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Because I Couldn't Kill You

6/9/2020

TITLE: Because I Couldn’t Kill You
AUTHOR: Kelly-Eve Koopman
PUBLISHER: Jacana Media/ MFBooksJHB
REVIEWER: Desiree-Anne Martin
A dazzling, brave debut memoir that leaves no stone unturned.
To say that Koopman is a wordsmith is a gross understatement. She has such an obvious, passionate love affair with the English language that it makes the reader often feel like an uninvited trespasser, a voyeur; her writing is that inexplicably intimate and soulfully seductive. She arranges words on the page, sometimes stacking them neatly

like her auntie’s prized Tupperware and other times scattering them haphazardly like her high-octane emotions on a particularly ‘bad day’. But they are always poetic, always lyrical, always resonating with some part of the reader’s needy soul.
Koopman writes of her struggles with racial identification as a woman of colour in South Africa. While this may appear, on the surface, appear to exclude a certain segment of the reading population, the themes of ‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are universal. This book does, however, demand to be read by all South Africans, across all colour lines.
She also writes eloquently and courageously about trans generational legacies and the need to understand the origins of our inherent assets and flaws. Her tender observations of the women who have gone before her helps her, as she traverses (sometimes literally) the road to defining her own identity.
Koopman digs deeply into the traumas and unspoken legacies of her family. She tries to forget her father – an abusive, mentally ill man – but his inconsistent, unexpected reappearances into her life and the manifestations of her own mental illness, leaves her with more unanswered questions about how this ghost of a man truly haunts her on a cellular level.
On the page, she also wrestles with her sexual identity, her amorphous expressions of love and striking a balance between her social and feminist ideals versus the reality she finds herself in.
No aspect of modern-day womanhood is left untouched and this book left the reader questioning, examining, indelibly touched and utterly breathless.
The reviewer received a copy of the book to review.

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Three Bodies

6/6/2020

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TITLE: Three Bodies
AUTHOR: Nechama Brodie
PUBLISHER: Pan Macmillan
REVIEWER: Nancy Richards
Nechama Brodie is enormously impressive. And prolific. With a PhD and established career in journalism, she has also authored short stories and the highly acclaimed, info-rich brace The Joburg Book and The Cape Town Book. Amongst other things, she is presently completing a non-fiction work on femicide. But two years ago she cut her teeth on a thriller, a supernatural thriller called Knucklebone, a bubbling blend of cops and witchcraft.

Reading it I remember thinking, gee whizz – from which part of Jo’burg’s heaving innards did she source this inside info! Well, wherever it came from she has gone back for more. Featured in Knucklebone were former cop Ian Jack and his one-time colleague Reshma Patel – and we find them again in Three Bodies, very definitely an item. And with the frontline peril of Reshma’s new appointment in a highly specialised cash heist prevention unit, you wonder how they sleep at night.
But stepping back from the crime and underworld, in a recent interview, NR Brodie, under which name she writes her thrillers, declares that her books always have an environmental backstory. In Archipelago, chapter one of Three Bodies, she puts her cards on the table with an alarming environmental foreground. Gardener Jonas Jiyane, methodically goes about his work removing triffid-like water hyacinth out of the Hartbeespoort dam. Water already strangled by algae where fish suffocate and he retrieves golf balls for resale. In the same interview she highlights the importance of unsettling otherwise ‘normal’ situations. And in the same chapter she does just this. As a thick black rope emerges from the water, Jonas, initially shocked thinking it to be a snake, realises it’s just rubbish. Until he finds there to be a whole mass of these spongey black ropes, writhing, apparently attached to something. ‘Something big.’ Turns out to be human hair. Attached to - a body. And so we have the first of the three bodies – all found in watery graves. Water is a theme that ripples through the book, beautiful but dangerous, pure but polluted, transparent but infinitely dark.
Next thing Reshma finds herself in a tunnel underneath Park Station, where there’s a channel filled with ‘unpleasant-looking brown water… the source of a thick stench of something like sewage’.
But Reshma is no sissy. Another theme that Brodie embraces (as a champion of feminism) is that a woman can be not just a cop, but a strong, fearless one. And that many cops do what they do in the name of truth and justice. In one hair-raising chapter in a strike on a heist-in-action, ‘Reshma, hyper-alert, kept her eyes fixed ahead of her. She’d fired off three shots on the approach. She didn’t want to waste more bullets, but there was a lone gunman on the blind side of the van.’
To be honest, I’m no crime-thriller fan – but back to Nechama Brodie, her research is intensely impressive. As is the level of her curiosity. In the acknowledgments she says ‘It is nearly a decade since I sat in a small Maboneng apartment with Gogo Nokulinda Mkhize and we discussed mermaids trapped in the Hartbeespoort Dam. The idea stayed with me, nor because it seemed implausible but because it had the feeling of truth (this might not be your truth, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so).’
Thrillers may not be your thing either, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t something more to them than crime.

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Where The Crawdads Sing

6/2/2020

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TITLE: Where the Crawdads Sing
AUTHOR: Delia Owens
REVIEWER: Beryl Eichenberger
It’s no surprise that Delia Owens’ ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ has sold over 4 million copies, spent 24 weeks as #1 on the New York Times best seller list and outsold many of the famous authors of our time. This masterpiece of storytelling intertwined with the natural heritage of the marshlands on the coast of North Carolina brings all of Owens’ understanding of nature and solitude together to create a mesmerising story. As the co-author (with husband Mark) of three

internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa including Cry of the Kalahari, her debut novel is an astounding piece of literary fiction.
Prejudice, injustice, solitude and conservation are the main themes in this novel and the narrative is a sensitive and creative ‘tour de force’. The inhabitants of the small town of Barkley Cove are wary and suspicious of the so-called Marsh Girl’, Kya Clark. She has lived a solitary existence on the marshes all her life. Abandoned by her mother and then her siblings, Kya is left as a small child with unpredictable Pa. With no schooling until the conservationist hungry Tate enters her waters, she is a bright and intelligent child whose love of the marsh natural heritage leads her into creative places where the birds become her friends and her artistic prowess is given free reign. Left completely alone at the age of ten the resourcefulness of this child allows her to use all the skills learnt from her Pa and brother Jodie to eke out an existence. She is a curiosity, not least to the immature teenage boys of the town who are fascinated by her wild beauty. But when one of their own, the golden boy of the town, Chase Andrews, is found dead in her territory the town turns on her. What transpires is an enthralling story, weaving together the magic of nature with the harsh realities of small town prejudice. At once a murder mystery, love story and coming-of-age novel. Hugely imaginative Owens has crafted a novel that is memorable and sensitive, yet at its core, disturbing.

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Because I Couldn't Kill You

Three Bodies

Where The Crawdads Sing

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