July’s People by Nadine Gordimer, her imagined end to apartheid through civil war, was banned in South Africa after its publication in 1981; her predicted end was a violent revolution in which blacks are killing whites in order to regain control of the country and overturn the system of racial segregation.  Bam and Maureen Smales, a liberal white South African couple, and their three children, flee Johannesburg with the aid of their loyal black servant, July, who hides them in his village among his “people” (the Smales are also his people and the title is ambiguous in whom it refers to and as July’s loyalties to both his kin, his Chief and his employers are tested).  The Smales family, under the cover of forest trees, live in a mud hut that belongs to July’s mother and attempt to adjust to the new life that has been enforced upon them, whilst being thankful that they have life.

The dynamic between the Smales and July has shifted; they owe him their lives (it was July’s idea to bring them to his home) and they depend on him for protection and for survival.  Gordimer examines the power relations between her characters and the ambiguities that lie therein; July, Bam and Maureen struggle with their pre-existing master/servant roles and their new roles, which are never fully certain.  The issue of control and who now possesses and exerts it, who is subservient to whom, is the crux of the novel and plays out in complex ways, particularly between Maureen and July; Maureen and Bam also change within their relationship with the dynamics of their marriage altered irrevocably in such close quarters.

In less than 200 pages, Gordimer’s take on the deteriorating situation of apartheid (in its imagined end) is immensely powerful.  The narrative is tense and claustrophobic, conveying the volatile situation and the close living quarters.  The first chapter (five pages) was disorientating as I attempted to grasp Gordimer’s style; the interior monologues and the dialogue -mostly between July and Maureen or Maureen and Bam- that is a dichotomy of dialogue but a blending of speech on which you have to concentrate to ascertain who is speaking (there are no quotation marks or he said/she said pronoun indicators; the speaker even switches mid-line) takes some adapting to but once you are in the thick of it, you’re there, just like the protagonists. The blending of English and Afrikaans is effective as it highlights the frustration between different, often untranslatable, languages and cultures as well as the power struggles between the speakers.  Gordimer’s characterisation is nuanced with the personalities of the three main figures rendered through their words and actions; their circumstances expose them and their true thoughts.

The content quickly devolves to the animalistic and the primitive with body odours and secretions, hunting and sex  described in their raw and unrefined states; the Smales adapt to their new surroundings and their instinct is to  survive. I found the rudimentary, functional events compelling to read as what fascinated me was the gradual break-down of white power in the  far removed, non-habitual surroundings  and the break-down of masculine power in the domestic sphere, as Bam and Maureen fail to cope with a new reality forced upon them.  Of course race is central to the changes in power, both politically and domestically, and Gordimer envisages wonderfully the struggle for control in people used to having it and those to whom the concept is new.

A favourite passage:

The heavy cadences surrounded her; the earth was fading and a thin, far radiance from the moon was faintly pinkening parachute-silk hazes stretched over the sky.  She understood although she knew no word.  Understood everything: what he had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him.  But for himself–to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others.  She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people.

The thirteen stories are mainly set in Zimbabwe (or concern Zimbabweans living elsewhere, as Gappah herself does) under Robert Mugabe’s regime and have been lauded with praise, with An Elegy for Easterly considered an inventive, stunning, masterful debut.  I must be missing something because they didn’t work for me.  Some of the stories are emotive, the title story and “The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie’s Bridegroom” are the ones that made an impression on me, that I found disturbing and that still resonate weeks later; the remainder are forgettable.  My issue with the stories is that I found no cohesive theme and no distinct narrative voices.  To begin with, reading the first three or four stories, I thought that there was a symbol of nameless female narrators -named as mother to or wife of- and even though the were indistinct from one another, I was excited because I thought I recognised the pattern early on and that the women were universal representations; I then realised I was wrong and I became bored by the randomness of the stories and their dull content.

The issue with many short story volumes, even by the best short story writers, is that certain stories are better than others, just as novels in an author’s oeuvre can never be equal in accomplishment; that is certainly true of Gappah’s stories and I found some quite weak in comparison to those that I did like.  I was unable to fall back on the writing when the content didn’t interest me (as I was able to do for Jhumpa Lahiri or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) because I didn’t think that it was particularly good, technically or in its evocation, characterisation and imagination.  I fail to see what is above-par about An Elegy for Easterly, let alone exceptional; for those readers who have read it, perhaps you could illuminate for me? I didn’t learn anything about life under Mugabe that I didn’t already know nor the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the country; “The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie’s Bridegroom” was effective because it uncompromisingly tackled the epidemic brutally but excluding it and “An Elegy for Easterly” I felt no emotion.  Some of the scenes of mental illness and subsequent shame were done well in “The Annexe Shuffle” but it didn’t bring anything new and I struggled to identify with Emily and any of the other stories’ protagonists.

The unrelenting tragedy of the two stories that I single out for me worked so perhaps I looked for emotionally devastating in the collection whereas it seems that Gappah tried to find the comic in the tragic in others; “Our Man in Geneva wins a Million Dollars” for instance, about a Zimbabwean working in Switzerland who is lured in by a phishing scam, didn’t make me feel much of anything … yes, I pity the victims of fraud but I suppose I am desensitised to everyday stories of this nature.  I felt disconnected to the harsh realities of the hyper-inflation and corruption and I do not think that was desensitisation but lack of connection to the short fiction.  I had hoped to enjoy these stories and to alleviate my disappointment I am reaching for some more fiction set in Zimbabwe -pre-independent Rhodesia- and picking up Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Indeed I too would have loved to write one of those serene stories with a beginning and an end. As you know only too well, it is never like that, though. Lives mingle, people tame one another and part. Destinies are lost.

When the Man Booker longlist was announced I was excited to see J. M. Coetzee’s inclusion on it, for Summertime. Although I had only read my first book by Coetzee, Disgrace, earlier that month I was excited to read more by him, especially following the great experience that was my primary encounter with his work. I was lucky enough to obtain a copy of Summertime pre-publication (due to be published September 3rd in the UK) and could not resist reading it more or less immediately.

Summertime is a fictionalised memoir of the author himself, who appears in the third-person via memories recounted by individuals who featured during this period of his life and through his own notebooks, research gathered together by a young English biographer. It is the last in a trilogy that began with Boyhood and progressed to Youth, neither of which I have read. However, I don’t think it is a requirement to read the others as Summertime works well as a stand-alone and rarely mentions Coetzee’s earlier life; the only time I found myself curious about something, mentioned frequently but not elaborated upon, was in reference to his expulsion from the United States, although I’m not even sure if that features in the earlier works. This allusion to events prior to 1972-77 -the period the biographer is researching and when Coetzee was in his thirties, living in Cape Town with his widowed father, and “finding his feet as a writer”- is interesting in terms of the literary construct of the novel: Summertime is very much a fraction of the whole, a glimpse of a life, but works independently of it. It is difficult to describe how Summertime functions so completely and resembles a novel that goes from a-z when it is not complete, and it only covers l-p in the fictional Coetzee’s life, but it does; I was never left feeling dissatisfied and as if I was missing the bigger picture.

That leads me to distinguishing between Coetzee, the character, and Coetzee, the novelist. I suspended belief when approaching this novel as I don’t think it is an accurate memoir, nor do I think it is supposed to be, nor do I want it to be. I think that Coetzee is incredibly clever in achieving what he has, even if I am not entirely sure what that is. Like Disgrace, Summertime is an exceptionally though-provoking read, and I find myself struggling to order and convey those thoughts. Summertime is very much a meditation on being an author and whether by putting words on paper, you are thus putting yourself on paper, immortalising yourself and, consequently, belonging to the reader. I struggle with this concept. People in the public eye should be afforded privacy and those in the literary world are not part of our world, it is their words that are, but neither are our property.

I attempted to divide John Coetzee, the character, and J.M. Coetzee, the writer, in my mind to prevent discombobulation and brain explosion. I believe that J. M. Coetzee is either creating a persona for himself or thumbing his nose at the media and public who have created the persona for him, either of which I respect. I admire Coetzee’s sheer ambition and scope of this work. Although Summertime spans a short period of time it engages with large literary questions regarding the relationship between author and reader and of literary biography, questions that will remain with me, whilst I attempt to figure out the answers and what I would like them to be. Summertime is not plot-driven but works in a sequence of notes and interviews, the content of which is often dramatised. The biographer never meets John Coetzee and the distant and detached, self-effacing, mysterious character that is presented is done so through the [biased] memories of others and via his own notebooks, that may have been doctored for public perception. I was also given the sense that this was a posthumous biography and that Coetzee was being immortalised post-mortem. I have even less of an idea of J.M. Coetzee as a person now than I did before reading the novel, everything is a fiction but his words, and not a sense of him, are what stay with me, and that, I think, is the point.

Favourite passages:

Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?

[A]m I wrong about John Coetzee? Because to me, frankly, he was not anybody. He was not a man of substance. Maybe he could write well, maybe had a certain talent for words, I don’t know, I never read his books, I was never curious to read them. I know he won a big reputation later; but was he really a great writer? Because to my mind, a talent for words is not enough of you want to be a great writer. You also have to be a great man. And he was not a great man.

It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.

I did not read all of them. After Disgrace I lost interest. In general I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion. That’s all.

Nobel Laureate Coetzee has won the Booker twice, apparently controversially, so will he be the first author to win for a third time? I think there is a very good chance and that Summertime is an attempt in “deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before“.