The latest issue of Granta includes work by Mark Gevisser and, for the first time, SJ Naudé.
The issue, Granta 129: Fate, features a piece by Gevisser entitled “Self-Made Man”, about a young transgender man, and the title story of Naudé’s collection The Alphabet of Birds, which was recently translated into English from the Afrikaans, Alfabet van die voels. The Afrikaans collection won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize and the Jan Rabie Rapport Prize.
South African authors have been full of praise for Naudé’s debut collection. Damon Galgut said: “Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.” Ivan Vladislavić said: “Naudé writes compellingly about South Africa and its dilemmas, but he is equally at home, or perhaps not at home, in many other places, in Hanoi, Phoenix, London, Tokyo.” At the launch of the book at The Book Lounge in Cape Town, author and award-winning translator Michiel Heyns said: “It’s wonderful. You’re not losing out by reading this work in translation.”
In her introduction to Fate, Granta owner Sigrid Rausing compares Naudé to JM Coetzee:
“[Naudé] describes a former nurse going for Aids training in the South African outback. Naudé writes in Afrikaans, but like many Afrikaans speakers he is bilingual, and translates himself into English. There is something reminiscent of JM Coetzee in his language, and in the vision of the fate of South Africa, hanging in the balance.”
Read an excerpt from The Alphabet of Birds on Books LIVE:
Sandrien is the only white woman in Bella Gardens. She is in fact the only white person in town. An establishment for the accommodation of women travellers, reads the website of Bella Gardens. The most luxurious home for females, reads the brochure in the dim entrance hall. One could mistake it for a refuge for unwed mothers.
Her hostess is Mrs Edith Nyathi, who introduces herself as a widow and retired matron of Frere Hospital. She never stops talking about her ‘second life’. She raises her eyebrows and drops her head forward when pronouncing the phrase. The guest house is her pension, she says, ‘my little egg’. The number of maids in her employ permits her to relax with a cigarette on the veranda during the day; sometimes, late in the evening, with a cigar. Mrs Nyathi does not raise her voice to any of the maids – a phalanx of demure village girls, ready to fry up sizzling English breakfasts or to polish baths and wooden floors to a high gloss. When she calls to one of her girls, it is in the same cooing voice she uses to address her guests.
Gevisser’s piece is available to read online:
1
Waking up with a headache – kinda sucks.
Waking up with a flat chest – priceless.Liam Kai, eighteen years old and just graduated from high school in a town near Ann Arbor, Michigan, tweeted these words on 18 June 2014. It was nine days after his breast surgery and the day after he had had the dressings and drains removed. On the same day he also posted a video on Instagram in which we watch the doctor unwrapping his bandages: Liam looks down over his newly boyish chest and whoops, ‘Dude !’ In a few weeks he will begin injecting the testosterone that will – finally – vault him out of the purgatory of an extended androgynous childhood into the manhood of body hair and a deep voice.
Book details
- The Alphabet of Birds by SJ Naudé
Book homepage
EAN: 9781415207130
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Lost and Found in Johannesburg by Mark Gevisser
Book homepage
EAN: 9781868425884
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Granta 129: Fate by Sigrid Rausing
Book homepage
EAN: 9781905881833
Find this book with BOOK Finder!