I love Paris...

Henry James is certainly not what I'd call light summer reading. But after enjoying Michiel Heyns's latest novel, Invisible Furies, I've been tempted to wade against my usual summer laziness and dip into The Ambassadors again.

As anyone who has followed Heyns's late-blooming literary career should know, he is quite the master when it comes to the work of The Master. He published his debut novel, The Children's Day, in 2002, shortly before retiring as a professor of literature at the University of Stellenbosch, and has since been making up for lost time, as it were, publishing no less than six acclaimed novels in the past decade and 'fast becoming one of South Africa's most respected novelists', according to The Sunday Independent. This year he has already received two important local literary prizes for his previous novel, Lost Ground, and seems to be finally gaining the recognition he deserves.

But to get back to James: Michiel Heyns's second novel, The Typewriter's Tale (2005), is a fictionalised biography of a period in James's life, seen through the eyes of a typist to whom The Master dictates the long, winding, complicated and often ironic sentences that make his novels rather difficult to read - not ideal for 'beach reading' - a hundred years later. But Heyns's own highly developed sense of irony turns this subject with the potential weight of a chainball into something light enough to float, never too serious or inaccessible. Henry James made, well, not exactly easy - no one would want to do that to James - but delightfuly digestible.

And now Heyns has done it again, although this time he returns to James in a more oblique way, by using The Ambasssadors - which was apparently James's favourite among his own novels - as the frame on which he weaves his modern-day take on 'dear old Paris', where 'everything, everybody shows'. (Quoting James, not Heyns.)

'You've all of you here so much visual sense,' remarks Strether, the protagonist of The Ambassadors (a mild and middle-aged American who is sent to Paris to lure his wealthy fiancée's prodigal son back home), before adding: 'There are moments when it strikes one that you haven't any other.'      


This same 'visual sense' almost overwhelms Heyns's protagonist, Christopher Turner (a mild and middle-aged South African sent to Paris to lure his wealthy best friend's prodigal son back home), who is enchanted by the Beautiful People he meets and starts questioning his own staid life and tired loyalties. Heyns cleverly places most of his Parisian characters in the fashion world - models, designers, make-up artists, agents and claqueurs (young men who are paid to look good and applaud at fashion shows) - an environment ruled by appearances even more, if that seems possible, than the rest of Paris.


You don't have to have read The Ambassadors to appreciate Heyns's  novel, but it does add to the pleasure if you can connect the dots between the story lines and the characters of the two novels. Some even share the same name, like Gloriani who is an admired artist in The Ambassadors and an admired fashion designer in Invisible Furies, and who rather reminded me of the real-life designer Armani - although of course the author might have had someone completely different in mind. As for the outrageously brash Alessandra Giovanelli with the dead designer brother, well, you don't have to be a fashion slave to remark the resemblance with a certain Donatella Versace...


But if all these fashion references make you fear a concoction as light and fluffily French as choux pastry, then you obviously haven't seen Master Heyns work his magic yet. Au contraire, Invisible Furies is actually quite a serious meditation on  beauty, superficiality and the way the eye can deceive, as well as an exploration of a theme dear to the author's heart: the tension between the homeland and the wide world out there. In Lost Ground the protagonist returns to the small Karoo dorp of his youth after living abroad for most of his life, while in Invisible Furies Christopher Turner returns to the great city of Paris for the first time in thirty years after spending all of his life in South Africa. Heyns manages all this while retaining his light and ironic touch, so that the book never becomes too heavy to read on the beach - or better still, on a park bench in Paris, if you're lucky enough to visit Paris this summer.


Because, maybe above all else, the book is an ode of love to an eternally beautiful city. If you love Paris - and who doesn't, come on, honestly? - you'll probably find the book as hard to resist as the city. Bon voyage, if you're travelling in that way. And happy reading, even if you're not.  

From Updike to Queneau - and back again?

It seemed appropriate to write something about John Updike this week, but while I was still planning the perfect angle, I was side-tracked by an email from my friend H who is also a reading writer - or a writing reader - like me. It was simply entitled Updike is dead and consisted of a single line, a link to the writer's obituary in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/01/27/books/AP-Obit-Updike.html?_r=2

I read the tribute and was rather amused by the fact that judges of Britain's infamous Bad Sex in Fiction Prize had recently 'honoured' Updike for 'lifetime achievement'. Of course I knew that whatever I wrote about Updike would contain some reference to his sexual, well, not activity - unless one can call writing about sex a sexual activity? - but at least to the way he brought suburban sex to mainstream literature with a novel like Couples in the sixties. I read Couples more than a decade after it had first appeared, when I was finally old enough to appreciate it, and frankly, I found quite a lot to appreciate.

Thanks for the link, I replied to H's email. Wanted to scribble something about him in my blog. It's true that his sex scenes sometimes sounded ridiculous - as most sex scenes taken out of context? - but I have to admit that 'Couples' (especially the sex) made a huge impression on me in my youthful innocence.

I don't know him all that well, H replied, but his short stories are fantastic. His literary essays too. He wrote a beautiful essay, 'Getting the words out', drawing a link between his stuttering and his writing. My partner was also mad about 'Couples'. Have you read Colim Toibin's 'The Master' (about Henry James)? Definitely my book of the past 12 months. Now I also want to read Michiel Heyns and Lodge's books about him. I also read Perec's 'A Void' (originally 'La Disparition' in French). Normally intellectual pyrotechnics don't impress me - but fuck if you can combine intellect with a heart it makes for a great read. It's also extremely funny, a man who gets blown up (assassination) when he has sex with one of those huge sea lion-type things you get in Florida and Mocambique. But I don't think it's everyone's cup of tea.

Then of course I had to respond: It's fascinating to read all 3 those Henry James books in a short space of time. 'The Master' is probably the most 'literary', but do have a look at what Lodge does with exactly the same material. Exactly the same episode from the life of James! Michiel's book uses another angle and an imaginary typist, for me the most 'enjoyable' of the 3, or the most imaginative anyway, would love to hear what you think. And 'La Disparition' I've been wanting to read in French for yeeeears, but I just don't get there... You know how it goes. I remember a long time ago I read in Time Magazine what an enormous task the English translation was. It might be even more difficult in English than in French to write a phrase without an e. You can't even use 'the'??? In French at least you have 'le' AND 'la', so as long as you stick to feminine nouns, you're more or less OK. My partner is mad about Perec and his buddies who did all those wonderful style exercises...

Who are Perec's buddies and are they translated in English? my friend H wanted to know. I discovered him with a detour via Granta - the list of all the food he ate in one year - and then of course I read 'Life A User's Manual'. It's one of those books - like James Joyce's 'Ulysses' - which was supposed to be a total wank but turned out to be total magic for me. Right book at the right time???

So I asked my partner about Perec's buddies and promptly answered H: Raymond Queneau is the most well-known of the group, in France anyway. They called themselves Oulipo, acronym for Oeuvre Litteraire Potentiel or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle or something like that. Queneau's 'Exercises in Style' must surely be translated in English. I quickly googled his name and found some interesting English entries, for instance on the site www.grammar.about.com. He wrote 99 short 'stories' about exactly the same incident (or non-incident), a guy on a bus who looks at another passenger and finds something wrong with the button on his jacket, if I remember correctly. My son had to read the book about 2 years ago as a set work in French high school, and he wasn't what I would call ecstatic about it, but I found it magnificent. The kind of thing any potential writer should try as finger exercises...

As you can see, by now H and I had quite an entertaining literary roadtrip going, meandering away from Updike, taking a shortcut through Henry James, detouring around Perec and Queneau, with no final destination in mind. This is part of the joy of reading, I realised once again. It is always seen as such a solitary act, but the moment you put two enthusiastic readers together, you can be sure there will be a joint voyage to some unknown destination. Which is why, instead of writing just another boring tribute to a dead writer, I decided I'd rather invite you along for the ride by sharing these emails with you.

Who knows, if we keep going, we might even get back to Updike?

Local stays lekker

My patriotism doesn't necessarily extend to my bookshelf. What I mean is that I don't feel morally bound to praise South African books just because I was born in South Africa. So when I say that three of the best books I read during the past year are by authors born in South Africa, please believe me, it is an ode to pleasure rather than an act of patriotism.

I am delighted to realise that local can still be so lekker. For those of you who don't understand lekker, it is the South African version of fabulous, genial, prima, wunderbar... All of these adjectives, in whatever language, apply to Anne Landsman's novel The Rowing Lesson. It is a thing of beauty from beginning to end.

A woman, pregnant with her first child, is summoned from her home in New York to her dying father's hospital bed in Cape Town. From these sad and simple facts Landsman constructs a tale that is anything but simple and, though sad, never sentimental. On the contrary, quite a few passages are laugh-aloud funny, a rare feat in any book.

Landsman's 'language of fire and passion', as Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee calls it, is spiced with Afrikaans, Hebrew and medical terms, producing a truly original new voice. The medical terminology makes perfect sense, not only because of the hospital setting, but also because the dying father has been a small-town doctor for decades. Harold Klein, once dedicated caregiver to a whole community, now needs to be taken care of as he lies in a coma, slowly slipping away from those who love him. The only way his daughter can still 'communicate' with him, is by meditating on his life - remembering, reliving, inventing it.

Thus the whole story becomes an act of imagination, brilliantly exposing the force and the fragility of a father-daughter relationship. It is also, perhaps above all, a book about memory - the many layers, the rich textures, the contradictions of memory.

Anne Landsman was a discovery to me, since I hadn't read anything else she'd written. Breyten Breytenbach, on the other hand, is a famous Afrikaans poet whose work I've been admiring for decades. His latest book, A Veil of Footsteps (Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character, as the subtitle has it), is neither poetry nor written in Afrikaans, but still a great read. Here too, as in Landsman's story, memory plays a pivotal role:

This should be kept in mind as I write Breyten Wordfool's black book of impressions. One must not let go of the memories; maggots and grubs are always needed to transform that which has been lived.

As always with Breytenbach, the borders between 'fact' and fiction, 'reality' and imagination, acting and dreaming, are deliberately and delightfully hazy. As nearly always, there is an undercurrent of anger - 'the sort of rage that produces great literature', according to The Washington Post Book World. And this time there are pictures too: simple black-and-white photographs used in much the same way as the melancholic German author WG Sebald had done in books like Austerlitz and The Emigrants. The photographs are supposed to confirm the 'reality' of what is written, but somehow they also convey a sense of alienation, an ambiguous process that seems particularly appropriate in such an undefinable literary work as this.

The third author in my trio of reading pleasure is Michiel Heyns, who only started publishing at retirement age, but is fortunately making up in productivity for all the years that we've been deprived of his talents. He has managed to publish no less than four books in six years, each in a different register, predictable only in its unpredictability, yet always retaining a stylish and ironic voice.

His latest offering, Bodies Politic, does in a way resemble its immediate predecessor, The Typewriter's Tale, in that it is also a historical novel fictionalising the lives of famous figures. In the previous book the famous figure was the English-American writer Henry James, seen through the eyes of his typist. This time we get to know Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, all of them passionate suffragettes and political activists, and the much lesser known younger brother, Harry, who died at the early age of 21.

It is only as I write this that I realise that once again I am describing a book dealing with a death bed, fragile family relationships, and memory - this time the often contradicting memories of three old women looking back at a young man's death many years earlier. What I love most about Bodies Politic, though, is its thoroughly convincing depiction of the personal price often paid for political victory.

Oh yes, and I also admire the fact that an author born and bred and still living in South Africa doesn't feel compelled to write only 'South African stories' - whatever that might be. Heyns spreads his literary wings to fly to other places, other people, other times. As a reader I am only too grateful to be able to fly along.