Karma Suture by Rosamund Kendal
Jacana R130
It's the end of another long, tiring day for GP Sue Carey. She's wearing green surgery pants, as she had yet more body fluid spilled over her during the course of the day, and she hasn't eaten anything more nourishing than a giant slice of cheesecake.
She's just 28 years old, still single after a broken engagement, ginger-haired rather than auburn, sleek and more zaftig than svelte. She works 24-hour shifts at a time to pay off her huge medical bills, dashes from one hospital to another, and in between tries to relax, socialise, be a good friend to one who is slowly becoming addicted to drugs and anorexia, and meet men so she can have another relationship to endure, so she doesn't end up alone with only a cat for company. Oh yes, to add to all this, she joins a philosophy class.
If this already sounds too much like chick lit, it's anything but. A simple pr?cis may read like some kind of doctor/local Bridget Jones number, but Karma Suture presents something deeper and more profound. On one level this is a fairly light story: the trials and tribulations of an exhausted, overwrought young doctor still struggling to find her feet in the world, if not the hospital. But it also presents an astonishing portrait of what really goes on in government hospitals and the doctors who work in them.
Author Rosamund Kendal is herself a medical doctor who practises in KwaZulu Natal, dividing her time between medicine and creative writing. So clearly she knows what she is talking about.
Sue Carey is a likeable, fun character, and you get to laugh and love and empathise with her, but the secondary plotline - that of life in a hospital for the medical personnel - provides a compelling read that is gripping.
No amount of newspaper reports can as accurately describe the minutiae and day-to-day realities of life in our hospitals, from bed shortages and negotiations with other departments to clear the said beds; to treatments that don't happen, or happen too late; to diabetic patients guiltily wiping away pie crumbs after downing Cokes and nodding yes to doctor when she suggests other foods, but all in vain, as some patients will go back to what is easiest.
There are weekend stabbings, gang members and family members battling it out with broken bits of bottles, only to somehow become the best of buddies the next day. There are young girls who decide to take overdoses at four in the morning. It's no wonder the doctor on duty is short-tempered and irritable. And then the scourge of Aids: anyone who doubts its insidious presence need only to walk the wards of Bellville (where Sue mainly works), or any other large hospital.
People are dying, and they are dying of Aids, over and over. And yet each receives a different "cause of death", pneumonia for instance, as patient confidentiality prevents writing the truth.
Revolving around Sue the doctor are the accoutrements of her personal life. Her flatmate Leah, soon to snuggle up to married life; model Gina, skinny, getting high on drugs to stay that way; and Carol from the philosophy class, who becomes more than a friend.
Sue copes with the tensions of being a doctor by having more than the occasional one-night stands. Then she does get involved with a dishy young doctor and the path is not smooth (when is it ever?), but by now you're cheering her on.
This book also reads a bit like one in a series - you wouldn't mind hearing more; by the end you are really in sympathy with this slightly kooky, but loveable doctor. How did she get to where she is? You'd like to know more about her years of training or studying, and of course, what happens next?
Perhaps author Kendal will tell us in due course.
First published in The Star Tonight May 15 2008
Showing posts with label rosamund kendal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rosamund kendal. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
A strong narrative set in rural SA
The Angina Monologues by Rosamund Kendal (Jacana, R145)
Rosamund Kendal's second novel, The Angina Monologues deals, as did her debut, with the trials and tribulations of being a modern doctor in today's South Africa. Like the first, Karma Suture, it also has a deliciously witty title.
The Angina Monologues centres on three young women interns who are completing compulsory medical community service in rural KwaZulu-Natal, at Prince Xoliswe hospital, in a one-horse town. Each is vastly different, and we follow their lives and struggles with life in a decaying hospital, decay which is made worse by the corruption practised by those in charge. We are introduced to each in separate chapters.
There's Rachael, spoilt and rich. We meet her as she wanders disconsolately around her spartan doctor's quarters, trying to figure out how to make water emerge from the taps. You pump it yourself, of course, or pay the dagga-smoking gardener to do it for you. Shock number one. Yet Rachael is determined to make a go of her community service and to stick it out. Not an easy task when she is beset by her parents at every turn, her neurotic Jewish mother in particular, imploring her to pack up, return to Cape Town and board the first plane to London where she can find a job as a doctor, and a husband too, hopefully.
In contrast to the wild and funny Rachael is the conservative, quiet young wife Seema. Passionately dedicated to her vocation as a doctor, and a brilliant medic, she harbours a painful secret. Her husband Satesh is both insanely jealous of her abilities, and abusive in his jealousy and his lack of love for her. But for Seema to abandon her marriage would mean incurring her family's wrath and alienation. She struggles poignantly with these dilemmas throughout the story.
Then there's Nomsa: feisty, ambitious, and equally passionate about her calling. And yet she too is caught between two worlds - an education in Cape Town away from her family in Aliwal North means that she feels alienated from her home and her rural, illiterate mother. But her mother is sick and Nomsa must return home and face the family she loves with a fierce sense of pride, yet returning means awakening a mass of contradictions within her.
Nomsa's portrait is finely drawn - I found her the most compelling of the three. The tensions that threaten to tear her apart are sensitively revealed.
It is only fairly late in the narrative that the three meet up, becoming more friendly with each other, and I couldn't help wishing that this had happened earlier on in the story. Part of the joy of each woman's life is in the connections they have made with each other, and this forms part of the enjoyment of the reading.
A very apt and large part of the story is Kendal's explanation of conditions at a rural hospital, which are shocking, to say the least. The stories of the various patients are also woven into the novel, and some of the stories are heartbreaking, especially in cases where private, expensive medical care could have saved lives.
Kendal, a medical doctor herself, knows what she is talking about, and her fiction exposes the truths and deceptions in an entertaining, yet ultimately shocking way.
Kudos to her for doing it so cleverly and for uncovering the facts that need to be exposed.
At the end of the year the threads of these young women's lives coalesce in a number of decisions made, and realisations achieved. This is a delightful, witty, entertaining read - serious truths are explored, and lives are deftly and intelligently explored in this strong narrative.
Published in The Star Tonight September 23 2010 and Pretoria News September 27 2010
Rosamund Kendal's second novel, The Angina Monologues deals, as did her debut, with the trials and tribulations of being a modern doctor in today's South Africa. Like the first, Karma Suture, it also has a deliciously witty title.
The Angina Monologues centres on three young women interns who are completing compulsory medical community service in rural KwaZulu-Natal, at Prince Xoliswe hospital, in a one-horse town. Each is vastly different, and we follow their lives and struggles with life in a decaying hospital, decay which is made worse by the corruption practised by those in charge. We are introduced to each in separate chapters.
There's Rachael, spoilt and rich. We meet her as she wanders disconsolately around her spartan doctor's quarters, trying to figure out how to make water emerge from the taps. You pump it yourself, of course, or pay the dagga-smoking gardener to do it for you. Shock number one. Yet Rachael is determined to make a go of her community service and to stick it out. Not an easy task when she is beset by her parents at every turn, her neurotic Jewish mother in particular, imploring her to pack up, return to Cape Town and board the first plane to London where she can find a job as a doctor, and a husband too, hopefully.
In contrast to the wild and funny Rachael is the conservative, quiet young wife Seema. Passionately dedicated to her vocation as a doctor, and a brilliant medic, she harbours a painful secret. Her husband Satesh is both insanely jealous of her abilities, and abusive in his jealousy and his lack of love for her. But for Seema to abandon her marriage would mean incurring her family's wrath and alienation. She struggles poignantly with these dilemmas throughout the story.
Then there's Nomsa: feisty, ambitious, and equally passionate about her calling. And yet she too is caught between two worlds - an education in Cape Town away from her family in Aliwal North means that she feels alienated from her home and her rural, illiterate mother. But her mother is sick and Nomsa must return home and face the family she loves with a fierce sense of pride, yet returning means awakening a mass of contradictions within her.
Nomsa's portrait is finely drawn - I found her the most compelling of the three. The tensions that threaten to tear her apart are sensitively revealed.
It is only fairly late in the narrative that the three meet up, becoming more friendly with each other, and I couldn't help wishing that this had happened earlier on in the story. Part of the joy of each woman's life is in the connections they have made with each other, and this forms part of the enjoyment of the reading.
A very apt and large part of the story is Kendal's explanation of conditions at a rural hospital, which are shocking, to say the least. The stories of the various patients are also woven into the novel, and some of the stories are heartbreaking, especially in cases where private, expensive medical care could have saved lives.
Kendal, a medical doctor herself, knows what she is talking about, and her fiction exposes the truths and deceptions in an entertaining, yet ultimately shocking way.
Kudos to her for doing it so cleverly and for uncovering the facts that need to be exposed.
At the end of the year the threads of these young women's lives coalesce in a number of decisions made, and realisations achieved. This is a delightful, witty, entertaining read - serious truths are explored, and lives are deftly and intelligently explored in this strong narrative.
Published in The Star Tonight September 23 2010 and Pretoria News September 27 2010
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