The Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee was raised in South Africa and now lives in Australia. He is an acclaimed writer who writes of the legacy of lies that is generated from man’s inhumanity to man, from the unequal power structures that are created and exist within our neighborhoods, families, schools and governments.

The Age of Iron is his sixth novel. Written in 1990, in the last years under South Africa’s system of apartheid, the novel is about a Mrs. Curran, a white liberal South African, living in Cape Town, who is dying of cancer. The cancer has eaten into her bones. It gives her immense pain, but she does not want to check into a hospital, since she knows that all they will do is help to obliterate her, drown her with medication. South Africa has cancer too, suffering from a malignancy that has enveloped all its population. Mrs. Curran, as a liberal, has considered her existence as apart from the injustice of apartheid. As a university professor, she has bemoaned it, witnessed against it, and finally lived with it, although unwillingly. But what she will discover is that she has never been outside its influence. And instead of being a bystander, she finds that she has been an accomplice.

Mrs. Curran’s dying condition is what arrests her, opens up her life to the reality outside her. First she forges a strange alliance with a homeless man, an alcoholic, who she feeds and offers shelter to, asking him for favors - like helping her when the pain is too intense. He is inscrutable, as ready to curse her as to mutter an unwilling response, to her intense and agonized questions. Her black maid has a teenage son, caught up as all the other young black people are, in the violence happening in the townships - the official reaction to their demonstrations. Dying alone, Mrs. Curran sees the ties that others have, and follows any claim now put upon her. She drives her maid out to the township, and sees the boy’s body laid out, killed by the police. Later another black young man, the dead boy’s friend, comes to her for hiding and is found and killed in her own house.

Coetzee's writing is searing and memorable, spare yet evocative in detail and in mood. You cannot escape the impact of what he writes. Yet for all his understanding, he will not countenance any real hope for redemption. He points to our ability to fool ourselves, to weave impressions of our plight that suit our need for affirmation, that we can be “baring our soul” and still be manipulating our audience. Mrs. Curran has grandchildren – the sons of her daughter who fled South Africa, turned her back on her country and now lives in the United States. But Mrs. Curran does not envy those children. Instead, she regrets their having escaped this doom, this inheritance of weight and implication. To her, they will die “as stupid as the day they were born” – protected: never to drown, never to taste dirt in their mouth.

Tsotsi (2005) DVD / a film by Gavin Wood; starring Presley Chenewagae & Jerry Mofokeng; based on the novel by Athol Fugard

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Tsotsi has never known a real home, a real family or even a real name (Tsotsi is a nickname roughly translated as "thief"). An orphan in the Johannesburg townships all his life, much of it spent sleeping at an abandoned construction site, he and his likewise-situated friends get by as common thieves, mugging and robbing (and sometimes murdering) their randomly selected targets. On a solo job one rainy night, Tsotsi burglarizes a woman arriving at her gated home. Acting recklessly, he forces the woman from her car at gunpoint, ultimately shooting her in the stomach before speeding off in the stolen vehicle.

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The amateurish carjacking has netted more than an expensive auto however as only afterwards does Tsotsi realize what else he's escaped with--the woman's infant son. At a loss for what to do, Tsotsi bides his time in hiding, meanwhile discovering just what it means to be responsible for another human being. As the child's unlikely surrogate caretaker, he does his best to keep it nourished, an act involving the coercion of a wet nurse (also at gunpoint). Tsotsi also does his utmost to keep out of sight of hypervigilant authorities--the baby's father is a wealthy, high-ranking city official--who will not only treat him violently if caught, but will help ensure he receives, if not the death penalty, then the severest of sentences. But he knows he can't hide for long, and soon must make the biggest decision of his young life.

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Tsotsi won the oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 2005, and deservedly so. It exposes the vividly contrasting lifestyles in post-Apartheid South Africa where wealth and poverty make strange, often tragic bedfellows. Even with an overhaul of improvements to the infrastructure of the country, conditions remain devastatingly bad for millions of disadvantaged squalor camp residents, many of whom have AIDS and/or are stuck without a chance. Yet where there is love, there is hope and Tsotsi offers a vision of the kind of redemption available in even the most dire of circumstances. (DVD TSOTSI)

Cry, The Beloved Country / by Alan Paton

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"Cry, the beloved country,
for the unborn child

that is the inheritor of our fear.
Let him not love the earth too deeply.
Let him not laugh too gladly

when the water runs through his fingers,
nor stand too silent when the setting sun

makes red the veld with fire.
Let him not be too moved

when the birds of his land are singing,
nor give too much of his heart

to a mountain or a valley.
For fear will rob him of all

if he gives too much." (p. 102)
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"The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions." (p. 187)
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The Reverend Stephen Kumalo is a farmer and lay minister in the South African province of Natal when he one day receives a letter requesting his presence in Johannesburg. The message informs Kumalo of the whereabouts and ill condition of his sister Gertrude who, along with Kumalo's son Absalom (who'd originally been sent to search for Gertrude), have neither returned home nor contacted Kumalo and his wife since their departure ("When people go to Johannesburg, they do not come back" p. 38). Kumalo arrives in the capital to discover that Gertrude has taken up a life of prostitution and is now drinking heavily, having dissipated herself to the point of bedrest to the neglect of her young son. After convincing his sister to return home with her child, Kumalo begins to search for his son with the aid of Msimangu, an Anglican priest, first encountering his estranged brother John, a carpenter who's become involved in city politics, before catching on to Absalom's trail. Kumalo and Msimangu learn that Absalom has, among other things, been in a reformatory recently, that he's impregnated a young girl and is now under arrest for the murder (during a botched burglary) of Arthur Jarvis, a white anti-apartheid journalist and social activist who is also, coincidentally, the son of Kumalo's Natal neighbor James Jarvis.

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Paton's impassioned novel, published at the inception of Apartheid, is tremendous. A moving masterpiece to be sure, it is at the same time a universal fable of redemption, an ageless treatise on race, an anthemic paragon and indispensable treasure of world literature. Cry, The Beloved Country is among the most compelling of human stories, as breathtakingly poetic as it is stunningly captivating. Kumalo’s journey is the journey of one man and yet it is every man’s life. The gambit of emotion, the encumbrance of the human condition and reality of man’s coarse and conflicted nature unfolds with every encounter. Fear and joy, anger and love, selfishness and generosity, deceit and friendship, suffering and compassion are all envived in the context, capturing the reality of Paton’s South Africa and illuminating the problematic verisimilitude of the world at large. Historically, the book portrays the devastating effects of Apartheid on all South Africans, its blatant discrimination, internal destruction, and lasting impact as well as the resilient determination on behalf of a proud few to overcome their national blight. The author unveils human nature as a stubborn beast, but there is hope for South Africa. Man is an ignoble creature, but capable of compassion; imperfect and severely limited, but rich in hope and potential. It’s this truth which gives the novel its deft value, revealing life at its ugliest and its most redeeming, from degradation to transcendence, desolation to abundance, and wretchedness to beauty. (FIC PATON)

Literature of South Africa (RSA)

Blood Safari / by Deon Meyer; trans. from Afrikaans by K.L. Seegers

Emma Le Roux must hire a private bodyguard after her brother, still missing and presumed dead, is named a suspect in a string of murders. When Emma herself is linked to one of the murders, her situation becomes even more hair-raising at every turn..
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Other Lives: A Novel in Three Parts / by André Brink

Brink’s tripartite novel looks into the lives of three Cape Town men, all artists who vaguely know each other and who are preoccupied with their own problems, but whose lives are, never the less, peculiarly headed in the same direction, literally and figuratively..
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Summertime / by J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Laureate, is a world-renowned author and scholar hailing from Cape Town, RSA, and has recently published his third in a series of self-fictionalized memoirs. Summertime is a complex novel of self-examination and reflection, exploring the life of a recently deceased author whose somewhat prominent literary career is being researched by a young journalist.
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Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black: And Other Stories / by Nadine Gordimer
South African Nobel prize-winner Gordimer involves all aspects of her homeland in this compilation, including a British social activist whose South African lineage includes both blacks and whites, a Johannesburg woman searching for her dead husband’s lover, and a young Hungarian couple who’ve just emigrated to Cape Town.

Wake Up Dead: A Thriller / by Roger Smith

When car thieves Disco and Godwynn pull a job on a spiffy-looking Mercedes one sweltering Cape Town night, little do they suspect they're stealing more than just a car, because more than one person is just a tad bit interested in this particular vehicle, its contents and passengers. The victims of the carjacking, Roxy Palmer, a former runway model, and her husband Joe had been on their way to deliver a hefty sum of laundered cash to a local mercenary outfit when the hit came, leaving Joe murdered and Roxy temporarily at a loss for her next move before she makes a daring choice to pursue her husband's murderers and retrieve the money.

Meanwhile, Billy Afrika, a marine just returned from a soldiering stint in Iraq, knows that Roxy knows where the money, his money--funds owed him by his mercenary boss--can be found and will stop at nothing to get it. Just out of jail, a dangerous psychopath named Piper is also looking for something of 'his'--former cellmate Disco. Piper does things with regard for his convenience only, evidenced with his exceedingly bloody break out of prison after which he wastes no time in employing the same murdering tactics to find his former lover. As the action and suspense escalates, so does the tension as all the players involved sense that this cat and mouse game will soon culminate in nothing short of an all out bloodbath.

Hailing from South Africa, Roger Smith has crafted a gripping thrillride of a novel and a worthy follow-up to his breakout debut, the unanimously lauded Mixed Blood. Reminiscent of Elmore Leonard where sequencing, action and violence are at the forefront of the story, Smith handily incorporates enough clever dialogue to match his fast-moving characters and their volatile situations. Don't look for too much depth to the protagonists; most won't be around long enough for you to get a feel for anyway. In addition to the rapid pace and sleek narrative, another element adding texture to the book is the setting. Cape Town is currently a burgeoning metropolis, uniquely located, economically lucrative and as socially diverse as any of its Northern Hemisphere counterparts. It's a hotbed for well-conceived fiction like this to use as a background. (FIC SMITH)