Best Novels of 2013: SA Authors share their picks

Siphiwo Mahala: 

This has been a dramatic year in the world of letters. The death of Chinua Achebe, who was affectionately known as the "father of African literature", and Doris Lessing, the British Nobel laureate for literature, were obviously the biggest and saddest news in the literary fraternity.
However, there was more growth than loss, as we saw the emergence of new voices, the return of seasoned writers from the solitude of literary production, as well as the excitement around literary awards.
Sabata-mpho Mokae scooped two M-Net Literary Awards for his Setswana novel, Ga ke Modisa. South Africa embraced the Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, whose shortlisting for the Man Booker Prize was announced while she was at a literary festival in Cape Town.

Another major African voice, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, released her third novel, Americanah.
It was also a year of reckoning for short story writing. The greatest news was the announcement of Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro, as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
We also saw the return of former chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Achmat Dangor, with a collection of short stories, Strange Pilgrimages (Pan MacMillan). His previous novel, Bitter Fruit, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004.
Other notable authors who published short story collections include Reneilwe Malatji, Russell Kaschula, Liesl Jobson and Makhosazana Xaba.
The release of Zakes Mda's novel, The Sculptures of Mapungubwe, was like the falling of rain after a long spell of drought. The internationally acclaimed novelist had deprived readers of his creative genius (in a form of a novel) since the release of Black Diamond in 2009. The Sculptures of Mapungubwe deploys history as a means of commenting on the present.
The story is set in the timeless kingdom of Mapungubwe, beginning in 1223 CE, "except in Mapungubwe they didn't count years that way". It is an epic tale of the royal sculptor who had two heirs whose talents and rivalry set them apart as they got older.
With this fantastical novel, Mda affirms his status as a cartographer of words and a fabulist of note.
The much anticipated third novel by Lauren Beukes, Shining Girls, took the world by storm. Beukes created a whirlwind as she travelled the US and the UK, promoting her book.
It is probably her ability to transcend different cultures, historical moments as well as geographical boundaries that places Beukes's work in an elite class of world literature.
With this time-travel thriller set in Chicago, Beukes makes it more difficult to define African literature.
Angela Makholwa burst into the scene in 2007 with a crime novel, Red Ink, and followed with a mellow feminine narrative, Thirtieth Candle, in 2009. The curious question has always been whether Makholwa is more comfortable with the latter or the former.
Her latest novel, Black Widow Society, confirms her insatiable penchant for bloody crime scenes. Black Widow Society is a gripping thriller of a secret society of women who have taken control of their destinies, as well as those of their husbands.
Makholwa's grisly crime narrative is written with great erudition and acumen, which makes it seem so authentic and hard not to believe. The strangest thing is that she still has a husband?

Michiel Heyns:

I did not read all the novels I intended to in 2013 (when does one ever?), so my list may not be as representative as it might have been.
Still, my three chosen novels are by no means here only because they're the frontrunners in a small field; they could hold their own in any company - this despite the fact that two of the three are debut novels. It is heartening that publishers continue to invest in the unlucrative field of literary translation. This year we had, among a few others, Etienne van Heerden's In Love's Place (Penguin), Leon de Kock's translation of the 2005 In Stede van die Liefde (Human & Rousseau).
Van Heerden's forte is the interaction between the city and the country. Here, too, he moves effortlessly between the hamlet of Matjiesfontein and the big city in dynamic interaction. A large canvas, painted with the ease of an Old Master.

When Claire Robertson's The Spiral House (Umuzi) landed on my desk, I was apprehensive - yet another historical novel with a slave woman as a main character?
But Robertson's take is fresh and original: Katrijn van de Caab is a freed slave, and works as a wigmaker's apprentice at the end of the 18th century. As in Van Heerden's novel, the interaction between the metropolis and the hinterland is intriguingly explored, the discoveries of the Enlightenment jostling against the unquestioned verities of rural life. The 18th century narrative is intercut with a 20th century story featuring another type of enslavement, that of Sister Vergilius to her order.
A beautifully written, meticulously researched work of the imagination.
Another well-visited sub-genre is the childhood-under-apartheid. Dominique Botha's False River (Umuzi, published simultaneously in Afrikaans) fits into this mould, with her largely autobiographical account of growing up in the conservative heartland of the Free State, living, at times rebelliously, with parents active in opposition to the government of the day.
Botha's account of the absurdities of apartheid are horrifying and yet often hilarious but the novel is also a sobering account of the life and early death of her brother. A powerful and moving novel.

Craig Higginson:

My South African novel of the year has to be Dominique Botha's False River, a semi-autobiographical novel triggered by the tragic death of the protagonist's brother - but in fact it is the narrator's journey from adoring and diffident younger sister to fully mature adult writer that makes the novel memorable for me.

The writer's evocations of the Free State landscape and her description of a politicised Afrikaans family during apartheid may feel like familiar territory, but Botha is already a remarkable writer with a style entirely her own and her book sits quite comfortably alongside the best "farm novels" that have been written.
Botha has written the book in both English and Afrikaans - so it is available in both languages. I hope this is the first of many more novels by a writer of major talent and remarkable emotional and psychological range.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Boykie Sidley's Stepping Out, which follows the misfortunes of Harold Cummings, a middle-aged middle-class American who leaves his comfortable bourgeois existence in search of something more urgent and meaningful.
This is a funny, moving and humane novel by a writer who has only gathered in strength since his award-winning debut novel Entanglement.
He is also one of several South African novelists who is beginning to set his stories outside the constraints of contemporary South Africa.
For younger readers, I recommend Hamilton Wende's delightful Arabella, the Moon and the Magic Mongongo Nut, which takes place in Parkview and tells the story of Arabella, who is grieving over the death of her father.
From the Grimm stories onwards, magic in stories for young people usually erupts out of extreme necessity or suffering - and this book takes us on a journey through a world at once familiar - with its mealie ladies and hadedas - and completely transporting.

Marguerite Poland:

Listening to Patricia Glyn talk about her experiences during her foot travels around South Africa is a mesmerising experience at best. Being able to discuss them with her and reading her most recent work, What Dawid Knew: a Journey with the Kruipers (Pan Macmillan), has been a moving encounter, both with author and text.

The Bushmen have long been the subject of research, interest and also exploitation. Their unique position - historically, culturally and (more urgently) within the context of a modern technological age - has put pressures on their communities, which are complex and tragic.
Perhaps, more than anything, they have suffered either from reprehensible neglect or a patronage which - at opposite ends of the scale of concern - have been deeply divisive.
Without illusions, Glyn set off to discover something of the truth concerning a particular community and tapped into the heart of a history which she tells with moving honesty, admitting to often being stumped for answers and profoundly changed by the experience herself.
It is the story of parallel journeys, and important reading for anyone wishing to understand life at the margins. It is told without sentiment and without apology, and is written by an engaging storyteller, a courageous and deeply compassionate woman.

On a lighter note, there has been a plethora of local cookbooks adding to the cooking frenzy on TV and the new celebrity of chefs. Therefore, it was a comfort to stumble upon a cookbook written by Margaret Wasserfall, the well-loved writer, journalist and editor. Called My Granny's Pantry: a Kitchen Memoir (Jacana ) and beautifully illustrated and presented, Margaret's book takes cooking off the stage, strips it of pretension and posturing and returns it (reliably!) to the family kitchen. It's a delight - a book for real people. - published January 5, 2014.

The State of Writing in SA

By Craig Higginson

Where South African fiction and non-fiction have exploded in the past two decades - with a rich and diverse range of people publishing books - our theatre is still dominated by writer-directors. Theatre practitioners who came to the theatre predominantly as directors and who have started to write or adapt their own plays, either because of a growing interest in telling their own stories or simply because there are too few new South African plays out there to direct.
We have had few career playwrights who came to writing plays through the study of literature and its related subjects. In the past, plays were made by communities of people and they were made to be performed - not published. Directors also enjoyed more status than playwrights and it was common practice for directors to completely change or rewrite plays in the rehearsal room. So it is perhaps little wonder we have had virtually no career playwrights.
In today's South Africa, we remain almost as divided as ever: between races, religions, languages, classes, nationalisms. We stand somewhere between apartheid and democracy, pulled in different directions - the best of us sometimes losing all conviction, the worst of us too often finding refuge in a passionate intensity.
So what is the role of the artist at the current time? And more specifically: what is the role of the contemporary South African theatre practitioner?
The easy answer to this is that there are as many roles as there are artists. We are free to make whatever fictions we like. We have fought for our freedom and we are free to exercise it however we want.
This is all very well, and it is a position I am in no position to contest. What I would like to suggest, however, is that I believe the quality of our fictions will depend entirely on the quality of our engagement with questions of content, form and context. It seems to me that the time we live in - in South Africa and more generally - requires works of the imagination that are nimble, dextrous and capable of infiltrating and engaging a range of perspectives at once.
Of these three areas, the issue of context is perhaps the most directly political. Who do I want to tell my story to? Or put it another way: Who do I want to talk to? Whose thinking do I want to reflect or challenge? What change do I want to make in the world? Am I writing for my own gratification - for money, for recognition, for revenge - or because I want to nourish something outside of myself?
In both theatre and fiction - which are the modes that occupy me most as a creative person - we have an honourable and justly celebrated legacy in South Africa. During apartheid, literature had a very clear role in defying the state. The ethical playing field was relatively unambiguous. To counter the dreary monologue of Afrikaner and other nationalisms, literature and other art forms provided an alternative monologue. One that asserted our shared humanity.
Because theatre during apartheid was predominantly workshopped by the director and the cast, this led to plays less concerned with dramatic structure and tight, combative dialogue and more concerned with monologues that attempted to access the interiority of the characters. By giving voice to the inner life, they made us see the humanity in characters that had been compartmentalised, reduced to ethnic types, so that they could be more easily dismissed or overlooked.
Playwrights like Athol Fugard and Zakes Mda wrote conversational, discursive plays - generally naturalistic in style and often quite old-fashioned in terms of form - that were again concerned with giving voice to the voiceless and dignity to those whose dignity had been taken away from them. When one compares these writers with their contemporaries in America or Britain, the plays often feel sluggish in terms of plot and bogged down by too much verbiage. Yet what could characters in plays during that period do but talk? What was more urgent?