Rereading Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket and Double Negative.
(Much) shorter version at the New Statesman, 9 January 2015: Lost in Joburg: One of South Africa's most accomplished prose stylists gets a timely reissue.
Do copy-editors still use their time-honoured signs: the confident slashes, STETs and arrowheads, the fallen-down S that means transpose? Or is everything now done via the garish bubbles of MS Word Track changes?
Midway through Ivan Vladislavić’s 2001 novel The Restless Supermarket, the proudly anachronistic narrator Aubrey Tearle gives a disquisition on the delete mark. As a retired proofreader, regular writer of letters to the editor, and grumpy but occasionally endearing old man, he suggests that of all his erstwhile profession’s charms, this is the most beautiful and mysterious:
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Meeting Geoff Dyer.
Edited version published in the Mail&Guardian, 23 December 2014.
Can I use ‘I’ in my essays? The question, often asked by first-year literature students, isolates the problem succinctly. The first I in the sentence means me, the special, singular, irreplaceable self; the second is a devious linguistic particle: a shifty, worn-out pronoun forced on us all the moment we enter language. And the perilous thing about book festivals is that they tend to collapse the two. The I who has been flown out to Cape Town and given a name-tag is now asked to answer for, or ‘speak to’, the I on the page.
In this case, Geoff Dyer, with whom I sat chatting during the Open Book festival in September this year while we waited for a panel on ‘The Art of the Essay’ to begin – a bit like TV newsreaders used to before or after the bulletin. I told him that he was one of only two people I had ever written a fan letter to (the other was Terry Pratchett, but I was ten years old then). I asked him if he actually enjoyed going to literary festivals, being interviewed, the whole scene. ‘I can honestly say’, he replied, ‘that the only reason I write any more is to be invited to literary festivals’.
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Remembering Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)
Business Day, 22 July 2014.
‘Responsibility’, wrote Nadine Gordimer in one of her most important essays, ‘is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity’. As the many tributes to her over the last week have shown, this was a writer who took such responsibilities seriously. Always ready to be in the intellectual thick of it – whether involved with the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Writers during the struggle, or opposing ANC-led bills limiting public access to information toward the end of her life – Gordimer was a model citizen of the Republic of Letters if ever there was one. The move from ‘creative self-absorption’ to ‘conscionable awareness’ is the essential gesture that gives the essay its title and the oeuvre its extraordinary social and historical breadth.
But what about the second half of that sentence? What was unique, strange and private about her work? What exactly was the nature of that enclosed and fertile space – ‘the Eden of creativity’ – that made her the writer she was?
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Review of Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief and Mark Gevisser, Dispatcher.
New Statesman, 13-19 June, 2014.
Lagos and Johannesburg: the two big, bad economic powerhouses of the African continent, neck and neck at the top of the GDP charts. Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole andDispatcher by Mark Gevisser are meditations on each city, respectively: one slim and spare; one garrulous and superabundant. Both are eagerly awaited follow-ups to highly acclaimed works, and each must face the challenges created by second-album syndrome.
Thief reads as a deliberately minor afterword to the literary hit of Open City (like Kid A after OK Computer) – but this Faber edition is in fact a remastered version of a book first published in 2007 by Cassava Press, the Nigerian imprint. That same year brought Gevisser’s monumental biography of the then South African president, Thabo Mbeki, The Dream Deferred. His Joburg memoir, Dispatcher, takes the other option for follow-up albums: the hyper-ambitious, super-produced, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach. Yet these two city books are linked by an inquiry into the mysterious ways in which the spaces of our early lives come to structure imagination, creativity, the self – and what happens when these primal attachments must weather disaffection, estrangement and violence.
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