Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night

Half of this book is a fairly traditional collection of short stories, and the other half is a collection of monologues by characters who work as "domestics" in wealthy white households. I love the stylistic experimentation in this latter half; characters appear and reappear across pieces, are presented first one way and then another by different people with different sets of facts. The diverse voices and backgrounds of the women allow a holistic, nuanced view of the profession and its attendant hardships—the inequality, despair, and exploitation are just as vivid as the hope and camaraderie.

My favourite story is "Flight," in which a girl watches a new wife or soon-to-be-wife running away from her village and into the early morning show more mist. We don't know why she's fleeing, or where she's fleeing to, all we see is this beautiful short scene of a woman escaping her pursuers and being engulfed by the glittering fog.

Magona's voice, both tender and biting, is ever-present here. More than anything, so many of these stories are crushingly sad. Women raped, children killed, men toiling away for months in the mines; all of this forms a sort of backdrop of anguish as people go about their daily lives in Cape Town and its satellite districts.

Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night is absolutely worth a read, and I hope to get my hands on more of Magona's work in the future.

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Global Challenge: South Africa show less

This book is a collection of stories divided into two parts. The first part is a ring of connected, gossipy by black South African women working as domestic servants for whites. The pieces, which really highlight the different personalities of each women, and read like oral pieces (if that's possible) are written in first person and are directed to another of the women. I had the distinct feeling I had read these before, but I think the stories are similar to ones I read in '07 in a memoir called Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman by Mpho Matsepo Nthunya.

The second part is comprised of several standard short stories set in the 60s through the late 80s, during the Apartheid system in South Africa, at least one show more story set during some of attempts at reforms in the 80s. The stories are bleak, often tragic, and several were very powerful. There was at least one I would deem "delightful". It was told by a young girl who detailed what her wonderful Fridays were like. This is an important collection, but I could not help but wonder about the stories now. I'm not so naive as to think that the vestiges of such a longtime segregation policy do not linger, but I wondered if the stories now were more hopeful. show less

This slim volume of short stories about domestic workers and their ‘medems’ is set in pre-democratic South Africa. I thought it excellent.

A prominent young South African writer talks about ‘listening’ to these stories, rather than reading them, which harks back to the African oral storytelling tradition and is accurate, I think.

A great entry into modern African fiction and the apartheid system. Readers can easily draw comparisons between Part One and The Help.