Book industry needs to turn over a new leaf: Franschhoek Literary Festival

Alexander McCall Smith, the British author who has penned a series of books set
in Botswana, was the star attraction at the FLF pic by Christine Fourie

By Konstantin Sofianos

'It seems that we are all trying to break into something, but we don't know what that is." Ingrid Winterbach, writer of adroit, searching novels in Afrikaans, is talking animatedly from her seat beside an intensely reflective Eben Venter, and next to the apparently detached figure of Carel van der Merwe, author of a string of similarly cool fictions of adult personal crisis.
The occasion is a panel on translation at this year's Franschhoek literature f?te, but the immediate setting is the narrow hull of a white-washed church building in one of the Boland town's back streets, the kind of place in which, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem Church Going, "someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious".
Winterbach is speaking about the enduring cultural chasm between Afrikaans and English writing, a problem aggravated by the general inadequacy (in all languages) of literary translations in the country, but her comment strikes at another issue that might have remained otherwise implicit among the varied activities of the Franschhoek fest: the question of literary and cultural prestige, and of the institutions that are able to confer this in South Africa today.
What, after all, are writers like Winterbach attempting to "break into" when it comes to South African writing in English, and who decides whether they have achieved this or not? Some preliminary clues might be found in the proceedings of this year's Franschhoek Literature Festival (FLF) as a whole.
Over the past few years its claim to be the premier literary event of its kind has been contested by the emergence of other national gatherings of readers and writers such as the Mail & Guardian Literature Festival in Joburg and the Cape Town Open Book festival, which has successfully positioned itself as an event devoted to higher-end literary fiction attracting impressive rosters of prominent international authors, including Booker Prize winners - it is in conscious opposition to the FLF, one suspects.
And yet the FLF retains a special, gilded attraction for literary patrons and book industry insiders alike, and its autumnal coming each May is an eagerly anticipated event. This is no doubt bound up with its location in the laminated pastoral surrounds of the wine-land town, with its gentrified main street of shopping boutiques, outdoor bistros and haute cuisine restaurants. The FLF offers less a literary than a "lifestyle" experience: writerly conversations and poetry readings mix with panels on gardening, cookery or popular history, and are supplemented by pricey gala dinners and concert recitals.
According to the website, some 8 500 weekend festival-goers descended on Franschhoek last year, to take occupation of its scattered auberges and guest-cottages, and to saturate in its faux-francophone ambience. These are startling numbers for an ostensibly literary function, and they seem to have been maintained this year, in the festival's seventh annual iteration. Practically all the 91 panel discussions on offer were fully sold out by lunchtime on the opening Friday, though tell-tale empty chairs at most events suggest that some patrons preferred to linger over their glasses of semillon.

SA evoked through rural battle: For the Mercy of Water

By Konstantin Sofianos

Karen Jayes's For the Mercy of Water (Penguin) is a strange, challenging novel, and a revelation. It makes much post-apartheid literature look banal, in its concerns, and amateurish, in execution.
At a time of severe water-crisis and drought, administration over this essential resource has been handed to the corporate control of "the company", which oversees the marketised supply of water in the big cities, and ruthlessly safeguards its dwindling sources in the parched, rural hinterland. The countryside has been largely abandoned following the imposition of ferocious tariffs on water-use, left to the silent transit of convoy-trucks, and to the rule of corporate militias, the "company men".
The absolute predominance of the company, guaranteed by the extension of executive powers in the national interest, is contested only by women, those too young or too old to make the harried trek into the cities, who launch daring night-raids on the reservoirs, or re-route the life-bearing corporate pipes and conduits. In this context of a simmering conflict, an unexpected rainfall brings the company soldiers to a desolate valley-town, where they confront a group of girls in the care of an aged school-teacher, known simply as Mother.
The narrative circles around the "unfortunate incidents" that ensue from this encounter, that will leave most of the girls dead, one soldier blinded, one girl, Eve, in flight, and the apparently traumatised schoolteacher under the ambiguous protection of NGOs and aid workers. A brief online report will draw Jayes's writer-protagonist and narrator to the valley, who arrives there in the novel's opening chapter, to be followed soon after by the company's organised effort to secure the area, and establish the official narrative of events.
All of this is to say precious little about the actual experience of reading Jayes's novel. The book opens with an epigraph by the aestheticist poet Rilke, and concludes with a citation from the Qur'an, and by acknowledging the support of, amongst others, André Brink. Between those unlikely coordinates a remarkable writerly capacity unfolds, which perhaps owes something to each, and it is through this finely-wrought instrument of style that the novel's actions and scenes are relayed.