Entertainment

Books of the year

December 20, 2009 Edition 1

Michiel Heyns

Small Moving Parts by Sally-Ann Murray (Kwela). Her vast ragbag of 1960s recollections are a scintillating addition to the "childhood under apartheid" sub-genre.

Ways of Staying by Kevin Bloom (Picador Africa). Updates the picture soberingly, taking a long hard look at the present state of the rainbow nation, and refraining from despair only by a moving act of faith.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Vintage). A new discovery for me this year, prompted by the movie. Originally published in 1961, this harrowing drama of suburban disaffection has lost nothing of its bleak power.

Karina Brink

The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands (Granta). Philosophy with heart and humour.

At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist by Anne Fadiman (Allen Lane). One of the best essayists at work in the English language.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury). Blew me away, again.

Exhibit A by Sarah Lotz (Penguin). Wise and funny local crime fiction.

The Book of the Dead by Kgebetli Moele (Kwela). Ruthless depiction of the HIV pandemic, brave book.

The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer (Atom Books). Kept me reading through four consecutive nights; quite a feat in my book.

Imraan Coovadie

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Granta). Tower's debut is the most unusual collection of short stories this year.

In Other Rooms Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Bloomsbury). Another gorgeous debut collection of short stories, and the book to read about Pakistan.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon). Dyer's pair of novellas set in canal cities - one in Venice, the other in Varanasi - is hard not to like.

The Goldstone Report. Judge Richard Goldstone's integrity and insight helped us to understand the real dynamics of violence in South Africa between 1990 and 1994. In his report on Israel's Gaza war he brings the same qualities to the Middle East (where they don't seem to want them).

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's). An account of the New Orleans flood by the author of Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which was one). Probably the best book of the year.

Other things which shaped the year in reading:

Ben Williams's Book SA website.

The Book Lounge in Cape Town.

My e-book reader.

Chris Dunton

Savage Detectives by Roberto Bola241o (Picador). I enjoyed reading it this year and put off reading his gargantuan 2666 (OK, so I'm a wimp). I caught up with the work of a number of thriller writers I'd not looked at before and got hold of the last couple of Le Carré novels I'd not yet read (realising once again how breathtakingly good he is). At the end of the year came Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes (Random House Struik), an exceptionally fine debut novel which uses the format and devices of detective fiction to remarkable ends.

Leon de Kock

Shepherds and Butchers by Chris Marnewick (Umuzi). Biggest surprise read of the year. Marnewick, an advocate and first-time novelist, comes out with a chillingly detailed thriller about the hanging culture, and the killing ways of ordinary South Africans.

The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman (Kwela). A writing lesson in how to sculpt prose into lyrical shape, how to make sentences shimmer, and how to reimagine a past with abundant amplitude.

The Road Home by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus/Vintage). A master class in how fiction can not only attain otherness but fill it out so sumptuously that you learn to forget yourself completely.

Bodies Politic by Michiel Heyns (Jonathan Ball). A superbly crafted play of perspectives, and a demonstration of how deeply embedded in the person, in the body itself, the "body politic" actually is.

The Riders by Tim Winton (Picador). An embodiment of the breathless pace and total envelopment that only fiction, in the hands of a master, can achieve. Any number of South African writers please take note.

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (Virago) by Lauren Liebenberg . An almost perfect example of lyrical economy in the writing of a debut novel.

Andre Brink

Summertime by JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker). Another reinvention of the autobiography, its bleak landscape illuminated by wry humour and a profound understanding of human folly.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (Alfred A Knopf). A dazzling interweaving of stories, ranging from the disturbing to the excruciatingly funny, and constantly bringing to light unexpected new facets of the human enigma.

An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah. A wonderful new voice from Zimbabwe, infusing an age-old African understanding of the world with a vigorous and unflinching probing of the present scene, with drama shading movingly into melancholy.

Nadine Gordimer

The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law by Albie Sachs. Justice as dispensation of a system of thought accepted as clear of the torturing uncertainties that underlie the decisions we make in the process of living. There is no book I have read this or any other year that connects in revelation these two actualities as inescapable synthesis. Presented by a dazzlingly honest and original mind, Judge Albie Sachs's zest for life adds the power of humour to sound the alert to what is deeply serious in any concept of judgment.

The Tranquil Star by Primo Levi (Penguin Classics). What a year which brings previously untranslated work of Primo Levi! Short stories, at that! The great Italian is thought of iconically for his writings stemming from his years in Auschwitz but his brilliance as a fiction writer ranges far and wide.

A Man Who Is Not a Man by Thando Mgqolozana. There are themes, inexorably part of human experience in society's mores, that are too painful to contemplate even in fiction. A young man in South Africa undergoes a ritual circumcision which is hopelessly botched; he is impotent for life. Lost to sexuality and subject to derisory rejection by other men. The place of this youth in the enlightened 21st century, eloquently set out: the truth through transformations of the imagination.

Zakes Mda

Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Narrated in a second person point of voice, a poignant and often humorous novel on addiction and alcoholism. I like the perceptive character descriptions, and the experimental form - it is written as notes for a novel rather than a novel in the conventional sense.

The Passport by Herta Muller, translated by Martin Chalmers, (Serpent's Tail - an imprint of Profile Books Limited). I am one of those who had never heard of Herta Muller before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, so I decided to order this slim novella of 92 pages. I am struck by her sparse yet poetic language. She captures the surrealism of totalitarianism in the age of the Romanian communist dictator, Ceausescu, through the sad attempts of a village miller who is trying to get a passport to emigrate to West Germany. It reminds very much of our literature during apartheid, although this one is of a very high literary merit.

A Man Who Is Not a Man, by Thando Mgqolozana. I am catching up with the novels of three young South African writers I met on my last trip home and with whom I was highly impressed. The other two are Zukiswa Wanner and Siphiwo Mahala. A Man who is not a Man handles a narrative that is taboo in many quarters with honesty and compassion. His straightforward no-frills prose tells an effective story of a botched circumcision and its consequences.

Petha Gappah

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Granta). I loved the wild inventiveness and the cracking humour in these sometimes risky stories which are definitely not your average cookie-cutter MFA stories. And you have to hunt down an audio link of Wells reading from the book, there is nothing like a story about pillaging Vikings being read in an (American) Southern accent.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (Viking). Hands down, the best novel I read this year. It is a book I will continue to enjoy as a reader, and one I will learn from as a writer, as it comes as close as possible to being a perfect novel.

Harare North by Brian Chikwava (Jonathan Cape). I loved this intensely funny novel. I am not sure that the non-Zimbabweans will ever understand just how funny it is as there are a lot of in-jokes and popular cultural references that only the inhabitants of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo will get. There is a scene set at a concert that alone is worth the cover price. Stupendous.

Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik (Knopf). This year was the 200th anniversary of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. This beautifully written book is about these two men, born on the same day an ocean apart, who in their different ways had a profound impact on how we see and understand the world. If a book can be accused of being too well-written it would be this one; it took me longer than usual to read because each sentence is so beautiful that it actually distracts you from moving to the next. Stunning.

Thando Mgqolozana

Unfortunately the best book I've read this year is not South African, or even African. The guy is from the UK, born in Japan. I say this because I know Africa probably has an equivalent. I just have to search harder. The book is called The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber and Faber 1994. First published by Pan 1989). Now that's the best literary thing I've encountered this year, I don't know why I was never told about this writer.

It is followed by The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut (Penguin). The restraint and caution in his work is something to marvel at. Maybe I can add that this was the year I also properly encountered Damon Galgut's work.

But those are old books. This year wasn't a particularly productive year in terms of quality, locally. Maybe 2010 will be better. (Zukiswa Wanner's book, Men of The South (Kwela), is coming out in June.) But the books that stood out for me in 2009 are the following, in order of their appearance:

Black Diamond by Zakes Mda. Enjoyable read with a lot of concrete, movie style, rather than Mda's normal abstract.

The Thirtieth Candle by Angela Makholwa (Pan McMillan). The story is easy to read, lovable, and at times funny. Makholwa must be proud.

Daddy's Girl by Margie Orford (Jonathan Ball). She's a crime fiction author, knows it, and has no intention of confusing the reader with anything else.