Praise for
The Alphabet of Birds
‘The astonishingly diverse stories in SJ Naudé’s remarkable collection The Alphabet of Birds count as among the best in Afrikaans, built on recurring motifs and elements such as music; departure and travel; fairy tales and myths; illness, dissolution, dying and death; cities; a search for provenance and origins; forgetting and remembering; instinct and reason; that which is said or described versus that which remains unsaid or incapable of description forever; and the places and shapes of love in human relationships. For any reader who would like to keep up with what is happening at the forefront of Afrikaans literature, this collection is truly unmissable.’
André Brink
‘Naudé’s beautifully shaped and often heartbreaking stories take the idea of home and tear it apart, fling it upside down, and refashion it into a thing more mobile and less anchored. This is a world in which home increasingly exists as idea rather than place, where people trying to find their way back to a sense of belonging discover, almost too late, how transient their lives have become. At once unsettling and deeply moving, this collection announces the arrival of a writer of great humanity and style.’
Patrick Flanery
‘For the discerning reader the substantial stories in this collection provide a feast of rare originality and revelatory power. In exquisitely honed classical prose and with acute psychological insight Naudé shows how the social forces of our time bear upon the private lives of individuals. He is one of those rare South African writers who can subtly balance a relentless investigation of contemporary political conditions with an informed interest in the shape of mourning and desire in his characters.’
Marlene van Niekerk
‘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. His characters are restless, drifting between cultures and languages, the farm and the city, the difficult present and the vanished past. This is fiction attuned to the “borderless world” inhabited by the “lapsed South Africans” of the post-apartheid era.
Naudé’s debut was acclaimed in the Afrikaans literary world, marking the arrival of a questioning, cosmopolitan writer. This English translation will bring him the wider readership he deserves.’
Ivan Vladislavić
First published in English translation in 2015 by
And Other Stories
London – New York
www.andotherstories.org
Copyright © SJ Naudé, 2011
English-language translation copyright © SJ Naudé, 2015
First published as Alfabet van die voëls in 2011 by Umuzi, an imprint of Random House Struik, Cape Town, South Africa
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.
The right of SJ Naudé to be identified as Author of The Alphabet of Birds (original title Alfabet van die voëls) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The poem ‘Hemelkewertjie’ on page 226 is by Esta Steyn and is reprinted from DJ Opperman’s Kleuterverseboek with the permission of Tafelberg Publishers.
‘War, Blossoms’ was first published in A Public Space.
An excerpt of ‘Van’ was first published in Granta.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 9781908276445
Ebook ISBN 9781908276452
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Introduction
When I was growing up in white South Africa, ‘The Border’ was a phrase that everybody knew, denoting both a physical and a mythical place. Physically it meant the northernmost edge of South-West Africa (as Namibia was then known), which South Africa was desperately trying to hold on to. In a more interior, psychological sense, it was the space that separated us from the rest of the world. Out there was the Communist enemy, but also every other way of thinking that was different and threatening. ‘We’ were not them; ‘they’ were not us. Inside the border, history hung heavily.
Now that the border, psychologically at least, is no longer with us, white South Africans have had to learn that ‘they’ are not so very different after all. Nor is the outside world so very remote. These lessons are on full display in the writing of SJ Naudé, whose stories inhabit what he refers to as the ‘borderless world’. His characters – ‘lapsed South Africans’ – move as easily between London and Dubai as they do between Johannesburg and Bloemfontein. Mostly unanchored, drifting, they rub up against other drifters from far-flung places. In the same loose way, characters and images recur in different narratives; sexual identities are fluid; relationships form and dissolve like smoke; drugs are frequently imbibed.
All of this gives a cosmopolitan gloss to some of these stories. But, more powerfully, it also gives them a surreal edge, which is enhanced by the visions that come to their protagonists. One of them, for example, ‘dreams he is doing ballet with a Japanese man at the Voortrekker Monument.’ Or as another puts it: ‘isn’t it strange where ex-South Africans pop up these days and which subjects and worlds they join together?’ Yes, it is very strange.
Typically, at the heart of these stories, a man or a woman has left South Africa but, after years of absence, is drawn back by something personal. It could be a sick parent; it could be a search for some abstract truth that’s buried in the past. As one of them says, ‘Perhaps I’m grasping towards a core … an origin.’ If history is present at all, it’s in a form that is almost metaphysical. One character reminds herself ‘that she was unable to endure anything other than skimming over the surface of this country; that this was the reason for her original departure.’ South Africa is not an historical place (the word ‘apartheid’ crops up only once) so much as a condition to be escaped from – or come back to.
But then again, ‘return isn’t possible’. The past has a strong gravity, but it’s also paradoxically out of reach. There is a painful longing running through this book, made more poignant by having no object. Something is wanted, but what it is exactly, and what solutions it will provide, is unclear. Instead, the yearning for what is lost is more likely to lead only to further loss. In a disturbing sequence, a woman lives in the empty room of an abandoned garden flat, listening to other rooms being plundered around her nightly. Entropy is felt as a purification, as if cumbersome layers are being stripped away. But towards what?
Only one story is set entirely inside South Africa, with no connection to the outside world, and it’s perhaps no accident that it’s also the narrative in which all sorts of social issues crowd in. HIV/AIDS, the new racial hierarchy, the problems of poverty and government corruption: Naudé shows that he’s alert and alive to the new South Africa’s ills. But even here they take on an existential cast, like forces besetting the main character, a woman dying of cancer, in a kind of spiritual onslaught.
In this peeling away towards some essential core, language is one more veil to be shed. It’s ironic that a writer like Naudé, who uses words with elegant exactness, should find them so obstructive, but he does. ‘You’ve talked enough,’ one character is told. ‘Talking is over.’ What will replace speech, in this instance, is violence, but in other stories the implications are gentler: ‘You should learn to do without words,’ a character says. ‘There are better things.’ He means dance, which is another sort of language. Or maybe music will lead to the truth. And if that doesn’t work, even harmony can be broken down: a noise machine, which speaks with hisses and roars and bangs – maybe that will do the trick.
But how can there be an answer, if we don’t even know the question? Like their central characters, the stories seem to begin and end in mid-air. Who will finish writing them for us? The birds, Naudé tells us. A bird trapped in a house eventually flies out, leaving shit ‘on the interior walls, like crooked letters. Like Eastern calligraphy. Maybe that is an ending.’
Maybe it is. But in order to understand, you would have to speak in impossible symbols. It is this missing resolution, cryptic letters written in bird-shit, that embodies the mystery at the heart of these narratives. Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.
Damon Galgut
