The Au Pair: A True Story
by Michele Macfarlane
(Jacana, R139.95)
Michele Macfarlane is a married mother of three living in Cape Town as this book opens. Happily partnered with Peter, a chiropodist, they lead a seemingly idyllic life. However, her eyesight is failing due to the onset of retinitis pigmentosa.
Macfarlane hires an au pair to help her care for the children and drive them around as she can no longer do so. Within a few pages Macfarlane is both celebrating her 37th birthday in her parents' luxury penthouse and suffering - and I use the word advisedly - the effects of her crush on her au pair, a woman of 23, Marizette.
Suffering, because Macfarlane believes herself to be straight: she is married, settled, her life following the ordinary, well-travelled paths of heterosexuality. There are niggling questions, of course. She was abused as a child, and can never quite rid herself of that "yucky" feeling she experiences when she's intimate with her husband, and there was that incident as a university student with the girlfriend of her brother, Ian? but these are just niggles. Or are they?
Macfarlane is surrounded by well-meaning close friends and members of her extended family, and sometimes supported as she tries to talk herself out of a crush on this much younger woman, who is in a relationship with a partner in any case.
Most of the book's chapters open with long e-mails written by Macfarlane to her close friend Sara, who lives in England with her own husband and family and is, ironically, also questioning her own sexuality and finding herself attracted to women.
The e-mails then set the scene for the actions that unfold in the main narrative.
The writing style is deceptively light, easy to read, set in the present tense, yet the story that unfolds is anything but light, nor is it easy. The events will impact on all those involved in the lives of these two women - family, friends, and of course Macfarlane's three children.
The book unflinchingly tells the story of the emotional rollercoaster of discovering that you're gay, and needing to leave a marriage to be true to yourself, and yet how living your own truth can be devastating to those around you, most especially Macfarlane's husband, Peter, who is initially broken and embittered through the process.
And yet, as Macfarlane makes clear, her gay orientation is not a choice, and not something that can be switched off, denied or ignored.
In one of her e-mails to Sara she discusses her attraction and the reasons for it: "The point is that nothing will stop me feeling the way I do about Marizette. I'm crazy about her.
"Of course I've asked myself over and over again how it's possible at such a relatively late stage in my life to discover I'm a lesbian.
"And I don't have an answer to that. There were many tell-tale signs? and again, I think: how could I not have known?"
And yet the toll taken on her family and her own sense of self-hood makes the guilt acute: "Sara, I feel like such a bad person. I've always liked myself and now I don't any more. I can't believe I'm hurting my children. All I ever wanted was for them to have a happy childhood."
Macfarlane is brave in many ways - for agonising over her choices, and ultimately choosing what will make her happy, a decision that embraces her new-found sexuality, a sexuality that has been denied or, suppressed, one that has left her unable to find satisfaction with men.
Brave, too, is Macfarlane's choosing to reveal so many intimate details of the lesbian sex between her and Marizette - descriptions which are quite graphic at times, and refreshingly so.
There's also a sense of fun here, and the scene in which the two buy a strap-on is infused with humour. Macfarlane is also unsparing in her depiction of the emotional difficulties each experience and the role of therapy in helping to diffuse some of these problems.
The Au Pair is a gripping, compellingly told story, and Macfarlane and her family are also brave enough to have the details of their lives thrown open within its pages.
Ultimately, too, there's a happy ending that you welcome as a reader, but what this book also makes clear is that even happily-ever-after requires some emotional work and rare understanding.
This is a necessary and welcome addition to the local landscape of memoir writing.
Published in The Star Tonight December 9 2010
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Short stories long on intrigue
Stories: All-New Tales
edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
(Headline Review, R185)
Short stories: we may lump them together in one big homogenous thing. Sure, there are differences, but basically a story is a story, not so? Yet, there are as many types of stories as there are say, novels, from literary to thriller, romance to adventure.
I admit that I like my stories rather literary: within my own strictly defined limits, characters emerge from page, grow, become aware, and carry this awareness of something defining them off the page.
However, the stories in this anthology stretched me somewhat. Horror rubs shoulders with fantasy, new vampires sprout a special tooth to suck blood or develop a fetish for chickens, and the past develops new underwater dimensions.
There are a few "literary" stories within this volume - in which ordinary people love, laugh and die and there isn't a vampire or strange being in sight - but the majority of these tales plumb depths which I don't normally reach in my own reading of the genre.
Enjoy might be too facile a word to describe my experience of these stories. At times I was horrified and disgusted, I was intrigued, I was admiring.
I kept on reading, for the most part, because, as the editors Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio write in their introduction, "what we wanted to read were stories that made us care, stories that forced us to turn the page. And yes, we wanted good writing."
The stories in this collection are polished, crafted, well-edited gems, they keep you turning the page, and the images created in your mind live on long after the reading.
Roddy Doyle's gruesome Blood is a case in point turns on a husband's sudden taste for the red stuff, to the point where he takes to murdering his neighbour's chickens while trying to hide this lust from his spouse. The surprise of the story is revealed right at the end? and it's a surprise to the husband himself.
Blood lust is the focus of Walter Mosley's Juvenal Nyx, a meandering story of how a perfectly ordinary man, a member of a Black Students Union, is turned into a man who lives by night and alone, surviving on the blood of others. This long tale also shows what happens when he attempts to live again in the world, emerging from the darkness of his solitary vampireness.
Joyce Carol Oates, a master of the genre, contributes Fossil-Figures, a strange tale of two twin brothers. One is strong and healthy, a popular A-grader who will go into politics with his winning smile and winning ways; his brother is sickly, weak, a victim of his brother's avaricious greed in the womb, or so the narrative suggests. The twins grow up, their lives dissect, diverge, then ultimately come together. A quietly powerful story, yet there's gothic horror wrapped up in the package.
Violence and murder form the spine of a number of exceptional stories.
There's Neil Gaiman's The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, a story set some time ago in which two men set out in search of treasure, and yet mistrust will dog them and splinter through.
Lawrence Block's Catch and Release is equally chilling in its presentation of a serial killer, while Jeffrey Deaver's excellent The Therapist is a horrifying yet gripping tale of man in the vice of mental illness.
I loved the fantastical Goblin Lake by Michael Swanwick, in which a man journeys to the bottom of a lake, to emerge with truths and realisations about the nature of paths taken, and not taken.
Meanwhile the narrator in Kat Howard's A Life in Fictions suffers from the fact that her lover keeps writing her into his stories, and thus influencing the course of her own reality. A mind-bending story, and delicious in the telling.
Equally fun was Diana Wynne Jones's Samantha's Diary set in the year 2?, in which the young narrator Samantha writes wittily about a secret admirer who keeps sending her live birds, from swans to pigeons and a partridge or two.
Finally, I also thoroughly enjoyed Michael Moorcock's simply titled Stories in which the lives of a group of friends, from their 20s on to life in their 60s is told in simple language, language that swoops and falls from event to event.
A real delight.
Published The Star Tonight December 9 2010
edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
(Headline Review, R185)
Short stories: we may lump them together in one big homogenous thing. Sure, there are differences, but basically a story is a story, not so? Yet, there are as many types of stories as there are say, novels, from literary to thriller, romance to adventure.
I admit that I like my stories rather literary: within my own strictly defined limits, characters emerge from page, grow, become aware, and carry this awareness of something defining them off the page.
However, the stories in this anthology stretched me somewhat. Horror rubs shoulders with fantasy, new vampires sprout a special tooth to suck blood or develop a fetish for chickens, and the past develops new underwater dimensions.
There are a few "literary" stories within this volume - in which ordinary people love, laugh and die and there isn't a vampire or strange being in sight - but the majority of these tales plumb depths which I don't normally reach in my own reading of the genre.
Enjoy might be too facile a word to describe my experience of these stories. At times I was horrified and disgusted, I was intrigued, I was admiring.
I kept on reading, for the most part, because, as the editors Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio write in their introduction, "what we wanted to read were stories that made us care, stories that forced us to turn the page. And yes, we wanted good writing."
The stories in this collection are polished, crafted, well-edited gems, they keep you turning the page, and the images created in your mind live on long after the reading.
Roddy Doyle's gruesome Blood is a case in point turns on a husband's sudden taste for the red stuff, to the point where he takes to murdering his neighbour's chickens while trying to hide this lust from his spouse. The surprise of the story is revealed right at the end? and it's a surprise to the husband himself.
Blood lust is the focus of Walter Mosley's Juvenal Nyx, a meandering story of how a perfectly ordinary man, a member of a Black Students Union, is turned into a man who lives by night and alone, surviving on the blood of others. This long tale also shows what happens when he attempts to live again in the world, emerging from the darkness of his solitary vampireness.
Joyce Carol Oates, a master of the genre, contributes Fossil-Figures, a strange tale of two twin brothers. One is strong and healthy, a popular A-grader who will go into politics with his winning smile and winning ways; his brother is sickly, weak, a victim of his brother's avaricious greed in the womb, or so the narrative suggests. The twins grow up, their lives dissect, diverge, then ultimately come together. A quietly powerful story, yet there's gothic horror wrapped up in the package.
Violence and murder form the spine of a number of exceptional stories.
There's Neil Gaiman's The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, a story set some time ago in which two men set out in search of treasure, and yet mistrust will dog them and splinter through.
Lawrence Block's Catch and Release is equally chilling in its presentation of a serial killer, while Jeffrey Deaver's excellent The Therapist is a horrifying yet gripping tale of man in the vice of mental illness.
I loved the fantastical Goblin Lake by Michael Swanwick, in which a man journeys to the bottom of a lake, to emerge with truths and realisations about the nature of paths taken, and not taken.
Meanwhile the narrator in Kat Howard's A Life in Fictions suffers from the fact that her lover keeps writing her into his stories, and thus influencing the course of her own reality. A mind-bending story, and delicious in the telling.
Equally fun was Diana Wynne Jones's Samantha's Diary set in the year 2?, in which the young narrator Samantha writes wittily about a secret admirer who keeps sending her live birds, from swans to pigeons and a partridge or two.
Finally, I also thoroughly enjoyed Michael Moorcock's simply titled Stories in which the lives of a group of friends, from their 20s on to life in their 60s is told in simple language, language that swoops and falls from event to event.
A real delight.
Published The Star Tonight December 9 2010
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Winter afternoons
Winter afternoons the pink wall is
cold grey, the sun oblique, hiding,
you can feel the chill in the
shadows of the paint.
Even the leaves look cold.
Published in New Contrast, Summer 2010
cold grey, the sun oblique, hiding,
you can feel the chill in the
shadows of the paint.
Even the leaves look cold.
Published in New Contrast, Summer 2010
Forthcoming publication from Dye Hard Press: The Edge of Things
The Edge of Things is a special issue of Green Dragon, to be published by Dye Hard Press, and consists of 24 short stories selected by Arja Salafranca. The authors are Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lakwana, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie.
Publication is scheduled for March 2011.
More details to follow.
Publication is scheduled for March 2011.
More details to follow.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Review of The Thin Line - Joan Hambidge in Die Burger
The Thin Line is ’n versameling kortverhale wat ’n mens eenvoudig nie kan neersit nie.
Arja Salafranca ondersoek die subtiele verbintenisse tussen mense, soos vroue wat saam koffiedrink, maar mekaar sonder woorde kritiseer, of, met giftige uitinge aanval; eksgeliefdes wat saamreis en in ’n vreemde landskap ontdek die verhouding werk nie meer nie, en sal nooit weer werk nie; ’n “verhouding” tussen twee mense wat liefdeloos is en tog uitloop op ’n desperate seksuele verkenning; ’n vrou wat haar manlike geliefde se eks-meisie seksueel begeer, najaag en ’n slot wat uitloop op ellende; ’n ondersoek na vetsug met ’n jong meisie wat haarself letterlik doodeet as die subteks . . Read more here
Arja Salafranca ondersoek die subtiele verbintenisse tussen mense, soos vroue wat saam koffiedrink, maar mekaar sonder woorde kritiseer, of, met giftige uitinge aanval; eksgeliefdes wat saamreis en in ’n vreemde landskap ontdek die verhouding werk nie meer nie, en sal nooit weer werk nie; ’n “verhouding” tussen twee mense wat liefdeloos is en tog uitloop op ’n desperate seksuele verkenning; ’n vrou wat haar manlike geliefde se eks-meisie seksueel begeer, najaag en ’n slot wat uitloop op ellende; ’n ondersoek na vetsug met ’n jong meisie wat haarself letterlik doodeet as die subteks . . Read more here
Monday, December 6, 2010
Short story short-listed for the Thomas Pringle Award
My short story ' Strangers', published in New Contrast literaty journal in 2009, has been short-listed for the Thomas Pringle Award by the South African English Academy. Read more here
Friday, December 3, 2010
BookEx, Sandton Comvention Centre, Johannesburg, November 2010: Discussion panel on short fiction
Arja Salafranca and Lauren Beukes
David Chislett and Arja Salafranca
David Chislett, Arja Salafranca and Lauren Beukes
From left: David Chislett, Arja Salafranca, Lauren Beukes, David Medalie and Louis Greenberg.BookEx, Sandton Comvention Centre, Johannesburg, November 2010: Short fiction discussion panel
From left: Arja Salafranca, David Chislett, Lauren Beukes, Louis Greenberg and David Medalie.Photo: Helen Holyoake.
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