M A U R E E N I S A A C S O N

AMONG the several book launchesI missed last week was the apparent-ly dramatic celebration of ZukiswaWanner’s third novel, Men of the

South (Kwela), which is about theway the lives of three men revolvearound one woman in Jozi.

Hopefully this is as amusing asWanner’s debut, Madams, about mid-dle-class black women adapting rapid-ly to the not-so-discreet ways of thewhite bourgeoisie. Zakes Mda haspronounced Men of the South “witty”.

Arja Salafranca, the editor ofSunday Life, launched a first collec-tion of short stories, The Thin Line

(Modjaji), which Hamilton Wende,author and journalist, says “chart anew direction in South African fic-tion”. He said the stories kept himup late at night. Sue Grant-Marshallchatted to Salafranca and Meg Van-dermerwe, whose debut short storycollection, This Place I Call Home, isalso published by Modjaji.

Salafranca reports that “sense ofplace” was under discussion. Placeis central to Vandermerwe’s storiesas she imagines herself into thelives of a variety of South Africanpeople. Emigration is key toSalafranca’s story, A man sits in a

Johannesburg park.“It has permeated through every-

body’s lives in South Africa and thestory is open-ended. The emigrationprocess can break up relationships.

“In this story, the man does not

wish to go Australia. The woman,who has been assaulted, does.”

Salafranca’s stories are set inSouth Africa, mostly Joburg. A Car

is a Weapon deals with corruption,At the table of the short story dealswith the issue of weight.

Shmalz is about the naming ofJews. “If you had money, you couldbuy a surname such as Rose Petals,”said Salafranca.

I did get to a packed Xara Bookson Saturday afternoon for thelaunch of Pumla Gqola’s What is

Slavery to Me? (Wits UniversityPress). I missed Nomboniso Gasa’saddress, but heard Gqola’s response,in which she defined herself as aradical feminist and pro-queer. Gabe-

ba Baderoon calls Gqola’s book “alandmark book on the role of slaveryin shaping contemporary SouthAfrica”.

She said she was inspired by ZoeWicomb, who said in 1996 and 1998that there was no slave memory inSouth Africa. She had set out to dis-prove this. “There is slave memoryeverywhere,” she said.

Fred Khumalo is the author ofthe compelling, if disturbing, mem-oir Touch my Blood and the EUAward-winning novel Bitches’ Brew,

as well as Seven Steps to Heaven.Khumalo’s collected Sunday Timescolumns were launched along with acollection of Justice Malala’s Finan-cial Times columns. A political com-mentator, Malala’s weekly politicaltalk show, The Justice Factor, on e.tvon Sundays, is the bane of many apolitician’s life.

Reading Malala’s columns inentirety recalls Norah Ephron’s nov-el Heartburn, in which she offersrecipes of the comfort food that seesher through a heartbreaking mar-riage bust-up. Unlike Ephron,Malala sheds no tears for his sub-jects, who are the great, the good, thegreedy and the corrupt among ourpoliticians – but it is possible that hehas on occasion rendered themunhappy with his jibes and japes.

The luxurious restaurants whereMalala dines provide the ideal juxta-position for the bread-and-butterissues he spears. Here is the perfectexhibition of our unequal society.

He decries the wastage of state

resources while assessing the culi-nary offerings of The Maze, at theV&A Waterfront in Cape Town.

The R1.1 million BMW belongingto Blade Nzimande, the SACP secre-tary-general, and the big cars ofPravin Gordhan the Finance Minis-ter, add up to R1.15 million. He findsthis disgraceful.

The Maze itself gets the partialcritical cold shoulder.

“The menu is slim. I like that.One must do what one does well andnot try to impress with volume.”Service, however, receives “one outof three. One waiter did not knowhis Karan from his Wagyu beef; theother was surly and behaved asthough he should be eating and weserving. He cleared our plates nois-ily and sullenly. The sommelier wasefficient, cheerful and knowledge-able. What a pleasure.”

That was September 11, 2009. For my money, Malala’s The

Times column of last Monday, inwhich he writes about the rage ofxenophobia that has already takenhold, is far stronger than thesecolumns. But Let Them Eat Cake, thecollection of columns, which isabout the worst of life as well as thebest of it, has its charms and it alsoserves as a brief history of our time.

It highlights key moments, suchas Julius Malema’s alleged loveaffair with Lebo Baholo, an officeadministrator. The two were said tobe planning to zip off to London tocelebrate Mandela Day.

Malala advocated a stopover in

Zambia and East Germany, wherethe nationalisation Malema wastouting had apparently resulted infailure: the lights, the hotels, theroads, the mines.

“I know. I’ve been there.” To celebrate this information

Malala took off to Louis XVI HauteCuisine in Rosebank, Joburg. Theclassic French cuisine appealed tohis palate and the Louis XVI decorwas divine. “No wonder people walkout of there thinking about the deca-dence of Marie Antoinette and hum-ming, let them eat cake”.

Khumalo’s collection, Zulu Boy

Gone Crazy, covers a range of issues,including returns to his homestead,

and comments on our weird politics– (“hey, what’s democracy without aplot?”). He describes Inkatha’s emer-gence from the comatose stateapartheid had lulled it into. The par-ty decided to engage the youth bylaunching a beauty pageant. Khu-malo is not politically correct, hesays. He would have entered the Mis-ter South Africa pageants but: “Alas,the gods were on a go-slow strikewhen I was conceived.”

At the Diakonia Centre he wit-nesses intellectual prowess andbeauty as contestants are probed.

Judge: What is your favouritedish?

Contestant: “Tupperware”. It is worth buying the collection

for this piece alone, which is calledI Wanna Sex You Up and whichincludes a further Q&A to which vir-tually every answer is “Prince Man-gosuthu Buthelezi”.

Reviewing Happy Ntshingila’sBlack Jerusalem, which tracks thestory of Herdbuoys, the first black-run and black-owned ad agency,Khumalo recalls his own gripe. “Foryour information, in these tryingeconomic times I can’t afford to putchips on my shoulder; I eat them!”

Why don’t I believe him?This man was interviewed – in his

own home – by the Trinidadian Nobelliterature laureate, VS Naipaul, whocame to South Africa with his wifeNadira, a journalist who wouldbetray Winnie Madikizela-Mandelawith an article in the Evening Stan-dard about an alleged meeting.

If you read Khumalo’s piece Writ-

ers in Search of a new Country (July19, 2009), you will see that Nadiraappears to know a great deal aboutSouth Africa, and agrees with Mbe-ki’s two nations observation – one isrich and white, the other black andpoor.

When Khumalo said: “As SouthAfricans we always pat each otheron the back and say: Ah, thank Godthe past is over. We have moved on,”Naipaul wanted to know: “Moved onto what, exactly?”

Naipaul’s sad pronouncementsabout race are recorded faithfully,and although Khumalo appears toagree, his tone is surely ironic.Naipaul has depicted Africa andAfrican people with derision. Wehave seen what happened to Madik-izela-Mandela at the hands of him-self and his wife. One wonders howhe will portray South Africa.

BOOKSTHE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT JUNE 6 2010

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Books Page

EDITED BY

MAUREEN ISAACSON

Take Malala with a pinch of salt,Khumalo with a handful

A NTONY Altbeker’s monu-mental tome on probably themost sensational murdertrial of the decade – the pros-

ecution of Fred van der Vyver for theslaying of beautiful Stellenbosch stu-dent Inge Lotz – has been deftly pack-aged by Jonathan Ball as a crimethriller.

“It reads like a thriller,” reads thecover shout by Marlene van Niekerk,who says Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned

Tree is “utterly un-put-down-able”. Deon Meyer, first among South

African crime writers, says the book is“totally mesmerising” and “absolutelyriveting”. Kevin Bloom comments thatthis work of creative nonfiction “readslike a high-voltage thriller”. Even thebook’s subtitle, “A true story of murderand the miscarriage of justice”, is redo-lent of a crime page-turner.

But this book – as impressive andcompelling as it is – is far from a con-ventional pot-boiler. On the contrary,Altbeker has written what I would pre-fer to call a work of forensic meta-analysis, a conceptual thriller – a bookthat will challenge its reader to think,discriminate, unpick arguments, con-struct, dismantle and then reconstructhypotheses and scenarios.

It will require a fairly grim kind ofconcentration and the application ofstrong mindfulness from its reader.

In fact though ostensibly a work ofnonfiction, Fruit of a Poisoned Tree

gathers its strength from a remarkablythorough and wonderfully scepticaltreatment of the contingent nature ofreconstructed and re-presented “reality”.

In Altbeker’s highly agile conceptu-al universe, writing is about discrimi-nating between multiple veils of illu-sion, where the only reliable constant isa mind that doubles back on itself andon everything people claim about whatis supposed to have happened.

That is, people in the present fabri-cate versions of the past, for reasonsbest left to the speculative scepticism ofa mind that mistrusts most explana-tions in the first place.

No need for postmodern theories ofrepresentation here – it’s alreadyembedded in the account of a SouthAfrican murder trial, in which testify-ing policemen function as “signifying

monkeys”, to use the term madefamous by Henry Louis Gates Jr fordouble-talk and trickery, equivocationand representational shimmying.

At one point near the end of Altbek-er’s account, he recalls that his lectur-ers at university taught him that notheory was worth its salt if it didn’tcontain within it the seed of its own

refutation. That’s very much the spiritin which Altbeker writes, reducingabout 5 000 pages of court record to asharply honed analytical narrativewhose alternating constructions of thevanished datum of the real leave onedizzy with contingency.

The profundity and relevance ofthis dance of representational smokelies in the fact that so much is at stake,in the very real world of criminal jus-tice and its perversion, for very realpeople – here, for Van der Vyver, false-ly accused of slaughtering the womanhe loved – but more generally for all ofus who might one day be beholden to asystem of criminal justice in whichmisprision is shown to be a disturbingthreat, and real prison even worse.

Altbeker, then, recounts the prose-cution of Van der Vyver, whom policeaccused of bludgeoning Lotz to deathwith an ornamental hammer after alovers’ tiff.

The account is intellectually foren-sic in its conceptual analysis of theforensic evidentiary disputes in thecase – mostly about a fingerprint and ashoe imprint supposedly connectingVan der Vyver to the murder, and vari-ous framing narratives about his “odd”behaviour immediately after news ofLotz’s death sensationalised the Stel-lenbosch community.

And yet the narrative widens inconcentric circles to include socialanalysis, character description, philo-sophical speculation, narrative deter-mination (sticking to a story in spite of

evidence to the contrary), criminologi-cal insight and literary allusion, all ofquite a high order.

At the same time, Altbeker’s booknever lets go of a gripping tale inwhich the prosecution in a murder tri-al is hell-bent on convicting a man whoincreasingly appears to be innocent asthe evidence – or meta-analysis of the

court evidence – piles up relentlessly.Although there can be no final ver-

dict in this narrative trial of a crimi-nal trial, one is left with the verystrong impression that police not onlysuppressed evidence that was unflat-tering to their case, but that theyactually fabricated evidence – tanta-mount to prosecutorial fraud – intheir stubborn determination to signi-fy imagined events in the way they feltdriven to do.

Altbeker’s summing up, after hissifting through closing argument andjudgment, and his final deconstruc-tions of accounts – indeed his myriadreconstructions of reconstructions – isdevoted to speculating about whatdrives people (here the police and, quitepossibly, the Lotz family) to persist intheir belief in a foundational realitythat would overwhelmingly, uponanalysis, appear to be devoid of empir-ical substance.

His conclusion? A certain mythological drive – a

compulsion to fashion versions of real-ity that speak to inner tensions andsocio-political displacement, a kind ofnarrative re-anchoring within the shift-ing waters of change.

Here, Van der Vyver was figured asa trickster-madman because of his alle-giance to an alternative church whosepractices were antithetical to the NGKerk.

Around this core, deeply felt notion,speculates Altbeker, a massive eviden-tiary fabrication was embroidered.

It is a fascinating and absorbingstory. What is most clear from Altbek-er’s important work is that reality hasnever been less certain in a SouthAfrican dispensation in which all par-ties need to get a much firmer grasp onanalytical precision.

It’s the only way to navigate the deepwaters of the unreal.

A conceptual murder thrillerAltbeker’s account of the most sensational murder trial of the decade is a work of forensic meta-analysis

Fruit of a Poisoned Treeby: Antony Altbeker:Jonathan Ball Publishers review: Leon de Kock

HILARY Spurling’s magnetic newbiography, Burying the Bones, suf-fers no romantic delusion about theChina that shaped American novel-ist Pearl Buck – it was a harsh landwhere brides were sold into slaveryand newborn girls were strangledand left out for the dogs.

The title, Burying the Bones:

Pearl Buck in China, alludes to howBuck as a little girl gathered thebabies’ bones in a string bag andburied them. Four of her siblingsalso died young, carried off bydysentery, cholera, malaria anddiphtheria. When she was eight, hermissionary family fled the BoxerUprising of 1900. They returnedafter the movement was crushed,and lived through the decades ofupheaval and war that followed.

Yet from this crucible of floodand famine, poverty and disease,Buck emerged with a novel thatgripped a generation and gave avoice to China’s illiterate masses.

Published in 1931, The Good Earth

won the Pulitzer, sold tens of mil-lions of copies and remains in print.Buck became the first Americanwoman honoured with the NobelPrize in Literature.

Today Buck is largely forgotten,deprived of a place in US letters andfeminist mythology, Spurling says.This amnesia is regrettable, forBuck has much to teach us about theworld’s most populous nation.

Spurling focuses on Buck’s yearsin China and relegates to a post-script the second half of her life,when she cranked out best-sellers inthe US. Though there’s nothingdidactic about this fluid account,

here are some lessons I drew.● You may never fit in: Chinese

was Buck’s first language, and as achild she wore Chinese jackets and

trousers. Buck said she first realisedshe was different at age four, whenher Chinese nurse tried to hide heryellow mane inside a red cap.

“It doesn’t look human, this hair,”she said, explaining that black wasthe normal colour for hair.

● Learn the lingo anyway: Lan-guage is the key to any culture, anda linguistic battle cut to the heart ofa social and political debate thatswept China in the 1910s. This wasthe fight between wen-li, a classicalwritten language accessible only tothe elite, and pai-hua, the languageof everyday life.

Buck avidly read Chinese novels,which scholars had long consideredvulgar. She thought out The Good

Earth in Chinese, translating as shewrote into fast, simple English that“sounds biblical but is pictorial”, asa friend of hers put it.

● Keep smiling: Buck wasimmersed in the squalor and cruel-ty of rural China. A stench hungover the settlement where she livedas a missionary’s wife; people drewdrinking water from the same pondswhere they washed.

“The only effective response wasto fall back on survival by laughter,”Spurling says.

Her encounters with villagersgave her much to smile about. Shewas the first white woman they’dseen, and they marvelled at the sizeof her feet and nose, pawed at herclothes, and were agog when sheanswered their questions.

“We can understand English,”they exclaimed. “It’s the same asChinese!”

● Don’t expect thanks: Bucktransformed how the West viewedChina. Americans who once sawChinamen as comic characters orFu Manchus suddenly encountereda stoical farmer caught in a familiar“cycle of prosperity and destitu-tion”, Spurling says.

Reviews in China were lessenthusiastic, partly because Buckexposed the country’s poverty. Theperceived slight lingered, even whenshe attempted to get a visa following

President Richard Nixon’s openingto China in 1972. Her applicationwas rejected because she had, in thewords of a Chinese diplomat, “takenan attitude of distortion, smear andvilification toward the people ofnew China and its leaders”.

● Keep a bag packed: The sum-mer Buck turned eight, an imperialedict backed the Boxers by declaring“war and death to all foreigners”.She kept her clothes folded on achair by her bed in preparation toflee. In 1927, her family barelyescaped marauding soldiers.

Political spasms convulsed Chinathroughout the 20th century, andunrest continues to bubble up.

Much can be learnt from Spurl-ing’s poised account, written withsweep, pace and insights into whatAldous Huxley called the “enigmat-ic lesson” of history: “Nothingchanges and yet everything iscompletely different”. – The Wash-ington Post

Much to learn from poised account of Pearl Buck’s life in China

“THE NARRATIVE WIDENSIN CONCENTRIC CIRCLES TO INCLUDE SOCIAL ANALYSIS

Burying the Bonesby: Hilary SpurlingSimon & Schusterreview: James Pressley

BIOGRAPHER: Hilary Spurling PICTURE:GRAEME ROBERTSON,PROFILE BOOKS