Notes on a bookish month
Sunday thoughts
In the first week of May I’m worried that my first-ever author talk will be a meandering lecture, but Kalk Bay Books is warm and cosy and the people who have come out to listen are generous, and it is difficult to meander or lecture when you are being stared at by a tiny rescue poodle named Frankie (fifth from right).
Franschhoek Literary Festival
Tanya plots us a course from Cape Town but I refuse to obey the GPS, partly on principle, partly because I know the area well and it seems it won’t make a difference. I drive us straight into a stop-go quagmire. As we sit and wait for the fourth stop to turn to go, I can’t help feeling that Silicon Valley has deliberately dug up all the roads in the Winelands just to force me to bend the knee to the robots. Worse, it has worked: I will never doubt them again.
As is always the case at Franschhoek I find myself feeling that I should go to as many sessions as possible and also that I should spend a lot of time dozing in the leaf-dappled sunshine. I realize I am channeling our dog Honey, who vibrates with excitement as she approaches the dog park and them promptly wanders along the periphery by herself thinking her dark doggy thoughts. I tell myself that it’s OK to take it easy because I’ve had a very busy time lately, and I am about to express this thought to a relaxed-looking Rebecca Davis when she tells me that she has come straight from Ukraine. I decide not to tell her how busy I’ve been.
There is a very old German Shepherd at our B&B that seems to bark angrily at exactly 7.24 every morning, presumably because of some passer-by who is very set in their ways. I want to be annoyed but he’s so dutiful, doddering stiffly across the lawn to go and do his job, that I start finding barking quite touching.
I ask an academic friend when I’m going to get an honorary degree from UCT and he tells me that I don’t have the stature to receive an honorary degree from anywhere, let alone UCT. I think this is a bit harsh since I am 6 foot 5, but it does make me more determined than ever to donate a small fee to a bible college in Missouri so that I can become a Doctor of End Times Tribulation and finally start making some real money.
The gossip is limited, with the gossips claiming that there is no new gossip and that the golden age of Franschhoek scandal is over. I hope this is true and not the result of my gossips having drifted out of the loop, reduced to being the subject of gossip rather than its purveyors.
Jonathan ‘Zapiro’ Shapiro always seems charmingly surprised by his success and slightly flustered by it, as if he’s drawn one cartoon that’s blown up and now he’s thinking he might give it a go professionally if he can just find the time.
Rebecca has the quickest wit in Franschhoek and I’m reminded of the pleasure of trying to keep up with someone who’s faster than you. It’s like being taken on an Alpine hike by an ultra-fit Bavarian, if Bavarians were subversive and muttered curses under their breath: you fall behind a lot but in the end you feel better for it.
Goodreads works: a reader tells me in a stern tone that she only bought ‘An Act of Murder’ because it had a rating above 4. If it had been 3.5, she tell me, she would not have bought it. I consider myself warned.
During a delightful panel led by Danielle Weakley, Mary Watson reminds me that we used to share a dirty passion for Days of Our Lives, and as we end the session reminiscing I feel quietly proud that Mary and I have managed to insert Stefano DiMera, satanic levitation and space twins into the country’s leading literary festival.
Johannesburg
On the flight up I find that I am somewhere between someone wearing the most delicious perfume and someone passing lamb-flavoured gas. One waft replaces the other, competing to take control of my mood. It feels like a metaphor.
A row or two ahead of me an elderly woman with beautiful hands keeps touching the passengers and flight attendants who squeezes past her with the most tender, consoling touch, the way a nun should touch a dying saint or how a vet might gentle an injured bird. The trouble is that she touches them on the bottom, and I find myself confused: am I watching the sort of human interaction that our society should strive for or do I need to keep notes in case I’m called as a witness for the prosecution?
Johannesburg looks fantastic and, after years in the Cape Town crawl, the traffic feels like something from a Jane Austen novel, as if I’m in a carriage en route to deliver an important letter.
There is an electronic scale in my hotel room. Since I imagine very few guests are staying long enough to gain or lose weight, I assume this is for rationing cocaine.
There is also a polite page of instructions warning me that I am definitely not in Kansas any more. Number 8 is especially intriguing:
Book launch in Sandton. The gathering is small but warm – old friends, faces from Facebook who are suddenly made flesh, and a scattering of readers who shyly hide at the back, which paradoxically makes them far more visible. Michelle Constant is a charming host who reads the room expertly, but I am so focussed on her questions that I forget to ask her to tell us about her being made a knight in France and whether this allows her to taunt you a second time.
My publisher, Marida, tells me that ‘An Act of Murder’ was Penguin Random House SA’s top seller at Franschhoek. If I could breathe the thin air I would whoop for joy, but I can’t so I give a small celebratory wheeze.
An Uber driver asks me what I think about the previous night’s meeting between Ramaphosa and Trump. I tell him I think Ramaphosa did as well as could be expected under the circumstances. He tells me that he more or less agrees with me, but with one difference: given the circumstances, he says, Ramaphosa probably did as well as could be expected. I realize I am in the company of a born politician or newspaper columnist, and fall silent.
Marida takes me to brunch at the Westcliff Hotel, which, I discover, is the Mount Nelson if the Mount Nelson’s parents finally made it leave home and get a job. We talk books and the biz and I find myself happily seduced by the view of Johannesburg, which includes a solitary elephant mooching around down yonder in the zoo. It is the fanciest authory thing I’ve ever experienced, and when a sleek waitron asks what we’re celebrating, and then, twenty minutes later, brings out this cake, I suspect I am as happy as a South African writer can be.
The Saturday of the Kingsmead Book Fair starts bright and cold, like the first sentence of 1984 except without the clocks striking thirteen. There are schoolchildren in my freezing 9.30am session with John van de Ruit and Paige Nick, and before the techies turn on our mics we wonder if they’re in detention.
We go outside to sign books, and I find a sunbeam and slowly regain the use of my hands. While defrosting, I discover that John is the Tom Cruise of the local book scene when it comes to talking to his fans: I have never seen anyone talk to readers for as long and with so much warmth. “And how long did you live there? Five years! What an incredible formative experience. But now is that on the other side of the park, or – oh, right, the side with the mall, of course. You know I did road trip past there in 1997 and…’
Flying home at dusk, the farm dams of the Tulbagh valley catching the last light and shining like polished copper coins scattered across the dark landscape below. A good month.
This was truly delicious to read - thank you!