Beguiling look into the past

Book review: The Afrikaner by Arianna Dagnino

It’s always interesting to see ourselves, as South Africans, reflected through another’s gaze as author Arianna Dagnino does in The Afrikaner. A multi-cultural author with roots in Italy and now resident in Canada, this novel is based on time she spent in this part of the world.

It opens in the mid 1990s. Democratic elections are over and the new ANC government is in power. It opens with a bang, literally, as Wits-based Italian palaeontologist Dario Oldani is shot in a hijacking in Johannesburg’s CBD. He was the lover of Zoe du Plessis, another palaeontologist, also based at Wits University. She is ‘the Afrikaner’ of the title and the story is focused on her after the events of the tragedy. Read more ... http://www.brucedennill.co.za/book-review-the-afrikaner-filled-by-emptiness-or-looking-at-the-present-from-the-past/

The stranger at the gate

It’s ambitious to call your novel Johannesburg, for there are as many versions of this city as there are novels about it. And yet it’s what initially attracted me to this book, and to attend a talk at the South African Book Fair titled Johannesburg: A love story last month. With novelist Niq Mhlongo quizzing several writers about their literary and visceral responses to this city they call home, it included Fiona Melrose as well as Ivan Vladislavić and Harry Kalmer. 

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Author Fiona Melrose

Travelling through Africa with a salty narrator

Hardly Working: A Travel Memoir of Sorts by Zukiswa Wanner Black Letter Media

Travelling in Africa isn’t for sissies, especially when you’re a South African/Zambian/Zimbabwean married to a Kenyan, living in Kenya, and with an 11-year-old son in tow.

Writer Zukiswa Wanner decided to travel through Africa in 2016, using local land transport, attending book events and readings, a writers’ symposium, celebrating a 40th birthday in Harare, and finally a residency, outside of the continent in Denmark. Her and her partner, Tchassa, wanted to show their 11-year-old son, Kwame, a bit of Africa – because although he was at school in Kenya, his British curriculum education left little room for African matters and stories. 

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