AFRICAN NOVEL CHALLENGE SEPTEMBER 2023 - SOUTHERN AFRICA

SOUTHERN AFRICA

This month we focus on Southern Africa and I guess that includes:

South Africa
eSwatini
Lesotho
Zimbabwe
Botswana
Namibia
Zambia
Madagascar
Seychelles
Comoros
Mauritius

(Mozambique and Angola also count I guess but I have feature Lusophone Africa already).

I am planning three books :

From South Africa (Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer, Galgut, Paton are all favourite writers) but I will go with Heaven Forbid by Christopher Hope

From Zimbabwe I will read The White Shadow by Andrea Eames

From Zambia/Zimbabwe I will read Rotten Row by Pettina Gappah

I hope to read The Promise - Damon Galgut

>4 Kristelh: One of the best winners of the Booker Prize in recent years, Kristel in my humble opinion.

>5 PaulCranswick:, That is encouraging Paul.

My reading so far:

Malawi: Smouldering Charcoal by Tiyambe Zeleza

Another book about life under an oppressive regime. It's not bad, but the male characters are mostly jerks.

Namibia: Desert December by Dorian Haarhoff, illustrated by Leon Vermeulen

A picture book about a young boy who travels across the desert to see his parents, who are away working at a mine. Vermeulen's illustrations are more memorable than the story.

South Africa: Where the Weird Things Are: An Ocean Twilight Zone Adventure by Zoleka Filandar, illustrated by Patricia Hooning

Beautifully illustrated and very informative. I'm not a big fan of the anthropomorphized research vehicle, but otherwise it's a top-notch children's book.

Eswatini: The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film by Richard E. Grant, read by the author

Diary entries from the days of making Wah-Wah, Grant's semi-autobiographical directorial debut, from the first pitch, through filming in Swaziland, to the day the final product got a distributor. Along with the usual ups and downs of trying to put together a film, Grant also had to deal with a producer who was incompetent, unprofessional, and, worst of all, convinced of her own brilliance; that the film got made at all and managed to be pretty good, too, is a testament to Grant, the cast, and the crew who persevered despite the myriad troubles caused by the producer.

Grant's narration is a delight, and his genuine gratitude toward the people who worked so hard on the film really shines through.

Looking at this list: https://www.theuncorkedlibrarian.com/books-about-south-africa/ and found two

This looked interesting, a time travel book Lauren Beukes the shining girls kindle has it for $1 how can I resist also found coconut

also interested in the promise

I had a busy summer with a dearth of reading, but I'm determined to get back into the African Novel Challenge. I started September's challenge a bit early and finished Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe).



My review is here.

I also have Nervous Conditions in line to be read after someone pointed out it was a Kindle deal earlier this year. It's nice to read one from the 1001 list.

And like >7 amanda4242: I have chosen one from Malawi, too, as Malawi is part of The Southern African Development Community. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a fictionalized non-fiction. :)

>8 cindydavid4: Hi Cindy - I also ordered The Shining Girls, although I probably won't get all three read this month. Thanks for sharing.

I see that William Plomer was born in the Transvaal Colony as it then was, so qualifies as a South African writer by birth as well by the setting of Turbott Wolfe, an absolutely stunning novel which I read last year apropos of its inclusion in Cyril Connolly’s 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement. The plot is a powerful exploration of the racial dynamic in South Africa before the official apartheid era.

Malawi does not seem to appear in any list for this challenge so I am going to regard it as being in Southern Africa and read No Easy Task by Aubrey Kachingwe, a book I’ve owned, unread, for a long time.

This is my second novel by Ivan Vladislavić, and I've enjoyed both.



The Exploded View

Four interconnected stories about a moment in the life of a census taker, an engineer, an artist, and a billboard installer.

My review

I have Nervous Conditions on my TBR pile, so maybe I will give it a go.

>10 streamsong: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a fictionalized non-fiction. How is it fictionalized? My copy, which I just started reading, seems like a straightforward memoir.

>15 labfs39: Well, some people say that any memoir is partially fiction. :) I'm not that harsh - but when I see dialogue in the text, I feel it falls into the 'creative non-fiction' category.

Im reading coconut which im liking

I finished The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Very inspiring, and although not a novel, gives great insight into everyday life in Malawi. My review

Have started No Easy Task. Yet another story of the uneasy transition from colony to self-governing African state. A sub-category of the “Coming of Age” novel.

100 pages to go in No Easy Task. Author’s only novel, unsurprisingly. Presumably autobiographical. No doubt interesting as a record of daily life in the author’s (unidentified) country at the time of transition from British colonial rule, but novel has proceeded at a snail’s pace with no narrative arc or characters of interest.

OCTOBER'S THREAD IS UP:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/354018

NGUGI WA THIONG'O and SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA.

I finished Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Bangarembga, which was pretty good. Nice to read about the impact of colonialism from a female perspective.

>22 banjo123: finished coconut liked it very much. interestting look at growing up in the "New"South Africa

Well,, I missed the appropriate month, but did read The Promise by Damon Galgut, in which he tells the story of a dysfunctional Boer family before and after the end of apartheid. But apartheid is only a fraction of the story - the family is uppermost. Some beautiful writing here.