other matters are attended to.

In the interim, we present this special compilation of the “Boswestblog Top Ten” - as chosen by YT (no, not Air Togo, the Yukon Territory, or yellowTab) - for your perusal.

Peruse, peruse!

• The New Suffolk Hymnbook My novel, of course.
• The Laddy Jones Story Part One Short fiction involving Arsenal FC.
• Mandela’s Ego Reviewed by YT.
• Gasping Fish The B-blog logo.
• Notes from the Cape Town Book Fair Haiku by Gus Ferguson.
• Here Comes the Coda: Green Man & Silver Jews Prose paen by YT.
• Eid-ul-Fitr 1427, Rylands, Cape Town As reported by YT.
• Memories of the Ford Administration (Discontinued) Pertaining to YT’s youth.
• My Near West A photo-mosaic of sorts.
• Against Poets & Writers A rant of sorts.

Today’s Sunday Independent features a survey of a few dozen writers’ “books of the year” - mine among them. Here are the links for subscribers:

• Writers’ Books of the Year (Sunday Independent - click on any of the articles marked 2006-12-24)

Only three of the titles I submitted actually made it into print - here’s the full list:

New books (all South African)

Mandela’s Ego by Lewis Nkosi (Fiction, Umuzi). Wicked satire that rivals Nkosi’s first novel, Mating Birds, as a surgical dismemberment of cherished beliefs - pure jazz to read. (Click title for review in Boswestblog.)

Keep reading »

by Lewis Nkosi
Umuzi, 2006

reviewed by Ben Oswest

Despite Africa’s large, often unrecognised, literary wealth (its robust oral traditions; its poetry and proverbs; ancient writings like the Timbuktu Manuscripts; the more recent tradition of fine playwrights and novelists), African “master texts” are few and far between. For writing in the West, the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and others supply a vast, rich - and tamed - metaphorical space for new works to resound in, their own meanings amplified by echoes from the past. Modern African literature enjoys no such milieu - but what Africa lacks in great texts, it makes up for with a powerfully symbolic pantheon of great men, the continent’s liberators, who loom so large in the popular imagination that they are themselves like great texts, their lives of struggle and triumph echoing with as much force here as, say, The Odyssey in imagined Europe.

This would explain autobiography’s prominence in contemporary African literature: the need for the great men’s lives to be made into books underscores a larger project of making independence permanent, of bolting the fact of liberation securely down into world history. In effect, then, the autobiographies of great men stand in as Africa’s master texts - and among them none can be accounted more weighty, more foundational, than Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom.

Enter Lewis Nkosi, who, with Mandela’s Ego, rushes in like a literary David to contest the Goliath autobiography’s claim to the territory of the African imagination.
Keep reading »

Last night saw the launch of Lewis Nkosi’s new novel, Mandela’s Ego, at the Metropole Hotel’s M Bar in Long Street, Cape Town. I introduced Lewis and his wonderful book, which is, as I said, a “serious satire”, locked in contest with the monumental founding narrative of the new South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, for the territory of the South African imagination.

I’ll post a full review of Mandela’s Ego in the next few days (and possibly some further speech notes). Meanwhile, I’ve put up a few launch photos on Flickr. See them in the Cape Town Book Fair Photo Set.

Lewis Nkosi & Ben Oswest

Mandela’s Ego - CTBF Launch

I’ll be speaking at the launch of Lewis Nkosi’s novel, Mandela’s Ego, on the Sunday evening of the Cape Town Book Fair (18 June).