Review of An Intimate War by Donvé Lee

THE intimate war – that closed battleground between a couple, fought within the confines of coupledom but, at times, no less bloody and messy and horrific than that fought between thousands in so many public war zones.

And, even harder to understand, both for those within the intimacy of that personal zone and those standing by watching the wrestling of two people, is being unable to comprehend or to help.

This novel charts the unsteady, murky territory of the relationship between an unnamed man and a woman. They come together, move apart, and come together again, drawn time and again by the passion that unites them, despite the destructive forces that run through their relationship.

As reader, you know what you’re in for from the moment you read the opening line: “The first time we divorced we did it on a serviette,” a divorce that leads once more, to undressing and “our limbs entangled with the limbs of the tree, my feet rooted in the ground my arm stretched out to the sky”. We’re in the tangled, twisted territory of attraction here, and so the narration continues.

The prose is poetry, almost dreamy, the story is told almost entirely in the present-tense, with Lee using the second person point of view to tell the story, the narrator addressing the text to the you of the man she seemingly cannot separate from. This can be a difficult device to sustain – although Lee manages it with a skill that means you read effortlessly, and it carries you along so that you don’t notice the unorthodox narration. The lack of quotation marks around speech adds to the dreamy, surreal quality of this story, and yet the tale is anything but dreamy.

Lee’s style is to use run-on, made up compound words, punctuation sometimes discarded in an effort to let the text flow on, again a style that evokes the half-wavy, half-seen dream world.

Instead what follows is heartbreaking, all too real, and not dream-like at all. It’s the poignant story of a man and woman who will find their love stretched and broken by the man’s inability to trust the woman. His turbulent, volatile emotions destroy their world, even though the woman tries to hold on, her love somehow intact, strong, always trying to mend his shattered soul.

It’s not hard to see why she carries on trying, the eroticism of the man’s love is forcefully expressed. Despite his own wounds this is a man who “is handing me back to myself. “Through the promise in your eyes. Beneath the balm of your voice. Under the miracle of your tongue.” He buys her a full-length mirror, encourages her to explore and love her body, despite its plumpness that she so despises, or has despised. And in tender love scenes that most intimate act assumes its beauty and power through Lee’s poetic touch.

And yet, within the love, poison: “A carapace has begun to grow over my soft centre. Your offerings of flowers have lost their innocence. They are bittersweet pills you feed me in an attempt to erase the latest bruises on my heart. It’s not your flowers I want, it’s your trust.”

Instead the narrator finds herself defending her decision to wear lipstick when she goes out, with the man accusing her of trying to attract other men, and the violent cycle has begun: “My daughter watches and she learns about the things women do to please their men.”

And still, the push and pull continues, coming together, driven apart, desire and love morph into despair and the therapist’s eyes assume the woman’s pain, and still the rollercoaster of it all continues, an intimate love closed to the understanding of outsiders.

Why do we love the people we do, and how can we untangle ourselves from destructive passions? There are no answers, simply the continuing tide of love through it all.

Published in The Star, April 7 2011

Alternative Anthology Keeps Turning Heads

The depth and breadth of contemporary South African writing in English makes it tough to contain – and makes creative approaches to local anthologies quite welcome. Indeed, quite necessary.

Glass Jars Among Trees is a collection of current South African writing – an alternative anthology of South African prose and poetry that is fresh, compelling and different.

The editors, Arja Salafranca and Alan Finlay, have selected works from published and unpublished writers that reflect a wide variety of writing styles and formats.

Stories in the form of mock movie reviews and film scripts, diary entries, song lyrics, poetry, short fiction, essays, comedy – even opera – make this a comprehensive showcase of South Africa’s new generation of writers.

Kay Benno’s highly inventive “Men with Dead Mothers” tells its rather unusual story through film reviews, while Finuala Dowling’s “Stand-Up Comic” delivers a wry, slightly sad story of a woman’s experiences through the speech of a comedian. “Lioness”, Alan Kolski Horwitz’s slowly unfolding story reveals the trials of a second marriage, and the convoluted triangles couples negotiate as families merge and stepfamilies are formed.

On the nonfiction front, Gary Cummiskey’s essay, “Who was Sinclair Beiles?” probes the life and art of Beiles, South Africa’s sole Beat poet.

The diary entries are numerous and engaging, proving quite concisely that diary writing isn’t a lost art that only the Victorians practised in their flourishing penmanship. Ursula Cox and Carol Leff explore what it means to be women at the close of the 20th century, while Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob lives through the war in Bosnia in 1993 in “Once a Thing is Known – War Diary of a South African Peacekeeper in Bosnia”, bringing to life just what it feels like to be caught up in a war.

Kobus Moolman, on the other hand, is writing in a time of peace, a time of artistic solitude in “Boom St Journal” and Karoo Notebook, bringing to his notebook a series of vignettes, snapshots and thoughts on writing.

Glass Jar Among Trees Homepage

Glass Jars Among Trees by Alan Finlay and Arja Salafranca
EAN: 9781919931234
Buy Glass Jars Among Trees via Bookfinder

(Published on BookSA)