By BRUCE DENNILL & ROB HOFMEYR
A Good Man by Ani Katz
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
31 Years To Peel A Banana by Phyllis Woolf
Madam: Impossible by Stephen Francis & Rico
The Wolf Hunt by Justin Fox
Two Months by Gail Schimmel
Thomas Martin is the narrator of his own story: a highly successful advertising executive with a home in Manhattan, husband to a beautiful and intelligent wife Miriam, and the adoring father of a young daughter, Ava. He is also the only functional member of his birth family. Abused as a boy by his domineering father, who is now dead, he is the sole supporter of his mother, a pathetic and incompetent 60-year old, and of his sisters, twins, who in early adulthood live on like children under the protection of their mother in the family house, a decaying Long Island mansion. The family is haunted also by the memory of another sister, Evie, who committed suicide. The story he tells is of introducing Miriam to the family, of their marriage, the birth of their daughter, Miriam’s postnatal depression, his rising career, visits to Long Island and the upbringing of Ava. He is the anchor, the solid man, the good man. There are his memories and family discussions of past events: contradictions abound between the way he and others reconstruct incidents and remember events. His career is reaching its heights when he pitches for a cell-phone company account, and he knows despite what his boss and his own team tell him, that this is going to be a coup. And of course the perceptive reader will have read the signs, which proliferate by the conversation, by the actions of each day, that the end is not going to be triumphant but tragic. This is a poorly written book, pretentious in its ambitions and a stark failure in its execution. The signs are too obvious. The story is too simplistic to be credible. A Good Man is a debut novel. Perhaps with better guidance and editing, there will be better to come. – RH
Deborah Levy is a highly acclaimed novelist and she has been nominated three times in the past seven years for the Man Booker Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. When I read The Man Who Saw Everything, I felt rather like the uncomprehending outsider must have felt viewing Salvador Dali for the first time. The book demands more than I can give! It is set in London and Berlin in the period 1988 to 1993, with the imminent demise of the GDR. Saul Adler is a young lecturer in a London college, about to visit East Berlin on an academic mission. His sexuality veers from one side to the other, depending on the lover. Unbeknownst to him, the young photographer who has just rejected his proposal of marriage is pregnant with his child, and this draws him into some sort of familial responsibility. Meanwhile he negotiates the culture and politics of the failing GDR, rejects in his turn the demands of a woman who claims him as a passport to England, falls in love with her brother, ends up in a hospital ward, has delusions of visitors which include his dead father, an English Marxist who abused him through his early life. The whole is bewildering. If you are looking for demanding, wry, ironic and incredible clever literature, this may be appropriate. If you want an account of the period which is intelligent and intelligible, also entertaining, try John le Carre or his ilk. – RH
At age 70 Phyllis Woolf writes an ‘autobiography’, a story that is very different because her life has been very different: she includes us in her intimate recollections of her tortuous, wonder-filled and bold journey – ‘disadvantaged’ physically as the outcome of Cerebral Palsy, she turned this around and became ‘differently and very advantaged’. Her parents’ marriage was stormy, a constant battle between a red-headed, vivacious and intelligent mother and incompetent and unsupportive father. Her mother shouldered the burden of bringing up her second daughter and the guilt of her disability. However, there came a point at which father left the family and a stepfather of enormous compassion and understanding took his place. Schooling and corrective surgery, with months of hospitalisation at a time, dominated Phyllis’ young life. She spent nine years at Forest Town and singles out various members of staff as having played special roles, positive and negative. On the whole a good place. Secondary school was a more difficult chapter, a boarding school outside Kimberley, which though officially bilingual was dominated by Afrikaans, language, culture and religion. Here she fought not only physical battles with her body but being an outsider, a “Jodin”. Gifted with a sharp mind and huge resilience, she succeeded. The book is not simply an autobiography: 31 Years To Peel A Banana is an account of important people, good and bad, of seeking employment, of qualifying herself, of confronting the real problems of mobility, dyspraxia and especially of prejudice. We are called to account for our facile assumptions about women and men with similar challenges, to hear their voices, to assess ourselves as we assess people who are ‘different’. The triumphs attained: obtaining a degree; building her own house with the collaboration of an architect and a builder who became deeply understanding and indeed good friends; a trip to Turkey and to Israel with a close companion; happy relationships with men; scuba diving and riding in a sidecar cross-country. This is an exuberant book, and one that is often moving. I wish that I had listened more carefully, dealt more intelligently with students and staff at Wits University when that responsibility was briefly a part of my portfolio. This book would have helped! – RH
With, generally speaking, the same news stories and current affairs themes to work with, political cartoonists are hard-pressed to create fresh perspectives on or analysis of what has happened in their country over each 12-month period. Madam & Eve has always worked around that by a) not always being focused on politics, and b) having character-driven stories, often continuing for a number of strips before going back to issue-related material. As such, particularly in a year (2025) in which South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) was the main focus for satirists, a comic strip annual with even a title that doesn’t relate to that theme – and not many would have thought of Tom Cruise wrapping up his most famous film franchise as a central pillar of that year – stands out. The mix of ideas and material inside is also pleasingly entertaining, with the mischievous Thandi turning up in a seemingly larger-than-usual proportion of strips (could Stephen Francis and Rico be succession planning?). And the mix of topics feels substantially less emotionally heavy to revisit than that in this volume’s competitors, making it a delight to dip into or race through in a single sitting.
The second in a series featuring dashing young naval officer Jack Pembroke, The Wolf Hunt looks at an often-overlooked chapter of World War Two – the arrival of, and destruction caused by – German U-boats in the waters around South Africa. The Cape convoy route was of huge strategic importance for supplying far-flung reaches of the war arena and having control of it would be hugely influential in how the conflict was eventually resolved. Justin Fox’s deeply researched fictional take on the period follows protagonists on both sides as they effectively have to learn a new form of warfare on the job, with technology and tactics being developed to at each step, each coming with their own teething problems. What Pembroke and his colleagues and the crews of the U-boats go through on a daily basis is enough to very quickly discourage anyone from ever wanting to replicate their service, but in this context, it speaks to the courage of the soldiers, regardless of which side they’re on. Readers will learn plenty about the facts of how naval warfare played out in 1941, and Fox’s battle scenes in particular are gripping and gruelling, highlights on a gritty adventure timeline. There is a thread – an Afrikaner trained by the Nazis to gather intelligence that would help turn the tide in favour of the Germans – that feels dramatically under-explored, but there is still plenty to hold the attention throughout.
Gail Schimmel’s characters inhabit a world all readers can relate to – especially South African fans who might be neighbours of either the author or her protagonists (the latter in recognisable but tweaked versions of local suburbs). And in parts, her books often tell gentle stories about urban life, its small, day-to-day challenges and how all of that impacts character relationships. But her brand of domestic noir means that the happy days can’t last forever and in Two Months, Johannesburg housewife Erica finds herself in trouble on page one. Her memory and her job have both gone and her marriage appears to be in trouble. Reconnecting with an old friend seems to offer some respite, but her condition means that rediscovering her identity is a slow, step by step process. It’s possible, one remove from the action on the page, to forecast how some of the narrative threads will unfold, but what can feel like predictability is used by Schimmel to ultimately undermine expectations. The power in the story is in the author’s understanding and depiction of the casual (and sometimes, calculated) cruelty of – distressingly – normal people. Villains don’t need to have lairs or plans to take over the world; they just need an agenda they’re willing to pursue without concerning themselves about the effects on those around them. And Schimmel’s portrayal of exactly such ordinary hate is both disturbing and absorbing.