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Today’s Sunday Times published a short review of mine (slightly edited) of Birds in Words, the quirky poetry compilation by Gus Ferguson and Tony Morphet. Here’s the link:

• Short review: Birds in Words

And here’s the review in full:

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A pretty book, launched at a pretty venue. Birds Cafe on Bree St. is one of Cape Town’s most popular lunch spots, the apogee of rustic chic in the city. The usual milk crate seats and door-and-sawhorses tables were cleared away for poets on Saturday morning, but the birdsong - supplied by a turntable spinning behind a curtain - twittered right along throughout.

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Delivered to the inbox a few days ago - should be great fun:

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by Imraan Coovadia
Umuzi, 2006

reviewed by Ben Oswest

Coovadia’s latest novel is the “book of the week” in today’s Sunday Times; I wrote the review, which the paper published in slightly-edited form.

• Green-Eyed Thieves reviewed by Ben Oswest (Sunday Times 6 Aug 06).
• Purchase a copy of Green-Eyed Thieves.

Here’s the review in full:

Of the many astute observations tossed out with offhand dexterity in Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves, one of the most telling is the remark from the novel’s main character – the aptly-named Firoze Peer – that “It’s a defining trait of great villains… to flourish in death.” The “great villain” Peer refers to is none other than Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11, 2001, and, posthumously, a personality flourishing in the imaginations of dozens of writers, including John Updike and Martin Amis.

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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.
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