South Africa Take-Home Reads

I’ve been home for just three days, and already South Africa feels as far away emotionally as it is physically. It’s always this way with vacations – that hazy, remote, romantic state of mind is no match for a return to New York City's drumbeat pace – but I feel it particularly keenly this time around. We went from sun to snow. From all the time in the world to none at all. From dream to reality.

Fortunately, I have a plan to keep the magic of those three weeks alive – I’m going to keep reading as if I was still in South Africa. To that end, I bought a South African book at nearly every bookstore I visited while on holiday, eventually amassing a collection that very nearly pushed me past my hard-won carry-on limit.

Here’s what I came home with:

Slim Foot on the Neck of a Dead Lion / Dominique Cheminais. All of Cheminais’ writing is published in beautiful and extremely limited runs – I picked up copy 300 of 300! This is a book “of lost fragments and forgotten stories held inside the mind since childhood and of recollected dreams half-remembered.” Based on that description I’m not at all sure what to expect, but I’m hoping to be swept away by something beautiful and strange.

Cry the Beloved Country / Alan Paton. This novel, published in 1948, is one of South Africa’s most famous, and decries the social structures that led to apartheid shortly after its release. This felt like a can’t-miss kind of classic, so I picked it up at Verbatim Books in Stellenbosch.

Waiting for the Barbarians / J.M. Coetzee. Nobel-prizewinner J.M. Coetzee is apparently the Philip Roth of South Africa – someone uniquely capable of capturing his country’s particular moods, ambitions, and dysfunctions. I learned about Coetzee when I stumbled upon Rian Malan’s fascinating characterization of him: “Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.” Blank Books carried just about everything Coetzee’s written, and I chose Waiting for the Barbarians on the strength of my two favorite lazy-girl book evaluation tools – name and cover art.

The Shadow of the Sun / Ryszard Kapuściński. Poland-born Kapuściński spent nearly 30 years in Africa, and this travel memoir is his account of being a white, foreign visitor in rapidly-developing and changing Africa. I broke my ‘only buy South African writers in South Africa’ rule to pick it up.

Known and Strange Things / Teju Cole. Cole is an American with Nigerian parents who grew up in Lagos and writes frequently about travel, race, photography, and other themes that popped up many times over the course of my trip. I really wanted to read this book and, with my South-African-writers-only rule already shattered by my Shadow of the Sun purchase, I decided to just go for it!

From Joburg to Jozi / Heidi Holland & Adam Roberts. Joburg to Jozi is a collection of 50 pieces – essays, poems, observations, and other forms – about the infamous city that I fell quite hard for. It’s also the needle I plucked from Collector’s Treasury's giant haystack, and one of the picks I’m most looking forward to reading.

The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan / Lionel Abrahams. I chose this book after reading a passage of Abrahams’ writing in Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys. Both Abrahams and the protagonist of his novel are South African, Jewish, and suffer from cerebral palsy, making this debut novel more than a little autobiographical. 

The Initiation / Mogorosi Motshumi. The owner of Cape Town’s Bibliophilia steered me towards this graphic memoir, the only one ever written by a black South African. The first in a trilogy, it recounts his experiences growing up in Bloemfontein’s Batho township, and is even getting attention from the source of 90% of my purchases and preferences, The New Yorker.

Soweto / Jodi Bieber. I whipped through this gorgeous photographic record of modern Soweto on the flight home. Bieber is an acclaimed South African photographer – she won the World Press Photo of the Year in 2010 for her haunting portrait of Bibi Aisha – but prior to embarking on this project she’d spent very little time in Soweto. This book, of course, changed that; Bieber spent three months capturing every corner of one of Johannesburg’s most iconic places. Many of her snaps can be found here.