The CTBF

(Logo taken from www.capetownbookfair.co.za)

The Cape Town Book Fair has been running for five years. I’d heard mixed reports about it; this year I’ll be seeing it for myself. For a literary conference the programme is shamefully poorly presented – it’s full of typos!

Some world-renowned authors will be there. Wole Soyinka talks about his memoir. Antjie Krog participates in a discussion of Nana Becky Ayebia Clarke’s African Love Stories. And I’m not a huge fan of Jodi Picoult’s novels, but I was impressed by a radio interview with her a while ago. She sounded cheerful and engaging, and she was funny and unusually articulate, so her views on ‘issue-driven fiction’ may well be worth hearing. There’s also a workshop on right-brain creative writing that could be interesting (or kooky? Or both?).

But hopefully fun, the whole thing.

Small, but striking

These two overlaps have the flavour of coincidence, but I prefer to think that when it comes to literature there’s more, and sometimes much more, to it than that.

The first happened a couple of years ago. A character in a novel that I was reading named a specific day of a particular month (sometime in August), and it was the very day and month I was reading it.

The second happened today, once I had decided what to read next. In my pile of unread books two caught my attention: Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind and Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down. I picked the Bind. And what do I find as its epigraph but a quote from the Hornby.

Another one

The gift orbits us
For H, then and now

I searched the crevices of the chair,
putting my fingers where my eyes were reluctant to go,
and sat back on my heels
with two bent bookmarks
and an old pen with a tiny rose in its lid.

I’m telling you, I told you,
that chair has a throat and a stomach. If ever
I have it recovered, I will ask the upholsterers
to search for your rectangle of glittering stones.

And I will return it –
in two or twenty years’ time.
I know the worth of that now;
I look forward to it.

As well as to the next time I drive to you,
all of three minutes away;
one road linking our homes.
A dip and a slight climb
that takes me through sun shot off glass,
shadows loosed by walls;
often the single great plane of night.
Hard to imagine traversing such solidity,
effortless in practice.

It seems that much of my life,
this life I remember
after the one I inhabited as a child,
is being spent with you with me
or in my thoughts.

When your voice was remote
there was your handwriting;
the two so similar, fast flowing.
But now you’re here,
and though you say it may change any day,
we’ve slowed into deeper water:
it feels permanent.

(First published in New Contrast 149, Autumn 2010)