Contemporary Authors

• Expulsion and the Nineteenth-century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction ( nonfiction) Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994
• The Children's Day Jonathan Ball (Johannesburg, South Africa), 2002
• The Reluctant Passenger Jonathan Ball (Johannesburg, South Africa), 2003
• Bodies Politic Jonathan Ball (Johannesburg, South Africa), 2008
• Lost Ground Jonathan Ball (Johannesburg, South Africa), 2011
• Invisible Furies Jonathan Ball (Johannesburg, South Africa), 2012

1. Bodies politic : a novel LCCN 2009351961 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title Bodies politic : a novel / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball, 2008. Description 312 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781868422982 1868422984 Shelf Location FLM2014 129599 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 B63 2008 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 2. The children's day LCCN 2009010360 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title The children's day / Michiel Heyns. Edition 1st U.S. ed. Published/Created Portland, OR : TinHouse Books, 2009. Description 244 p. ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780980243666 Shelf Location FLS2014 090802 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 C47 2009 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 C47 2009 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. The children's day LCCN 2002482327 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title The children's day / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball : [Distributed by] Thorold's Africana Books, 2002. Description 244 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 1868421252 Shelf Location FLS2014 090794 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 C47 2002 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 4. Expulsion and the Nineteenth-century novel : the scapegoat in English realist fiction LCCN 94012798 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title Expulsion and the Nineteenth-century novel : the scapegoat in English realist fiction / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1994. Description x, 293 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0198182708 (acid-free paper) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0639/94012798-d.html Shelf Location FLM2014 195806 CALL NUMBER PR868.S32 H49 1994 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) CALL NUMBER PR868.S32 H49 1994 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Invisible furies : a novel LCCN 2012435514 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title Invisible furies : a novel / Michiel Heyns. Edition First South African edition published in trade paperback. Published/Produced Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012. Description 296 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781868425099 9781868425105 (eBook) Shelf Location FLM2014 122628 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 I58 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 6. Invisible furies : a novel LCCN 2012435457 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title Invisible furies : a novel / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball, 2012. Description 296 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781868425099 1868425096 9781868425105 (eBook) 186842510X (eBook) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 7. Lost ground : a novel LCCN 2011465434 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title Lost ground : a novel / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball, 2011. Description 304 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781868424160 (trade pbk.) 1868424162 (trade pbk.) Shelf Location FLM2014 116893 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 L67 2011 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 8. The reluctant passenger : a novel LCCN 2004377387 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title The reluctant passenger : a novel / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball, 2003. Description 435 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 1868421600 Shelf Location FLS2014 090818 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 R45 2003 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 9. The typewriter's tale LCCN 2016038740 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel, author. Main title The typewriter's tale / Michiel Heyns. Edition First U.S. Edition. Published/Produced New York : St. Martin's Press, 2017. Description 270 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781250119001 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 T86 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 10. The typewriter's tale LCCN 2006376992 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Main title The typewriter's tale / Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball, 2005. Description vi, 237 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 1868422291 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER MLCS 2006/41965 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 11. Verkeerdespruit LCCN 2007540811 Type of material Book Personal name Heyns, Michiel. Uniform title Children's day. Afrikaans Main title Verkeerdespruit / Michiel Heyns ; vertaal deur Elsa Silke en Michiel Heyns. Published/Created Pretoria : Human & Rousseau, 2006. Description 270 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 079814727X (pbk.) 9780798147279 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 090810 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.H49 C47123 2006 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• A Sportful Malice - 2014 Jonathan Ball, Cape Town
• I Am Pandarus - 2017 Jonathan Ball, Cape Town

• Words Without Borders - http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-last-farm-novel-an-interview-with-michiel-heyns

  Skip to content
  Logo Image
  Magazine WWB Daily Education Events About Get Involved

  enter search term | hit return
  Home
  Current Issue
  Back Issues
  Book Reviews
  Find & Search
  Books
  WWB Daily
  About Us
  Donate
  Events
  Newsletter
  Magazine

  from the January 2008 issue

  The Last Farm Novel?: An Interview with Michiel Heyns

  Interviews by Dedi Felman

  I met Michiel Heyns—author, translator, and professor of English at Stellenbosch University from 1987 until 2003—last year when he was here in the U.S. as a visiting professor at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He's a tall, large-framed man who easily dissolves into crinkles of laughter, quickly revealing a gentle spirit beneath the somewhat imposing exterior. He's an ideal dinner companion—charming, erudite, gracious, and full of wit. And though our subject was serious, our conversation was punctuated by bursts of merriment.

  Four years ago, Heyns took early retirement from his university position to focus on his writing career. He is the author of three novels, The Children's Day, The Reluctant Passenger, and The Typewriter's Tale (all published by Jonathan Ball), and a fourth, Bodies Politic, to be published early in 2008.

  We met, however, through a slightly different channel. A London agent had sent me a novel last winter, just on the brink of its publication in South Africa, that I sped through in one extraordinarily long weekend sitting. Heyns had paired up with Marlene van Niekerk to translate her most recent novel, Agaat, and in the process created the kind of masterpiece about which those in the world of translation usually only dream. (One thinks of other renowned author/translator pairs—C.K. Scott Moncrieff on Proust, Edith Grossman on Cervantes' Don Quixote, Robert Fagles on Homer, and the praise that Gabriel Garcia Marquez bestowed on Gregory Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original.") In what appears to be a seamless melding, two master forgers of prose have come together to produce an extraordinary work for the English-speaking world.

  Agaat, winner in 2007 of South Africa's top award, the Sunday Times Fiction prize, the first translated work ever to win, is both a gripping story and, as we discuss in our conversation below, technically a supremely difficult work. It uses four voices, four tenses, and multiple registers to capture the sweep of South Africa's complex and famously tumultuous recent history. It's an extraordinary achievement on the part of both author and translator, and I was very eager to learn more about the book and the translation process that produced it from Heyns direct.

  AGAAT

  Dedi Felman: I thought we'd start off by talking first about Marlene [van Niekerk]'s work and the magnificent masterpiece of translation that you've wrought with Agaat. And it is an epic of translation [fingering the rather bulky South-African published copy that Heyns has carried to the interview]; how many pages is this?

  Michiel Heyns: (Laughter) It's 700, about 695 pages.

  The Afrikaans may have been a bit longer, in fact. Isn't that a rule of thumb that a translation is usually 10% under the original? That's what the publisher told me. I couldn't swear that the Afrikaans is longer, but I somehow remember 700 plus pages.

  DF: Can you first introduce our readers, because the book is not yet available in the US, although maybe it will be by the time we publish this . . .

  MH: We hope so . . . (laughter)

  DF: Introduce us to the story, and maybe a little bit to Marlene herself?

  MH: This is obviously the long-awaited follow-up to Marlene's first novel, Triomf, which was published here and very well received; it is being filmed at the moment in Afrikaans, by a Zimbabwean director living in Paris.

  The interesting thing about Agaat, apart from the fact that it was long awaited—it was almost ten years after Triomf—is that it is also such a change in register.

  Triomf is raunchy, it's very urban, the people are frankly trashy, they are the left-behinds of apartheid. They were the voting fodder. They feel disenfranchised, well, they're not exactly disenfranchised, people are still competing for their votes, but by and large that's all they are really good for. It's a very urban novel with a very deliberately unelevated idiom—it's very crude, extremely crude.

  And then came Agaat, which is a farm novel. The family, the people are what I suppose can be regarded as a kind of Afrikaner aristocracy. They are people who went to university, they are landowners.

  Milla, the main character, is a fifth-generation, I think it's fifth-generation, owner of this farm—a farm that's been passed down through the female line—called Grootmoedersdrift. Grandmother's Drift, Grandmother's Crossing. And so she certainly feels, and her mother feels, that they are a kind of aristocracy. And what Marlene is plugging into here is a very strong tradition of the farm novel in Afrikaans, a tradition that goes back to C. M. van den Heever, who wrote these very grueling stories called Droogte which is "Drought," Laat vrugte which is "Late Fruit"—stories that are very much rooted in the naked earth, and tend to be about very strong, dour, survivors.

  Anyway, Marlene is subverting [this tradition] because the story of Agaat is what is happening now in a new dispensation. Milla is still in charge. Her son has left the farm in disgust, really, of the political system, he is not interested in inheriting the farm. Milla's husband has become a bit of a cipher. He is a very traditional sort of male chauvinist pig, but he is, in fact, emasculated, really, by Milla's power, Milla uses her sexuality . . .

  Then of course there is Agaat, who is the—"a little colored," as they would have been called in South Africa—girl whom Milla takes into the house. Milla finds this little girl on her mother's farm, absolutely destitute, desperately ill, with a misshapen little arm. And she takes pity on the child, takes the child into the house, raises her, and teaches her to speak. Agaat can hardly speak when she comes into the house [a fact that echoes Milla's later loss of speech].

  And by and large, Milla imagines that she is performing an act of great mercy and charity.

  But Marlene is, in Agaat, as in Triomf, very interested in questions of power and, of course, I think she sees Milla's taking up of Agaat as an exercise of power, as a manipulation.

  I found a passage in T.S. Eliot [from "Little Gidding"] which I thought expressed very well the sort of central idea of Agaat and Marlene agreed and we reprinted it and what it says is:

  And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. [Heyns' emphasis]

  I think that very much sums up where we are when the novel starts. Because the novel starts with Milla on her deathbed, slowly, very slowly dying of motor neuron disease (ALS), and her faculties shut down one by one. And for 700 relentless pages we have this dismantling of this body traced then in various ways.

  There are four narratives. One is the present tense: the description of Milla's day-to-day communion with Agaat. Because Agaat, now, and the roles have been reversed: whereas Milla taught Agaat to speak, to read, to write, now Agaat has to speak for Milla, she has to read for her, she has to write for her, she now does everything for Milla. And of course Agaat is [now the locus of] power and I think the novel very much swivels on that Foucaultian idea of caring as an exercise of power.

  I'm rambling (laughter) so . . . I'll stop there.

  DF: The power structures in this novel are very elaborate. Maybe we can go back to that in a minute. I also want to note your important statement that "caring has a power of its own." Let's return to that as well.

  Now, you started to say that there are four narrators. Can you go through and explain who those four narrators are? What their tenses are. It's a very complex weaving of voices, of tense . . .

  MH: . . . it is voice—and style really, isn't it? The stylistic differences are perhaps the most noticeable.

  The first is the main narrative. The present tense. It is in the present tense, which is not strange in Afrikaans because that is the usual narrative tense. But in English, it would have been more obvious that it is the here and now. And that it is what is happening now and in this room between Milla and Agaat. And it registers every move Agaat makes through Milla's consciousness. So it's a hypersensitive account of a sick room and of Agaat's movements.

  Then, from that, we move to the most traditional, the flashback in which we are retold in fairly conventional chronological order the story of Milla's marriage. It starts with Milla's engagement to Jak. This is when her mother hands over the farm, and it is when Milla assumes power: she assumes power over Jak and she assumes power over the farm. Jak, of course, thinks that he is assuming power.

  Now this section, Marlene has told in the second person. And Marlene debated this for a long time and then decided that the second person was interesting in that it has an almost confessional, even accusatory inflection. . . . Milla is recalling what she herself did as "you did this," then "you did this," and then "you did that."

  DF: Accusatory?

  MH: Yes. Well, you know: You did that. You did that.

  Accusatory is too strong, but it's a sense of . . . a recording of what she has done as if she is pointing a finger at herself.

  DF: At herself?

  MH: Yes. Perhaps not intentionally, but the style is turning the novel onto Milla. For instance, say in the sex scene between her and Jak. It gives it a kind of an objectivity which first person wouldn't have had. As if someone is standing back, slightly skeptically, and describing Milla's movements from outside.

  DF: It's interesting, because . . . it's not the way that I remember that scene. The way I remember it, the sex scene seems so intimate and so real—and so full of life—that it's a direct contrast with the sickbed. As you say, the sickbed voice is a distanced voice, a voice twice removed. It's someone else's consciousness. It's a different person almost.

  But, of course, yes, in the sex scene there's distance as well. And it's a helpful distance because it helps you (the reader) not to take sides. And that's why I stopped you when you said "accusatory," because I thought that Marlene was trying to set it up so that you're not just sympathetic with Milla, but perhaps also with Jak. And, weirdly, I ended up sympathetic with Jak (Milla's male chauvinist husband) precisely because of that voice. Maybe more sympathetic than I should have been? (Laughter)

  MH: Well, I think Marlene would be pleased. No, because Marlene is actually very hard on Milla, harder than I am, in the sense that she's very interested in Milla's manipulation of power, to the extent almost of wanting to nullify the good intentions that there were, you know. Those good intentions were thoroughly mixed, of course. But, anyway, so Marlene is not very sympathetic to Milla. She's not very sympathetic to Jak either. But she does see him as a victim of Milla, and that, in a way, he's reacting to his own powerlessness. And he's reacting in the only way he knows how, which is violently and very unpleasantly.

  DF: OK, so now let's go back to the two voices.

  MH: Yes, so the two voices. Then the third voice is the diaries. These diaries start when Milla adopts Agaat. When Agaat is taken into the house, Milla decides she must keep a record of this. But, just to confuse us, these diaries are re-read, read back to us in reverse order. Another aspect of T.S. Eliot that Marlene likes is "in the end is my beginning" because the novel does exactly that, it eats its own tail. And it retraces events. So when we get to the end of the novel, Milla's death, it is also recounting the tale of the beginning, which is Milla's adopting of Agaat.

  DF: So when we get to her death, we are right at the beginning with the adoption of Agaat.

  MH: Yes.

  DF: And why does Milla decide to record her doings at the time of the adoption of Agaat?

  MH: She sees it as a kind of covenant with God. She has undertaken it, and she writes a solemn little bit, "And on this day . . . I, Milla, undertook this, and may God help me in this." It is all very pious. And for that reason, perhaps, she thinks she must keep a record of every day, of Agaat's development. So we have a very detailed account of how Agaat starts to talk, and Milla's pleasure in teaching Agaat, and Agaat's pleasure in things. And that would be hard to see as merely an exercise of power on Milla's part. And Milla shares, in fact, her knowledge of the land, so that Agaat, by the end of the novel, is as well informed on the plants, the animals, farming techniques as Milla herself was. And Milla learned all these things from her father.

  DF: And, as you say, this is a matrilineal descent to begin with, and there is this sense that she is grooming Agaat for that, even though Milla has a son.

  MH: And so she is passing on, and of course, also what one is more aware of in the Afrikaans than in the English, is that Marlene is passing on a whole cultural possession, in terms of songs, poems . . . And it is also Marlene writing down a lot of things that might get lost. Old words. Myths.

  DF: I don't think you talked about this, but historically, the starting point and ending date of the novel are significant . . .

  MH: Yes, they are significant. I think Milla and Jak got married right after the accession to power of the National Party, in 1948. Then Agaat was adopted in the early sixties, so she is an apartheid child. And she is very much brought up in accordance with the tenets of apartheid.

  Agaat's great bitterness is that when she is brought into the house, Milla doesn't have any children of her own and Agaat's brought up almost as Milla and Jak's child. Then Milla gets pregnant with Jakkie, and Agaat is put into the backyard and made into a servant. So having been brought up as a member of the family, all of a sudden she is this servant. In fact, she becomes a nothing in that the other servants don't accept her. They think she's privileged; she has a better room than they do. But nor is she accepted into the house because she's not actually part of the family. So she's left in between. And she's very bitter about it.

  DF: But we haven't got to the fourth narrative yet.

  MH: Right. The third is the diaries . . .

  So the fourth. The fourth is: Marlene talks of the lyrical passages, they are stream of consciousness, tracing all the various stages of the disease. I think that's how Marlene saw it. But they are strange washes of memory and associations, in terms of the body that is slowly breaking down.

  It's often not very easy to see what is happening there, and one has to, when one has read the whole novel, one has to go back, and you see that Marlene has woven into those passages themes from the rest of the novel that she has also very carefully traced. For example, Milla first becomes aware that she is ill is when she drops something. She discovers suddenly that she can't hold things anymore. And then, she uses a wheelchair, and then she can no longer use a wheelchair.

  And so there is that breaking down. In poetic terms. Very strongly metaphorical. Very strongly associative. Those are the italicized passages.

  THE TRANSLATION PROCESS

  DF: So, for you, when you are translating, these four different voices, four different tenses: What are you thinking about when you are switching between voices? Are you consciously thinking about trying to make these voices different? Or are you just following the pattern of the words?

  MH: I'm following the pattern of the words and because the writing is so strong, if I stay close enough to that, the voices will be different. And, also, I think sentence by sentence. I've read the whole novel. I know the setup. I know the various tensions and styles. But then I go through it in a narrowly focused way.

  I go through the translation at least three times. First, a very quick translation, I hardly look up any words, I just write; and then, second, I come back and check against the text; and then a third time, again, this time without the Afrikaans text, seeing how it reads and whether it can stand on its own. And then a final reading.

  So what I'm thinking about in the first round is how one translates this word in this context. As for the larger context, that I look at later when I come back.

  DF: So you go through then a final revision process and that's where you are ensuring that the voices have a certain continuity, and in this round you are checking not against the text but against yourself?

  MH: Yes. I do. That's difficult. Because you want to go back to the text all the time. You say, OK, I'm done and then you ask yourself, what does this mean? I was sitting on the train today reading this and thinking, hell, I want to revise this. (Laughter). And I think obviously if I had read it another time without looking at the text I would have made a lot of changes. But you reach a point where you say, OK, this for the time being is where I am. And, it's not the last word.

  DF: And, of course, the translator's feeling here is similar to the author's feeling of constantly wanting to revise. Where is the ending point?

  MH: Yes, and this is where Marlene was great to work with because she didn't—I think some authors could have driven one mad in that they would have felt all the time, this could be better, this could be better. Marlene trusted me, some people may feel she trusted me too far. And she read critically, and suggested lots of changes. But she wasn't fussy. She didn't try to rewrite the novel that I was translating.

  DF: I was struck—I'm leaping ahead of ourselves—but I was struck by something that Marlene said in an interview that she did with you about your own work. "When one reads your work one soon falls under the spell of the well-chiseled Heyns sentences, wittily elegant in the qualifications, the oppositions, the exclusions, the symmetries that they propose." And what struck me reading that quote was that that was exactly the impression I had of her writing—and that's the kind of thing that makes one wonder about the convergences involved in translation. The grasp of the language is what impressed me most about your own translation of Marlene—and of course with translation there's always the question of how much was her and how much was you.

  MH: Marlene is an absolute master of Afrikaans. Afrikaans is in part an offshoot of Dutch, which she speaks fluently, so she can dredge up Afrikaans words, words that are not in common use. She plays on a very large organ, to use her term for it. And I tried to do justice to that.

  Having said that, our styles are very different. When Marlene talks of my "well-chiseled sentences" she is probably thinking in the first place of The Typewriter's Tale, which is very self-consciously Jamesian. That kind of structure. Her structures are extremely well chiseled but they are well chiseled in a very different sense. Of course, her style is much more varied than mine, but I think her style is also much more colloquial than mine. But, of course, that's probably saying more about The Typewriter's Tale than Agaat.

  Let me put it this way, I admire Marlene's style tremendously but it's not my style. And I know that Marlene admires my style, but it's not her style. And I think that if she were to have written The Typewriter's Tale she would have cut half of it, because in the Jamesian manner, the sentences are very long and very circumlocutory. Marlene's style is much more trenchant.

  DF: Although, I also feel obliged to interject that Marlene has written a very long book. So she is clearly no stranger to length herself, though yes, in the frame of the individual sentence she is concise. Her length thus is not the same as your length.

  MH: And she does say, against herself, "I'm always telling my students to 'cut, cut'." [Laughter.] And they say, "but look at Agaat." And in fact, Agaat is very extensively cut. It could have been twice as long.

  AFRIKAANS AND ENGLISH

  DF: You were saying that Marlene is an absolute master in Afrikaans. It's interesting because you yourself are fluent—amazingly fluent—in English. Yet you are also fluent in Afrikaans. In fact, Afrikaans is what you grew up with.

  MH: Yes, Afrikaans is my first language. I feel more articulate in English than Afrikaans. Perhaps because I've had more practice in having to construct sentences on the hoof, as it were. When I lectured, I never wrote out my lectures, I used to stand, and improvised it to a large extent, which I never had to do in Afrikaans, because I never lectured in Afrikaans. I'm more confident in English, I think, than Afrikaans.

  DF: When did you make the decision to write in English? Was it a decision that you made very early on?

  MH: The first time I tried to write, when I was at school, I started writing a diary and I wrote it in English. I don't know why. Perhaps at that stage because I needed a certain distance. Writing a diary is an embarrassing thing . . . and writing in another language . . . I'm speculating about my own motives, of course. And then, when I came to university, I was doing English as a subject and I was very much attracted to English literature, and, I don't know, I just started writing in English, and of course, once I started lecturing, my whole professional life was in English. Of late I've gone back to Afrikaans because I'm no longer teaching full time. And because many of my friends are, in fact, Afrikaans, and because I've now done two translations of Marlene's works, and there are other translations. So I'm feeling more in touch with Afrikaans than I have for long time.

  DF: So does that tempt you to want to write a novel in Afrikaans?

  MH: You know, I am tempted. But I'm only tempted so far. You know my first novel has been translated into Afrikaans and they asked me if I wanted to translate it myself. And I said no. I didn't think I could. Also, many people asked me why my first novel hadn't been written in Afrikaans. The novel is set in the Free State, it's very autobiographical, it's mainly about Afrikaans speaking people; it would have made a lot of sense to write it in Afrikaans, but I couldn't. I mean it sounded false to me when I tried to write in Afrikaans.

  Just because my style . . . call it corrupted, call it contaminated, call it influenced by English. And interestingly, the translation, which I think is a good translation, has vindicated me. Now don't quote me on that. But I don't think it works that well in Afrikaans. And it should, because it's such an Afrikaans story.

  DF: Wait, it's a very Afrikaans story, but the translation vindicates your decision to write in English? (Laughter)

  MH: What I'm saying is that the translation into the language that many people say it should have been written in in the first place, suggests that NO, it was an English novel and there's something uncomfortable about the translation into Afrikaans.

  Where it should have been a coming home, as it were, for the novel, there is sense in the Afrikaans translation of something not quite fitting. That's my sense. But I'm the author and probably have too much invested in my version of it.

  But, Marlene, for instance, feels about my translation of Agaat, she says: it's as if I were thinking in English. I don't feel that way about the Afrikaans translation of The Children's Tale—that it's as if I'm thinking in Afrikaans.

  I was given the translation and given the freedom to change, of The Children's Tale, but I didn't feel I could really . . .

  DF: Can one easily wear the cap of both author and translator without literally rewriting the novel for yourself? One thinks of Kundera . . .

  MH: I believe that that is what Andre Brink does. I believe he doesn't actually translate his work, so much as he writes both versions simultaneously. And now he has the freedom to do it.

  AGAAT, PART TWO

  DF: I wanted to go back to Agaat and the question of the various power structures in the novel. It is such a dense web. There's Agaat's relationship to Milla, there's Agaat's relationship to KleinJak, there is Milla's relationship with KleinJak, there is both of their relationships with Jak. There's Milla's relationship with her family. She starts out in the opening scenes as very independent and rebellious—an interestingly independent woman even as we meet her in her completely dependent later stages.

  With such a complex setup, I wondered whether the point is not to create any kind of structure at all but just merely to trace the shifts between the characters. It's complicated by the flashbacks, and the back and forth of the chronology, but that it's the shifting of the relationships that are the point rather than any particular structure of power.

  MH: I think you are absolutely right because those power relationships shift all the time. At times, Milla is very much under the domination of Jak. But in the larger context, she is probably the stronger character. The moment she becomes pregnant she is stronger than Jak, because she is now producing the heir. So through bringing forth their manchild she is stronger than her husband, but of course in terms of the mores of the time she is under the authority of her husband. Yes, so you're right that it shifts—and with Milla and Agaat, almost from second to second. Even when Milla is completely powerless and lying there she can still project a certain kind of power. Which Agaat can choose to ignore and yet at times, has to heed. I think that's what makes those present tense passages so very strong. It is always a struggle. It's not just someone lying flat on her back being dominated by someone else. It's a game that is renegotiated all the time. So I think you're absolutely right that it's not a rigid structure.

  DF: Clearly there's a parallel to the shifts in the form of the novel as a whole, because you are constantly shifting back and forth in time. Is there a parallel to that in the language?

  MH: I hadn't thought of the language itself as embodying those shifts.

  DF: The idea struck me because of that fourth voice . . . That fourth voice is where she is taking language and that negotiation of structure to the extreme . . .

  MH: Yes, I think it's true that that's where the language is liberated and deprived of those structures of tense and reference that one would normally have. It's a suspension of a lot of structure. Certainly Marlene is trying to give the impression of a more subconscious awareness floating through. But very much in terms of sense impressions, Marlene writes very much for the senses, sound, smell, touch, all those are very much part of her recollections as floating associations.

  DF: The publisher's description of the novel starts by noting the main character's paralysis of voice due to the advanced stage of her disease, yet one leaves the novel with a powerful sense of Milla and Agaat's voices. Does the literal paralysis of the speech of the "heroine" amplify her voice? How is this achieved?

  MH: The four narratives help. As one narrative slows down, the other one is picking up momentum. We are moving toward the moment of revelation: we know that we will find out how Milla came across Agaat as the present-tense narrative unwinds, and we know that Milla will die. And these two narratives are seeking each other all the time.

  DF: In a critical reading of "The Hedgehog," by the Dutch poet Ida Gerhardt, van Niekirk warned against the illusory aesthetic communion with the object one is contemplating. As the reviewer of van Niekirk in the Washington Post put it, "identity is not empathy." Does this resonate with you in regards to Agaat?

  MH: In quite a strong sense that would be true of Milla's appropriation of Agaat and the recreation of Agaat in terms of a white Christian nationalist concept of identity. Agaat is baptized in the Dutch Reformed church, admittedly not while there are white people in the church, there was apartheid in the church. And while Milla is enforcing this white identity, she is at the same time trying to sustain the ideology of apartheid. She wants a little brown girl who is a copy of a little white girl, except who doesn't make any of the claims that a white girl might want to make. It's far more of an imposition of an identity than empathizing. She wipes out Agaat; she tries to wipe out Agaat's personality. There are painful scenes where she is training Agaat. It's like training a dog.

  DF: Yes, and going back to "identity is not empathy," Marlene is very successful in not letting you ever feel comfortable that you are identifying with a character. You're never quite sure how Agaat is taking something—Agaat can be impenetrable.

  MH: Yes, and Agaat uses her silence as a weapon. And Milla becomes absolutely furious and beats her in order to get her to speak. And then, of course when Milla is speechless literally, Agaat can decide when to say and when not to say and she can control her own silences, but no less cryptically than earlier. Agaat plays games with Milla while Milla is dying.

  DF: Given the epic sweep of history in the novel, I saw this as a novel not of "New South African Writing" but, in many ways, as an attempt to bring closure to a generation of South African writing, a generation of writers that played off the farm novel. Is that fair?

  MH: Closure is too strong. I think Marlene would like to see it as a continuing conversation with those forms. I think she's made it very difficult for someone to write a conventional farm novel after this. She's changing the tradition by contributing to it, but at the same time the tradition is informing what she's writing. And this makes further writing possible to a tradition that has been changed through Marlene's intervention in it.

  And I think because Afrikaans literature is such a relatively small body of work that this will be a powerful addition to that body.

  DF: What has the critical reaction been in South Africa to Agaat?

  MH: It's been mixed. In the beginning, there were some very powerful reviews, in Afrikaans, of course. Very appreciative. People saying that this has changed the face of Afrikaans writing. But then also a certain timidity and a lot of people not feeling quite sure that it's OK to say that they liked it. Marlene is a controversial figure in Afrikaans circles. She's not part of the people who see themselves as warriors for a revitalization of Afrikaans. She has very little time for those kind of more politically inspired movements. So she's not popular in those circles. And some people were a bit cagey. But some people were extremely enthusiastic and it has now won every major prize. It won the Hertzog prize, which is the biggest Afrikaans prize, and she won the University of Johannesburg prize, which is also a very big one. And we'll know on the 2nd of May whether it's been shortlisted for the Sunday Times prize because for the first time this year the Sunday Times prize is open to translations so it's just been entered, and that's the biggest literary prize. [ED Note: The novel was not only shortlisted but went on to win the Sunday Times prize.] So I don't want to speak on Marlene's behalf, but I think Marlene feels that in South Africa people haven't taken the kind of care in reading the novel as, for instance, in Holland. The Dutch reviews were amazing. They were long reviews, they were analytical. And they weren't scared to say that this is a great novel. Some of the Afrikaans reviews were very tepid. So yes, I'd say mixed. The English, there was that review in the Sunday Times by Leon de Kock of the translation which is very, very positive.

  THE SOUTH AFRICAN SCENE

  DF: What is going on in the current South African literary scene?

  MH: I wish I could give you a very convinced answer on that because I'm not so sure. Clearly a lot of writers feel we can no longer write about apartheid, we must move on, at the same time, a lot of writers feel that we cannot disregard the past. So you still have a lot of novels that deal with that situation. And, of course, you have a lot of expat novels because so many people moved out of the country. And they write novels about people coming back to South Africa. And we who didn't leave are a bit impatient with these novels. And usually the main character is someone who comes back to South Africa because their mother is dying and then they confront the past again, that sort of thing. That is a genre that seems a bit overpopulated at the moment.

  DF: And a final question that I must ask: are there writers that we should keep an eye out for? Writers who are still unrecognized?

  MH: Etienne van Heerden . . . he is, after Marlene, the most noteworthy. Karel Schoeman . . . I've just started translating a novel, Equatoria, by Tom Dreyer, that will be published in the UK.

  Read more from the January 2008 issue

  Go Back

  Subscribe to our newsletter for new issue content

  email address

  Subscribe
  Dedi Felman

  Dedi Felman is a senior editor at Simon and Schuster. She reads several languages and helped found The Front Table, a book review web publication.

  » More about Dedi Felman

  Like what you read? Help WWB bring you the best new writing from around the world.

  Give Now
  — top —
  Logo image
  Content
  About
  Donate
  Contact
  Follow Us
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Instagram
  Magazine
  Book Reviews
  WWB Daily
  Words without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.
  Follow

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiel_Heyns

  Michiel Heyns
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Michiel Heyns
  Born 2 December 1943
  Stellenbosch, South Africa[1]
  Occupation Author, Translator, Academic
  Nationality South African
  Michiel Heyns (born 2 December 1943) is a South African author, translator and academic.

  He went to school in Thaba 'Nchu, Kimberley and Grahamstown, and later studied at the University of Stellenbosch and Cambridge University before serving as a professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch, from 1983 until 2003.

  Since then he has concentrated on his writing full-time, and has won numerous awards for his reviews, translations and novels.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Novels
  2 Translations
  3 Awards
  4 References
  Novels[edit]
  The Children’s Day, Jonathan Ball (2002)
  The Reluctant Passenger, Jonathan Ball (2003)
  The Typewriter's Tale, Jonathan Ball (2005)
  Bodies Politic, Jonathan Ball (2008)
  Lost Ground, Jonathan Ball (2011)
  Invisible Furies, Jonathan Ball (2012)
  A Sportful Malice, Jonathan Ball (2014)
  I am Pandarus, Jonathan Ball (2017)
  Translations[edit]
  Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat (2006)
  Marlene van Niekerk, Memorandum: A Story with pictures (2006)
  Tom Dreyer, Equatoria (2008)
  Etienne van Heerden, 30 Nights in Amsterdam (2011)
  Chris Barnard, Bundu (2011)[2]
  Eben Venter, Wolf, Wolf (2013)
  Ingrid Winterbach, It Might Get Loud (2015)
  Awards[edit]
  2006 Thomas Pringle Award for Reviews in 2006
  2007 Sol Plaatje Prize for Translation for Agaat
  2008 South African Translators' Institute Prize for Agaat
  2009 Herman Charles Bosman Award for Bodies Politic
  2010 Thomas Pringle Award for Reviews in 2010
  2012 Herman Charles Bosman Award for Lost Ground
  2012 The Sunday Times Fiction Prize for Lost Ground
  2015 Herman Charles Bosman Award for A Sportful Malice
  References[edit]
  Jump up ^ http://www.stellenboschwriters.com/heynsm.html
  Jump up ^ http://www.michielheyns.co.za/

• Michiel Heyns - http://www.michielheyns.co.za/

  Michiel Heyns

  Michiel Heyns grew up all over South Africa – Thaba Nchu, Kimberley, Grahamstown, Cape Town - and was educated at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. For much of his adult life he was an academic, lecturing in English at the University of Stellenbosch, but after publication of his first novel, The Children’s Day, he took to writing full-time, publishing The Reluctant Passenger in 2003 and The Typewriter’s Tale in 2005 (published in the UK by Freigh Books in 2016, and due to be published in the US by St Marin's Press in 2017). He published Bodies Politic in 2009, which was short-listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and won the 2009 Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction. His fifth novel, Lost Ground, was published in April 2011, and was awarded both the Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for 2012. Invisible Furies, was published in May 2012, and A Sporful Malice in 2014. The latter novel won the Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction. His latest novel, I am Pandarus, wil be published by Jonathan Ball in early 2017. In 2006 he translated two works by Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat and Memorandum. Agaat was awarded the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for 2006; published as The Way of the Women in the UK in November 2007, it was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in the US. Michiel Heyns won the English Academy's Sol Plaatje Award for Translating (2008) as well as the South African Translators' Institute Award for a Literary Translation for his translation of Agaat. He has also translated Equatoria by Tom Dreyer, published by Aflame Books (UK, 2008). His translation of Etienne van Heerden's 30 Nights in Amsterdam was published early in 2011, and his translation of Chris Barnard's Bundu was published later that same year. This novel, in its translated form, was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013. He translated Eben Venter's novel, Wolf, Wolf (published 2013, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize), and Ingrid Winterbach's It Might Get Loud (2015). His translation of Winterbach's The Shallows is due out in early 2017. . He reviewed regularly for the Sunday Independent, for which he was awarded the English Academy's Pringle Prize for Reviewing for 2006 and again for 2010.

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview2

  The author's curse
  David Lodge spent three years writing and researching a biographical novel about Henry James. Then he learned that at least four other writers had been at work on similar projects. Soon he found himself caught up in a web of irony and coincidence worthy of a Jamesian plot
  View more sharing options
  Shares
  0
  David Lodge
  Friday 19 May 2006 19.53 EDT First published on Friday 19 May 2006 19.53 EDT
  If anyone deserves to win this year's Man Booker Prize, it's Henry James. During 2004, he has been the originator of no fewer than three outstanding novels.

  Thus began Peter Kemp's review of my novel, Author, Author, in the Sunday Times of August 29 2004, a few days before its official publication date. The other two novels to which he referred were Colm Tóibín's The Master, published in March of that year, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, published in April. Henry James is the central character of both The Master and Author, Author. The central character of The Line of Beauty, which is set in the 1980s, is a young man who is writing a postgraduate thesis on Henry James, and Hollinghurst's novel was seen by several critics as a stylistic homage to him.

  Sign up for the Bookmarks email
  Read more
  Kemp did not mention another novel about Henry James, which had been published in November 2002 and was reissued as a paperback in the spring of 2004, Emma Tennant's Felony, which spliced together an account of James's relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and a speculative retelling of the source story of his novella, The Aspern Papers. Nor did Kemp mention - probably he was not aware of its existence - yet another novel about James, by the South African writer Michiel Heyns, which was being offered to London publishers in 2004. Entitled The Typewriter's Tale, and narrated from the point of view of James's secretary, it concerned James's involvement, in the years 1907-10, in a love affair between two of his closest friends, the novelist Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton, bisexual journalist and man of letters. We know all this about a book that is still unpublished because Michiel Heyns wrote an eloquent and poignant article in Prospect magazine in September 2004 about coming last in the procession of James-inspired novelists. These were its opening words: "My agent forwards to me another polite letter of rejection: 'I am so sorry but timing is all - and there has been a spate of fiction based on the life of Henry James published here. I don't know how such coincidences happen ... something in the atmosphere? So regretfully I must say no.'"

  Advertisement

  Something in the atmosphere - or, to use a more philosophical term, the Zeitgeist? Needless to say, I have given the question some thought myself, and have come to the conclusion that it was a coincidence waiting to happen.

  The biographical novel - the novel which takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration, using the novel's techniques for representing subjectivity rather than the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography - has become a very fashionable form of literary fiction in the last decade or so, especially as applied to the lives of writers. Emma Tennant published such a novel about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001), before she turned her attention to James and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Other examples which come to mind include JM Coetzee's Master of Petersburg (1994), Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower (1996), Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1999), Malcolm Bradbury's To the Hermitage (2000), Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney (2001), Edmund White's Fanny: a fiction (2003), Kate Moses's, Wintering (2003), Alberto Manguel's Stevenson under the Palm Trees (2004), CK Stead's Mansfield (2004), Andrew Motion's The Invention of Doctor Cake (2004) and Julian Barnes's Arthur & George (2005), novels about Dostoevsky, Novalis, Virginia Woolf, Diderot, Dr Johnson, Mrs Frances Trollope, Sylvia Plath, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Keats and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, respectively. It was only a matter of time before this kind of attention was turned on Henry James.

  Why the biographical novel should have recently attracted so many writers as a literary form is an interesting question, to which there are several possible answers. It could be taken as a symptom of a declining faith or loss of confidence in the power of purely fictional narrative, in a culture where we are bombarded from every direction with factual narrative in the form of "news". It could be regarded as a characteristic move of postmodernism - incorporating the art of the past in its own processes through reinterpretation and stylistic pastiche. It could be seen as a sign of decadence and exhaustion in contemporary writing, or as a positive and ingenious way of coping with the "anxiety of influence".

  Advertisement

  There is a sense in which all literary novels published in the same year or season compete with each other - for readers, for sales (not quite the same thing, though the two are of course connected), for critical approval, and (a fairly new phenomenon, this) for prizes. The proliferation in the last few decades of literary prizes like the Booker, with their published shortlists and (more recently) longlists, has intensified and institutionalised the element of competition in the writing and publishing of fiction. Normally, however, novels compete in all these ways as independent works of art, not as different treatments of the same subject matter. If it happens that two new novels have a theme in common, or the same historical background, they are likely to be compared and contrasted more directly. But in such cases there is bound to be a significant difference between the two narratives. When two novelists take the life of the same historical person or persons as their subject, however, the possibility of duplication is much more real, the element of competition between the two novels becomes more specific and overt, and the stakes are higher. Biographers are familiar with this danger, and live in dread of finding that someone else is working on the same subject as themselves. Such a coincidence is invariably bad news for one, if not both, of the writers involved.

  Colm Tóibín's novel and mine had much more in common than either had with any of the other novels about Henry James. ( I have not read The Master, but I have assimilated some information about it indirectly, and have had the facts checked by others.) Both are long, extensively researched books, sympathetic to James, which attempt to represent known facts of his life from inside his consciousness. It is true that the structure of each book is different, and that they deal in part with different aspects and episodes of James's life. The backbone of my novel is Henry James's friendship with George Du Maurier, who does not figure in Tóibín's book at all; he deals extensively with James's relationship with Lady Louisa Wolsey, who is not mentioned in mine. Both of us have invented some incidents. The main story of my novel is framed by an account of Henry James's last illness and death, which is not covered by Tóibín. But there is nevertheless a significant amount of overlap between the narrative content of the two novels. The calamitous first night of James's play Guy Domville in January 1895, when he was booed on stage by the gallery, is central to both.

  I am usually secretive about my work-in-progress. I am afraid of being excessively influenced, and perhaps discouraged, by the reactions of others to what would be, if I were more open, an account of something in a fluid and incomplete state. I want to know what effect the novel will have on readers in its fully finished form, and that depends to some extent on their not knowing in advance what to expect. Perhaps I am afraid that some other writer might "steal my idea" if I were to broadcast it widely; or perhaps there is a more devious and largely unconscious motivation at work: a denial of the possibility that anyone else might have had the same idea, illogically combined with a wish not to know about it if they have, because that might entail giving up the cherished project.

  I do not know in which category of writers Colm Tóibín would place himself, but I suspect it is the same secretive clan to which I belong. Even so, it was surprising that I had no inkling (a word which has a punning appositeness in this context) of the existence of The Master until several months after he delivered it to his publishers and a few weeks after I delivered mine. Once his novel was received by his publishers, in the spring of 2003, I might have picked up news of it on the literary grapevine. But, long before that, our common involvement in researching the same subject, consulting some of the same sources and visiting some of the same places, might well have alerted either of us to the other's project. Michiel Heyns tells the story of an encounter with Tóibín at Lamb House in Rye (James's principal residence from 1898 until his death in 1916) which might as easily have happened to me as to himself:

  Advertisement

  On a summer afternoon, shortly before the completion of my novel, my agent and I made a pilgrimage to Lamb House, now a National Trust property. There we met Colm Tóibín, whose presence was the first ominous inkling either of us had of his intentions. The custodian of the house kindly allowed us upstairs, normally closed to the public. Both of us made surreptitious notes, Tóibín's, it seems, enabling him to write the passage in his book in which Henry James, in his bedroom, can hear his young guest and the object of his adulation, Hendrick Andersen, undress in the adjoining guest room.

  Colm Toíbín told the same story, with more amusing details, in an article in the Daily Telegraph in March 2004, when The Master was published. He described going to visit Lamb House,

  on a bright Saturday afternoon two years ago, when I was close to completing a draft of my novel about Henry James ...

  Suddenly ... a voice called my name. It was a London literary agent whom I knew. She was with one of her clients. She asked me what I was doing in Lamb House. I said that I was writing a book about Henry James.

  "So is my client," she said. She introduced me to her client, who was standing beside her.

  "Are you writing about this house?" the agent asked.

  I told her I was. As I spoke, I noticed a neatly dressed man whom I presumed was American listening to us carefully, moving closer. "Did you both say you are writing books on James?" he asked. "Because so am I." He shook our hands cheerfully.

  By this time a small crowd had gathered, marvelling at three writers pursuing the same goal. We were very careful with each other, no one wishing to say exactly how close to finishing we were. We were also very polite to each other.

  Tóibín does not identify the American writer, but one may safely assume from his cheerful demeanour that he was a scholar rather than a rival novelist. For me there are other intriguing features of the episode, and the two reports of it. If we put Tóibín's "two years ago" and Heyns's "a summer afternoon" together, it took place in the summer of 2002. I also visited Lamb House with my notebook and pencil that summer - on August 1, to be precise - privately, by appointment.

  I first made a note about the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier as a subject for imaginative treatment in November 1995, though I did not begin serious work on it for another five years. I had just finished reading Du Maurier's novel Trilby for the first time. Two facts in Daniel Pick's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition made a strong impression on me. The first was that Henry James had been closely involved in the genesis of Trilby. The two men were good friends and often took walks together, on Hampstead Heath and in London. On one of these walks, in March 1889, Du Maurier summarised the story of Trilby and Svengali (both as yet nameless), which he had dreamed up as a young man, when he was toying with the idea of trying his hand at fiction, but never completed, and offered it to James, who had been complaining of a dearth of ideas for plots. According to Du Maurier's later account of this episode, James said he lacked the requisite musical knowledge to write the story, and suggested that his friend should write it himself. Du Maurier, whose sight was failing and threatening to curtail his career as an artist and illustrator, was prompted by this conversation to start writing a novel. The second fact in Pick's introduction that struck me - indeed, astounded me - was that Trilby, published in 1894, is thought to have been the bestselling novel of the 19th century: the kind of big popular success which James always longed for and never achieved in his lifetime.

  Advertisement

  Writing, and preparing to write, Author, Author was an entirely new compositional experience for me: instead of creating a fictional world which wasn't there until I imagined it, I was trying to find in the multitudinous facts of Henry James's life a novel-shaped story. But its climax was always to be the failure of Guy Domville and the contemporaneous triumph of Du Maurier's Trilby.

  I did more fieldwork than usual for this novel, visiting several sites that were important to my story, beginning with De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where James occupied a fourth-floor flat for most of the duration of the main action, and whence he would often walk up to Hampstead Heath on a Sunday in the 1880s, to visit the Du Mauriers.

  At some point you have to decide that you have accumulated enough raw data to work with, and begin writing. In the summer of 2002 I decided I had reached that point. The last research trip I made was to Rye, spending three days there at the end of July and beginning of August, staying at the Mermaid, the medieval inn where James used to dine when his cook and butler had a day off.

  In the article in Prospect from which I quoted earlier, Michiel Heyns reminded his readers of Henry James's extreme and uncompromising hostility to literary biography, and his almost obsessive desire to preserve his private life from public scrutiny even beyond the grave, recalling that the novelist confided to a correspondent in 1914: "My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter ... I have long thought of launching, by provision in my will, a curse not less explicit than Shakespeare's own on any such as try to move my bones." It is a fair assumption that James would have anathematised novels about himself even more vehemently than biographies. Heyns concludes his article by saying, "I am starting to suspect, as yet another letter of rejection arrives, that James's curse is taking effect - at least on one writer." His suspicion was understandable in the circumstances, and if I were of a superstitious nature I might experience some uneasiness myself on this score, since I certainly feel that Author, Author has been an unlucky book. But if the outraged spirit of HJ were responsible, it is not obvious why Heyns should have suffered much worse luck than I, or why Tóibín has enjoyed a seemingly trouble-free and favourable reception for The Master (unless being shortlisted for the Booker Prize but not winning it counts as a misfortune).

  No, I do not feel that I have been cursed, but rather that by daring to write imaginatively about Henry James I entered a zone of narrative irony such as he himself loved to create, especially in his wonderful stories (which are among my favourite works of fiction) about writers and the literary profession. I became - we all became, Colm Tóibín, Michiel Heyns and I - characters in a Jamesian plot. Consider, for example, that comical convergence in the sanctum of Lamb House of three writers all secreting works-in-progress about its distinguished former owner. Could anything be more Jamesian? Or consider the ironies and symmetries that have characterised my own slender acquaintance with Colm Tóibín.

  We first met, not, as writers usually do these days, at a book launch or literary festival, but on top of a small mountain in Galicia, in north-west Spain, in the summer of 1992. I was making a television documentary for the BBC about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, and we had reached the little village of Cebrero, about 150 kilometres from Santiago, which has a special place in the history of the pilgrimage because of a miracle said to have taken place there in the Middle Ages. It has a refugio with a canteen attached, where I was having lunch with the TV crew during a break in filming, when a dark-haired young man came in and sat down, since there were no other places free, at the end of our refectory table. Tóibín was also following the pilgrimage trail, gathering material for a book entitled The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, which was published two years later, and which I reviewed, not knowing in advance that I would find in it his description of our encounter:

  Advertisement

  As I looked at the menu I realised that the other people at the table were of the English persuasion and did not look like pilgrims. Nor did they look like a family on holiday; most of them were in their thirties and it was hard to work out the relationship between them. I looked at one of them and was sure I knew him from somewhere; he was careful to look away. I asked them a question about the pilgrimage and found out quickly that they were a television crew making a film about the route to Santiago. I told them I was writing a book about it, and wondered out loud if everyone else in the dining room was engaged in similar activities. They were all jolly and friendly in a very English way, and it was a great relief from the gruff Galicians I had been dealing with.

  I looked at the man who had looked away earlier: he had glasses and straight hair, he was in his late forties. Suddenly I realised who he was.

  "What did Chad's family make their fortune from in Henry James's The Ambassadors?" I asked him. "No one knows," he replied. He did not seem surprised by the question.

  "But there's a solution in your first novel," I said.

  "In my third novel," he corrected me.

  "You're David Lodge," I said, and he agreed that he was. He was the presenter of the BBC film.

  Note that the very first utterance Tóibín addressed to me was an abstruse question about Henry James. To use a currently fashionable formula: how weird is that? Note too that Colm Tóibín, discovering that I was making a film about the pilgrimage to Santiago, revealed that he was writing a book on the same subject (not quite true - it was only one chapter of his book) and immediately wondered aloud if everyone else in the canteen were similarly engaged, anticipating the moment 10 years later when he found himself at Lamb House in the company of two men also writing books on Henry James.

  Up until the time I published Author, Author I thought that the encounter in Cebrero was our only meeting, and said so to several inquirers. But in mid-September 2004 I met Tóibín again, in Rye, where we were both speaking about our respective novels at the festival, and he reminded me that we had met on another occasion, only two years before, which to my great embarrassment I had to admit I had completely forgotten.

  I had scarcely been aware of it, for reasons which are worth recalling for their comic and ironic aspects. It happened at the Harbourfront literary festival in Toronto at the end of October 2002.

  By the time I packed my bag for this trip I was about three months and some 20,000 words into the writing of Author, Author, but I was not averse to putting it aside for a week.

  At this point I must inform the reader that in recent years I have become quite deaf, and am obliged to wear a hearing aid in both ears. Although a state-of-the-art device, it cannot cope with extremely loud background noise. Names are always especially difficult to hear when nothing in the context gives you any clue as to what they might be. In the crowded festival bar one evening, a Canadian friend greeted a man whose name I did not catch and whom I did not recognise, though he smiled warmly as if he knew who I was. He spoke animatedly for some time, but I heard and understood almost nothing of what he said, and responded with phatic murmurs and complaints about the circumambient noise level, until his attention was drawn by some other person. As we moved away from the bar I said to my companion, "Who was that man?" "Colm Tóibín," he replied. "Good God," I said, "was it really? I didn't recognise him."

  Advertisement

  If this seems improbable, bear in mind that I had only seen Tóibín in the flesh for about an hour, 10 ears previously, and in the meantime his physical appearance had altered. It is not surprising that he recognised me: I am famous among my acquaintance for not changing much in appearance, and looking younger than my years. (It is just the luck of the genetic draw.) At the time of our first meeting, when Tóibín described me in his book as being in my late forties, I was in fact fifty-seven. The passage of time since then had left its mark more deeply on him than on me. The young man who walked into the canteen at Cebrero had a head of dark curly hair. The man in the Harbourfront bar was bald, and his features triggered no memory. (I am sorry to be so personal, but it is the only way I can explain what happened. I would gladly trade my hair for his ears.) I was embarrassed that I had not recognised him and hoped that it had not been too obvious, but the episode did not bother me for long, and I soon forgot it completely. I wonder now what Tóibín said in the conversation that I was unable to hear or meaningfully contribute to. Did he perhaps drop some hint of working on a novel about Henry James? If so, I didn't pick it up, and returned to England blissfully ignorant of this threat to the originality of my own project, only to encounter immediately another from a different source.

  I arrived in London early on Saturday morning, November 2, and bought the Guardian to read on the train to Birmingham. Although a copy was waiting for me at home, I was eager to read the lead article in the Review section, which was an edited extract from the title essay of my new book, Consciousness and the Novel. I read it through with the quiet complacency that seeing one's work prominently in print usually generates, and then idly turned the pages of the magazine. My eye was caught by the opening sentence of a review by Toby Litt of a novel by Emma Tennant called Felony

  "I don't know what Henry James ever did to Emma Tennant, but it must have been something pretty awful. Enough to have her take revenge upon him by making him the villain of her latest novel."

  BAD NEWS BAD NEWS BAD NEWS ... The message raced through the synapses of my brain and sent the adrenalin pumping through my arteries and veins. Seated in a crowded railway carriage, I could not express my shock or relieve my feelings by an exclamation or expletive. Another writer had scooped me by publishing a novel about Henry James! I hardly dared to read on to discover how similar it might be to the one I had recently started. I let my eye skim the surface of the newsprint, picking up the gist of the review; then I read it from beginning to end. I was relieved to discover that Felony was only partly about James, and dealt with only a fairly small segment of his life, in a style evidently very different from my novel. I also observed from the header that it was very short. Nevertheless, its publication was a blow. It would take some of the bloom of originality off my own novel, and if I had not already made a substantial start on Author, Author, the effect would have been far more demoralising. As soon as I got home I reread what I had already written (the first half of the frame story, and the first chapter-and-a-bit of the main story), and was reassured. It worked, I thought, and I knew how I meant to go on with it. To avoid any more interference in the creative process from Felony, I resolved not to read that novel, and to avert my eyes from any more reviews of it that might come my way. An additional ironical twist, of a kind with which I would become familiar, was that it was published by Jonathan Cape, a Random House imprint like my own hardback publishers, Secker & Warburg. I had not yet told my publisher, Geoff Mulligan, the subject of my novel-in-progress, except to say that it was a period piece. I now put him in the picture. He was sympathetic and supportive, and said there was no need to speak to anyone else in Random House at present about the clash with Felony. So I went on with my novel in a calmer state of mind, and in the months that followed the existence of Emma Tennant's bothered me less and less. Subconsciously, I must have assumed that, having survived this unwelcome surprise, I would not experience another of the same kind. Little, as the old novelists used to say, did I know.

  Advertisement

  I submitted the finished novel to Geoff in September 2003 and he called me to say, with obvious sincerity, that he liked it very much. The following Monday he emailed me to say Secker aimed to publish in September 2004. It would be their lead title and "a massively important book for us". Tony Lacey, editor at my paperback publisher Penguin, called to say how much he loved the book - had been totally gripped by it, read it in two sittings, had no criticisms to make.

  I had always had faith in the novel myself, but it was gratifying to have this confirmed by others. It was more than gratifying - it was exciting; and I quote these enthusiastic responses to convey some idea of the euphoric mood I was in when it was abruptly shattered by a phone call from my agent Jonny Pegg of Curtis Brown on the Thursday morning of that same week.

  He said he was calling about two things. One was that Viking USA had, like Random House and Penguin, made an offer. The second item was "not very nice, really". His voice faltered somewhat as he gave me the bad news. One of Curtis Brown's foreign sub-agents had been sent the MS of Author, Author, and had just reported that they had already sold the rights in another forthcoming novel about Henry James, by Colm Tóibín, to my publisher in that country. Jonny read out to me a brief agency synopsis of The Master - it began with the first night of Guy Domville, traced James's recovery from this setback, ended with the acquisition of Lamb House, etc, etc. It was 200 pages long and due to be published in England in April 2004.

  I was at first incredulous, then divided between dismay (that a novel by a highly respected writer on much the same subject was due to be published before mine) and relief (that I had not known about it sooner). It would have been deeply disturbing if I had made this discovery while I was actually writing my book, and had I made it very much earlier I might have abandoned or never started what turned out to be one of the most satisfying creative projects I have ever undertaken. But I immediately recognised the damaging effects that the prior appearance of The Master was likely to have on the way my novel would be read and received, and in due course all my fears were realised. I can truthfully say of Author, Author that I have never enjoyed writing a book more, and publishing one less.

  Next week - the screw turns with the announcement of the Booker prize longlist.

  · Edited extracts from The Year of Henry James: the Story of a Novel or, Timing is All: With other essays on the genesis, composition and reception of literary fiction, published by Harvill Secker on May 25 at £18.99. David Lodge is discussing his new book at the Hay Festival on June 2. Details from www.hayfestival.com

  Since you’re here …

• Pen South Africa - http://pensouthafrica.co.za/i-am-pandarus-by-michiel-heyns/

  About the author
  Michiel Heyns is the author of seven previous novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale, Bodies Politic, the multi-award winning Lost Ground (including the Sunday Times Literary Award in 2012) and most recently, Invisible Furies and A Sportful Malice, which won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction in 2015. He is also an award-winning translator. He was previously professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. Michiel Heyns lives in Somerset West.

• Stellenbosch Literary Project - http://slipnet.co.za/view/event/up-close-and-personal-with-michiel-heyns/

  REPORTS
  Up close and personal with Michiel Heyns
  Posted on September 25, 2011

  EVENT: Michiel Heyns: Lost Ground (Wednesday, 21 September; Fugard Studio)

  DENISE GRAY

  Michiel Heyns, author of Lost Ground, talks to Patrick Gale

  Michiel Heyns is something of a literary celebrity. His novel The Children’s Day singlehandedly inspired me to develop a PhD idea, and then there is also his considerable academic work. So it was with some surprise that I found his responses to British novelist Patrick Gale’s questions accessible, light-hearted and with none of the sense of self-importance one often encounters in authors with such an esteemed literary and academic career.

  Michiel spoke about the process of writing his most recent novel, Lost Ground. He had originally tried to write a “South African Othello”, which he claimed had failed, so instead he invented a character who had the same problem – Peter, a journalist who returns from London to South Africa to write his story.

  The story, he said, grew as he went along, and three-quarters of the way through the novel he still wasn’t sure who the murderer was to be. It is rather peculiar, then, that some readers have told him they knew the answer from the start.

  This was not the only instance of Michiel gently undermining readers’ responses with his composed irony. Patrick referred to a recent review that claims Lost Ground is a “state-of-the-nation” novel, a suggestion which Michiel appeared to find somewhat amusing. He contemplated the idea that perhaps every South African novel is a “state-of-the-nation” novel, since such a novel cannot but involve some of our country’s integral issues. For instance, a reviewer has claimed that Lost Ground is about the failure of policing in South Africa, which he deduced from an incident where the police fail to turn up at the scene of the crime in time.

  On the other hand, Patrick tentatively suggested that Lost Ground might be read as a warning that “you neglect male friendships at your peril”, but again Michiel rejected this possible reading, responding that, if anything, it’s a novel that warns that “you neglect your past at your peril; this is what Peter does, and it comes back to get him.”

  Interestingly, a discussion ensued that related to the work of South African writer Damon Galgut – who was in the audience – about the strategy of understated homoerotic desire or, what Patrick described as “a simmering passion”. Michiel agreed that there is something very powerful about understatement: “Something about repression (in gay writing) produces an energy in the writer… Even though it is unpleasant to live through, repression is more energising than revelation.” Using an example from Lost Ground, he added that “some of the energy between Peter and his close friend Bennie is in what’s not being said”.

  From this, Patrick drew a parallel with The Children’s Day, as both are stories of boyhood friendship are characterised by homoerotic tension that is never quite resolved. Michiel agreed that there is an undeclared love at work between Simon, the protagonist of The Children’s Day, and Fanie. Not for the first time in the interview, Patrick pressed Michiel for possible autobiographical aspects of the text, asking whether Simon was based on himself as a boy. To a degree this is true, said Michiel, insofar as he, too, didn’t have much interest in rugby, preferred to stay inside, and was an intellectual child for whom reading was synonymous with life.

  Finally, Michiel discussed the pitfalls and the advantages of having his novel translated, adding that his style – which he describes as ironic understatement – does not easily translate into Afrikaans. The question of why he writes in English and whether he should write in Afrikaans was also raised, to which he responded that, having been a professor of English, it seemed most natural to him to write a novel in English. In the light of a discussion about his 2005 The Typewriter’s Tale, a novel in which he imagines the story of Henry James’ typewriter, and written in Jamesian prose, a question from the floor asked him how he positions himself as a South African writer. He responded that, besides the obvious tie to the landscape, he “didn’t grow up sitting on an antheap”, and the countless works of fiction that he read from around the world became a part of his experience, perhaps of himself. The question of a “South African” literature has been under discussion for some time, and his response was a refreshing reminder of the inescapable hybridity that produces South African people and texts.

• Jonathan Ball Publishers - http://www.jonathanball.co.za/component/virtuemart/i-am-pandarus-detail?Itemid=6

  Michiel Heyns is the author of seven previous novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale, Bodies Politic, the multi-award winning Lost Ground (including the Sunday Times Literary Award in 2012) and most recently, Invisible Furies and A Sportful Malice, which won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction in 2015.
  He is also an award-winning translator. He was previously professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. Michiel Heyns lives in Somerset West

• Sunday Times - http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2017/05/08/story-with-a-shaggy-dog-anton-ferreira-talks-to-michiel-heyns-about-his-latest-book-i-am-pandarus/

  Story with a shaggy dog: Anton Ferreira talks to Michiel Heyns about his latest book I am Pandarus
  by Jennifer on May 8th, 2017
  Michiel Heyns retells ‘Troilus & Criseyde’, writes Anton Ferreira for the Sunday Times

  I am PandarusI Am Pandarus
  Michiel Heyns (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
  ***
  Ever since devouring Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, I have come to regard a list of characters at the start of a book to be an auspicious omen of what is to come. In the character list for I Am Pandarus, Michiel Heyns had me right after Achilles, at A is for Adrastos.
  Adrastos is the Anatolian shepherd dog of Pandarus, one of two narrators in Heyns’s reworking of the Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida story that has been told previously by Chaucer and Shakespeare, among others. (Full disclosure: I have an 80kg Anatolian shepherd dog at home in real life, and he is the sweetest, handsomest, and most devoted companion imaginable.)
  “I have a dog in every book,” Heyns tells me. “Anatolians are a very old breed and would have been around in Troy. I like having dogs in my books.”
  That he loves his dog adds to Pandarus’s likeability. A skilled archer for the Trojans, he spends much of his time during the siege as Cupid, trying to get his friend Troilus into bed with his niece Criseyde. You have to like a person who sees the importance of love in a time of war.
  “Chaucer’s story is a love story,” says Heyns. “The love aspects became more important as I was writing, and it’s actually very sad in that it’s a reflection on the impermanence of love. Troilus at the end, in the Chaucerian version, he goes up to the seventh sphere of heaven or somewhere, and he looks down and he sort of laughs at the people grieving next to his dead body. Because he says, ‘Well there is a greater love up here; that is so trivial, earthly love,’ which is one perspective. In one way it’s a consolation and in another way it makes it sadder.”
  Heyns, who taught Chaucer’s 14th-century Troilus and Criseyde for many years during his tenure as an English professor at Stellenbosch University, says he has wanted to write his own version for a long time. “I started with Troilus and Criseyde and then through that I went back to the Iliad which is the ultimate source of all these stories. These things overlap and combine in this novel which is a bit of a hodge-podge of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Iliad.”
  “As I was working it became more contemporary; originally I tried to keep to the story as handed down by Chaucer and Shakespeare, and then as I was working at it I thought well there’s no reason I can’t change this, because every generation rewrites the Iliad. There is no actual history, these are all versions… so I thought I might as well create a new one.”
  The Heyns version is somewhat more accessible than some of the previous ones, and is laced with reasons to chortle; in I Am Pandarus, Helen of Troy, for example, “may have been the world’s first trophy wife – and if she wasn’t much of a wife, she was indubitably a trophy, albeit of the floating variety”.
  Heyns faced a difficulty in having Pandarus talk about modern concepts like trophy wives. “I had a terrible problem with anachronisms – where do I situate this story? In Troy, in 14th-century England, in 16th-century England? And what kind of frame of reference do I give these characters? So I thought let’s have an overarching frame of reference, which would be the modern one… So it was a cheat in a way but it permits me to introduce what would otherwise be a very anachronistic frame of reference.”
  His solution was to have Pandarus materialise in a contemporary London gay bar, Halfway to Heaven, and give his memoir to a publisher. The London publisher develops little depth as a character, and the sections set in Halfway to Heaven have a whiff of bolted-on contrivance, but the story that unfolds in ancient Troy is riveting.
  One of the excerpts with which Heyns prefaces the book is from Milan Kundera: “Today, the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war… that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind.”
  The extract is “rather gloomy”, Heyns acknowledges. “But it’s not the last word on the story, it was just a way into the story: ‘here’s a story about war’. We are now at a time when we seem to staring war in the face again.”
  A good time to keep our eyes on the antidote. As Heyns notes, “It was Philip Larkin who said, ‘What will survive of us is love.’”
  Book details
  I am Pandarus by Michiel Heyns
  EAN: 9781868427758
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

• Jonathan Ball - http://www.jonathanball.co.za/component/content/article/298-jbpauthors/h/4091-jbp-author-michiel-heyns

  Michiel Heyns
  heynsmichiel
  Michiel Heyns was born on 2 December 1943 in Stellenbosch. He went to school in Thaba Nchu, Kimberley and Grahamstown. He studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and at Cambridge and was a professor in English at the University of Stellenbosch from 1987 until his early retirement to become a full-time author in 2003.

  He has written four novels since The Children’s Day was translated into Afrikaans as Verkeerdespruit: These are: The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale, Bodies Politic, Lost Ground, and his most recent novel, Invisible Furies published in 2012. All are published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. He has also become renowned as a translator, and was awarded the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, for his translation of Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat, where it was the first translated book ever to win. This translation also won him the Sol Plaatje Award for Translating

  In 2003 he taught as a visiting professor at the University of Tulsa, teaching creative writing. He currently lives in Somerset West and reviews regularly for the Sunday Independent.

• Aerodrome - http://thisisaerodrome.com/the-reluctant-writer/

  QUOTE:
  Ideally the organic and the conceptual knit seamlessly,” he says. “Things start falling into place in a way that’s very satisfying if you’re a literary scholar as I am and you’ve been teaching your students that they must see how the patterns work.”

  “I think in all of my novels there is a seriousness but I try not to approach these things to solidly
  there is a reluctance to sit down, and there is a sense that I now have to dig into my guts. And then when you’ve sat down and it happens, it’s wonderful.”
  The reluctant writer
  Posted on January 28, 2015 by AERODROME
  BY ALEXANDER MATTHEWS

  I first encountered Michiel Heyns at school – when I devoured his second novel, The Reluctant Passenger (2003), as a 15- or 16-year-old. It made quite an impression: not only was it very smart and funny and eloquent, but this spot-on new South African satire was, I suspect, the only book in the library at Rondebosch Boys’ High to have a tantalisingly explicit gay sex scene. It probably still is.

  More than a decade later, Heyns continues to dazzle, with a slew of books showing the breadth and depth of his literary talents. There have been the historical – The Typewriter’s Tale and Bodies Politic; and a murder mystery, Lost Ground (which won the Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2012).

  In 2012, we were treated to the Jamesian Invisible Furies – subtle and aching and elegantly devastating. Heyns’s seventh, A Sportful Malice, came out last year, marking a return to the comedic lightness of The Reluctant Passenger, but set, like the Paris-based Invisible Furies, in Europe. I sat down with Heyns recently to chat about the book, which is styled as a series of emails that Michael Marcussi, a young South African academic, is writing to his partner back in Johannesburg as he romps around Florence and rural Tuscany.

  Heyns explains that the book’s inspirations coalesced from a series of trips to Italy: two month-long stays in a little Tuscan village (which inspired the hamlet which Marcussi decamps to for several weeks), and a six-week fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, an Umbrian castle. Characters poured from life onto the page – an elderly couple he met outside of Asisi for example, who were “fanatical representational artists” that showed great contempt for abstract and performance art. Then there was a good-looking young performance artist who inspired the book’s Paolo. These two extremes – old and young, figurative versus performance – formed the book’s two conceptual poles.

  Echoing JM Coetzee, Heyns believes a story is “there and you discover what is there by writing”: you figure out what you want to say as you write. The more he wrote, the more he realised he was exploring the theme of representation – the way things are presented: whether in art, or on Facebook, or to a lover back home.

  “Ideally the organic and the conceptual knit seamlessly,” he says. “Things start falling into place in a way that’s very satisfying if you’re a literary scholar as I am and you’ve been teaching your students that they must see how the patterns work.”

  “I think in all of my novels there is a seriousness but I try not to approach these things to solidly,” he says. “This is the most over-the-top of my novels, I think – and I enjoyed that. But also, it’s not just a romp.”

  The novel’s email letter format gives allowed him to “create a character that you’re not necessarily subscribing to as author: he is a character – that is his voice, not mine”. There is a “sense of a voice speaking to you – to the reader”. The intimacy created through addressing his lover back home means Marcussi is “expressing himself without any kind of inhibition” – and his snobberies and conceits can be fully displayed in a fiercely personal, subjective way.

  * * *

  I ask Heyns what the Civitella Ranieri fellowship was like. He says that having all day to write was initially “quite inhibiting”. “You don’t even have to feed a dog. And that paralysed me for a while.” For several days he would go on long walks through the forest – which would provide inspiration for Marcussi’s encounter with a boar-hunting party. Eventually he was able to get into a writing groove.

  And back home – does he have a writing routine?

  “It comes and goes,” he says. “I write very sporadically. When I write, I write fairly quickly, and then I have these fallow periods.” He envies those who are able to write every morning and afternoon, for set periods. “I think you must be very productive when you do that, but I don’t. In fact I’m quite often surprised that I get anything written because I don’t seem to spend very much time writing.”

  Does he enjoy the process?

  “Most writers seem to be quite oppressed with the idea of writing,” he says. “I think it’s also easy to exaggerate that – I mean it can’t be such hell, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it. But there is a reluctance to sit down, and there is a sense that I now have to dig into my guts. And then when you’ve sat down and it happens, it’s wonderful.”

  “Much easier” is the translation he does (he has translated, from Afrikaans into English, Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat and Etienne van Heerden’s 30 Nights in Amsterdam – among other works). “I don’t have that creative block, because translation is creative in its own terms, but not in the same way – it doesn’t come from your guts.” It also pays better than fiction, he adds.

  When it comes to his novels, he sometimes asks himself, “Why am I bothering?” But then he also wonders what would he would be doing instead. “I don’t play golf. But it’s not just that. There is something that compels. If I don’t write, I start feeling very restless. If you were religious you could say that God’s given me this one talent and I must use it in terms of the parable of the talents. But without being religious about it, there is a sense that this is something I can do and I would be wasting my life if I didn’t.”

  Heyns spent 30-odd years teaching English literature at the University of Stellenbosch. I ask him if he misses academia.

  “No, not at all,” he replies. Not having to drive to lectures or mark essays is “a wonderful luxury”. He enjoyed working with young people, enjoyed sharing something he perceived as valuable, but it could “become very frustrating”. He recalls the “dead snoek eyes” of bored students. “English literature is not very big in young people’s lives.” He can’t blame them, he says, for dreaming about their date that evening instead of considering the nuances of Chaucer – but their indifference could be dispiriting nonetheless.

  “I started writing when I was at school,” he says. “I wrote short stories and I submitted them to magazines; of course they were rejected. And then I stopped. And now, when young people ask me for advice I say, ‘Don’t be discouraged; at the same time, be realistic – not everyone is a writer; but if you really feel you want to write [then write].’”

  “I just realised at the age of 55, there’s only one life,” and that “a novel is not going to write itself,” he says. Although academic life – with its intensive research and marking demands – was hardly conducive to creative writing, finding excuses not to write is “too easy”, he says. “You just have to tell yourself, ‘Bullshit, you’ve got time.’ When I was in the army, and they said ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ and you said, ‘I didn’t have time,’ they said, ‘What were you doing at four ’o clock this morning?’ You have time. But it’s not always easy.”

  I ask him about the state – or fate – of South African fiction.

  “People don’t really read,” he says. “We make fun of reading groups – but thank heavens for them. People say at Franschhoek [Literary Festival], ‘Here are all these grey haired ladies’ – well thank heavens for the grey-haired ladies, because the blonde boys aren’t reading.”

  The market is too small “to make authors rich” – although “oddly it does seem enough to keep publishers going”. I suggest the publishers are staying in the black thanks to cookbooks and sports biographies, rather than novels.

  Heyns agrees. “And religious books,” he adds. “I have a friend who writes cookery books and we decided we should write a religious cookery book – preferably with some rugby thrown in.”

  Although South Africa’s fiction market might be miniscule, it’s not all gloom. “I think it’s remarkably easy to get published in this country, compared to, say, England,” Heyns says. “Publishers are open to new writing which is great, although it often means the writing’s not that great. You can get published here without having an agent, which you can’t in England.” Even if you don’t make much from it, “at least you get published”.

  Heyns’s work is – deservingly, of course – finding increasing appeal abroad. Many of his novels have been translated into French; The Children’s Day, his first, was published in the US. And Lost Ground has been snapped up by the Scottish publisher Freight Books, which has also commissioned another novel from him.

  A Sportful Malice by Michiel Heyns A Sportful Malice is published by Jonathan Ball and is available from Kalahari.

  Share this:

QUOTE:
Literary history blends masterfully with a plot of intrigue in this slim
and delightful novel.
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502505873602 1/5
Print Marked Items
Heyns, Michiel: THE TYPEWRITER'S TALE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Heyns, Michiel THE TYPEWRITER'S TALE St. Martin's (Adult Fiction) $25.99 2, 28 ISBN: 978-1-250-11900-1
A novel from the point of view of Henry James' fictional amanuensis. It's 1907, and Frieda Wroth, a young woman
from a small English town, has recently completed a course in typewriting, a skill that promises to liberate women by
preparing them for employment. Frieda's prospects seem even brighter when she's hired by the celebrated author Henry
James to take dictation. But certain ironies soon become evident, the most vivid of which is that the role of the typist,
despite those early hints at liberation, is an essentially passive one: as James dictates, Frieda types. During her free
time, Frieda makes her own little forays into novel writing, forays that bear the unmistakable stamp of James'
influence. But then a guest comes to visit her employer, and Frieda's world shifts its scope. Morton Fullerton is a
charming, mysterious, and handsome American living in Paris. He catches Frieda's eye, or she catches his, or both; in
any case, it isn't long before Fullerton has asked Frieda to retrieve for him certain compromising letters he's sent, over
the years, to Henry James. In other words, he'd like her to steal. If Heyns, an accomplished South African scholar,
translator, and writer, relies a bit too often on too-convenient coincidence, that's a forgivable sin. So, too, is the matter
of his prose style, which, though elegant for the most part, occasionally, like Frieda's, collapses beneath the weight of
James' influence. But his novel plays on a fascinating interchange among the idea of taking dictation, the role of a
medium, the concepts of telepathy and thought transference (much in vogue at the time), and the role of the writer who,
not unlike a medium, merely gives voice to those who speak through him. Then there are the cameos by real-life, but
larger-than-life, personages like Edith Wharton, which are amusing but also convincing: Wharton, like James in this
novel, comes to life as a full-fledged character. Literary history blends masterfully with a plot of intrigue in this slim
and delightful novel.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Heyns, Michiel: THE TYPEWRITER'S TALE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652414&it=r&asid=d70ba10c92aad1529c7183a84eb3e5c7.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652414
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502505873602 2/5

QUOTE:
Faithfully re-created real-life
individuals mix well with authentically drawn fictitious ones
The Typewriter's Tale
Brad Hooper
Booklist.
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p29.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Typewriter's Tale.
By Michiel Heyns.
Feb. 2017. 288p. St. Martin's, $25.99 (9781250119001).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The great American master storyteller Henry James (author of the classic novel Portrait of a Lady, among many others)
intrigues today's novelists, including Colm Toibin (The Master, 2004), who are interested in discovering or at least
imagining the nature of his life. Heyns' highly creative novel locates itself in James' final decade, when he was resident
of the charming English coastal town of Rye. In Heyns' "Author's Note," he explains, "My young typewriter ["typist"
in modern language] is based on Theodora Bosanquet, who was in James' employ from 1907 to his death." James does
not write in longhand or type, but rather dictates to his "typewriter," our heroine, Frieda Wroth, as he paces the room
orally spinning his intricate plots. With threads of spiritualism, which was popular at the time, woven into the story,
Heyns creates an engaging and highly suitable whodunit atmosphere to support her tale, which is centered on an
American friend of James, Morton Fullerton, paying a visit to James in Rye, arranging a rendezvous with Frieda, and
enlisting her aid in finding and securing a cache of letters in James' possession, letters that certain parties, including
Fullerton's and James' good friend, novelist Edith Wharton, would not want exposed. Faithfully re-created real-life
individuals mix well with authentically drawn fictitious ones. --Brad Hooper
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Hooper, Brad. "The Typewriter's Tale." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 29. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563490&it=r&asid=8693c2e2d828083ebfe98fdb906662fe.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563490
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502505873602 3/5

QUOTE:
fans of James will find a compelling take on his
private life.
The Typewriter's Tale
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p80.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Typewriter's Tale
Michiel Heyns. St. Martin's, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-11900-1
Any Henry James aficionado should recognize the setting (Henry James's Lamb House in Rye) and major players
(including James himself and Edith Wharton) in this imagined story of James's personal typist in 1907. Twenty-threeyear-old
Frieda Wroth (a fictional character) comes from modest means and has taken a job as a typewriter for the
venerable author (partly to avoid the fate of a life with her respectable but boring suitor in London). Her new career
mostly consists of sitting in front of the Remington and mindlessly transcribing James's words--that is, until Morton
Fullerton arrives to visit his friend and mentor. The young and dashingly handsome Fullerton seduces Frieda and asks
her to find the packet of his letters to James, which must be hidden somewhere inside Lamb House. Frieda's promise,
combined with a visit from James's niece Peggy, leads Frieda to experiment with telepathy and contacting those from
the beyond. And so begin her communications with Fullerton, transcribed with the Remington in much the same way
she takes dictation. There is nothing normal about the James household--from the comings and goings of visitors to the
chewing exercises performed nightly by Henry James himself. And Frieda fits right in. Though she isn't the strongest
protagonist and the fiction and nonfiction elements don't fully mesh, fans of James will find a compelling take on his
private life. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Typewriter's Tale." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273929&it=r&asid=26bc40822a00ad1dfd1c5eb86206cd46.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471273929
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502505873602 4/5

QUOTE:
This probing and perceptive coming-of-age tale features artfully
sketched characters and offers a vibrant portrait ova country and culture in conflict.
Heyns, Michiel. The Children's Day
Jim Coan
Library Journal.
134.14 (Sept. 1, 2009): p107.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Heyns, Michiel. The Children's Day. Tin House. 2009. c.244p. ISBN 978-0-9802436-6-6. pap. $14.95. F
This tale of growing up in 1960s South Africa revolves around two characters who are polar opposites. The narrator,
Simon, is the bookish son of a local magistrate, while quiet Fanie Van Den Burgh comes from a more modest
background. The two somewhat reluctant friends meet again when Fanie plays in a tennis match at Simon's private
high school, competing for her lowly technical school. In a series of flashbacks, Simon recalls his and Fanie's past
growing up in and around the village of Verkeerdespruit, a rural backwater in the Orange Free State. Just as Fanie
could be a side of Simon's character that he is unwilling or unable to face, so the country is divided not only between
whites and blacks but also between the English and Afrikaans languages and cultures and rural and modern urban life.
The story comes to a climax when Simon goes against his old friend in the final match, as various dramatic, sexual,
and cultural themes come into play. VERDICT This probing and perceptive coming-of-age tale features artfully
sketched characters and offers a vibrant portrait ova country and culture in conflict. While the audience may be limited
by the setting, it is quality literary fiction worth considering.--Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta
Coan, Jim
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Coan, Jim. "Heyns, Michiel. The Children's Day." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2009, p. 107. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA208057089&it=r&asid=d779f0ebd98f344ddba1992a04334405.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A208057089
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502505873602 5/5

QUOTE:
Simon's recollections lack the coherence needed to transform the mundane
adolescent experience--sexual discoveries, troublesome friends, forging an identity--into a compelling story.
The Children's Day
Publishers Weekly.
256.26 (June 29, 2009): p111.
COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Children's Day
Michiel Heyns. Tin House (PGW, dist.), $14.95 paper (244p) ISBN 978-0-9802436-6-6
Despite taking place in South Africa during the 1960s, the latest from Heyns (The Reluctant Passenger) treats the
looming presence of apartheid cursorily, choosing instead to focus on the subtler conflict between the elite English and
the much-despised Afrikaners. At Wesley College, an English-speaking boarding school, Simon, the teenage son of an
English magistrate father and an Afrikaner mother, keeps quiet about his mixed ethnicity, but is forced to confront his
past when a group of Afrikaner students from a nearby technical school arrive at Wesley for a tennis match and Simon
recognizes Fanie van den Bergh, a primary school classmate. The book then alternates between the fated day of the
tennis match and memories from Simon's childhood. All of these recollections chronicle Simon's attempt to establish
his own sense of morality in the face of the racist conservatism of the adult world, but while the book successfully
unveils the moral hypocrisy of the era, Simon's recollections lack the coherence needed to transform the mundane
adolescent experience--sexual discoveries, troublesome friends, forging an identity--into a compelling story. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Children's Day." Publishers Weekly, 29 June 2009, p. 111. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA203029126&it=r&asid=aa8074594e3fa8a959619b1893f181d3.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A203029126

"Heyns, Michiel: THE TYPEWRITER'S TALE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652414&it=r. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. Hooper, Brad. "The Typewriter's Tale." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 29. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563490&it=r. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. "The Typewriter's Tale." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273929&it=r. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. Coan, Jim. "Heyns, Michiel. The Children's Day." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2009, p. 107. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA208057089&it=r. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. "The Children's Day." Publishers Weekly, 29 June 2009, p. 111. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA203029126&it=r. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/taking-dictation-from-henry-james-was-a-lesson-in-style--and-patience/2017/02/27/60347474-fd10-11e6-8f41-ea6ed597e4ca_story.html?utm_term=.f4dac12886dc
  Word count: 906

  QUOTE:
  “The Typewriter’s Tale” is a historian’s tale, chock-full of perfect detail, rather than a novelist’s creative transformation. As such, it’s more like a cover band than a performance of original music — but that’s not to say it isn’t genuinely fun.

  Taking dictation from Henry James was a lesson in style — and patience
  By Susan Scarf Merrell February 27
  If you are a fan of the novels of Henry James, or interested in his friendship with the novelist Edith Wharton, you’ll get a literate kick out of Michiel Heyns’s novel “The Typewriter’s Tale.” Originally published in South Africa in 2005 and then in the U.K. last year, it’s finally available in the United States.

  (St. Martin's)
  When the story opens, penniless Frieda Wroth learns, during a seance, that her dead mother would like her to take what the not-quite-literate medium spells out as “a corse in somthing usful.” Frieda goes to school to become a typewriter, a human extension of the Remington machine itself, able to take dictation from any professional man who needs his words transcribed as they emerge from his mouth. Frieda has the good fortune to be hired by the novelist Henry James and goes to live near him in Rye in 1907.

  Heyns draws James with an affectionate hand, as quirky and verbose and brilliant as we would wish, equal parts self-involved and kind. Frieda, who has writerly aspirations of her own, is a smart blend of the iconoclast and the conventional. Grateful to be freed of the banal, drudgery-filled life she had been destined for, Frieda focuses her energies on her tasks for Mr. James, eagerly observing his process at work. In her spare time, she takes solitary walks or bike rides, and occasionally — somewhat halfheartedly — works on her own writing.

  Some of the novel’s most charming passages showcase Frieda and Mr. James in the dictation process, Frieda imagining she might guess the next word to issue from his lips after a prolonged silence, and then the always different — complex and interesting, or simpler and cleaner — choice that James makes:

  “ ‘I have lost myself once more, comma, I confess, comma, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. Full stop. By what process of logical . . .’

  “Deduction?

  “ ‘. . . accretion was this slight “personality” quotation marks, comma, the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous . . .’

  “Woman.”

  “ ‘. . . girl, comma, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject, capitalised, question mark?’ ”

  A search for a cache of intimate letters becomes the driving tension of the novel, once Frieda becomes involved with James’s friend, the handsome and captivating journalist Morton Fullerton. James has refused to return some letters to Fullerton, who enlists Frieda’s help in retrieving them. In real life, as in the novel, Fullerton was scandalously linked to Wharton, who considered him the love of her life. A set of letters played an important role in the Fullerton-Wharton relationship as well.

  Book Club newsletter
  Monthly book reviews and recommendations.
  Sign up
  The other important plot thread, also distilled from history, toys with psychic communication and telepathy, an ironic contrast to Frieda’s day job receiving transmissions from James’s mind and typing them into solid-state form on the page. James’s brother, William, was one of the first members of the British Society for Psychical Research and, like many other educated people of the day, believed it possible to transfer thought between people over long distances. (How he would have loved text messaging!) Frieda, too, experiences the ability to send and receive thoughts, both with the living and the dead, using her trusty Remington as the recording tool:

  Author Michiel Heyns (Courtesy of Michiel Heyns)
  “Sitting at her typewriter, she became aware of the presence of another consciousness, of her fingers obeying not the promptings of her own mind or eye, but half-formed thoughts entering her mind of their own volition. . . . Yielding to the impulses of the usurping consciousness, she found that she could record them as smoothly as if she were taking dictation.”

  These psychic communications are perhaps the hardest aspect of the novel for a 21st-century reader to accept. Although believable in the world of the story, such moments effectively erect an emotional barrier between Heyns’s fictional world and our own. After all, a historical novel becomes literature if its story enhances our contemporary vision, moves us into a new relationship with both the past and our present. Such novels use history to point the reader to deeper revelations about life today. Although Heyns’s novel is delicious to read, that application to life in the present that one feels when reading, say, Colm Toibin’s novel about James, “The Master,” is sadly missing. “The Typewriter’s Tale” is a historian’s tale, chock-full of perfect detail, rather than a novelist’s creative transformation. As such, it’s more like a cover band than a performance of original music — but that’s not to say it isn’t genuinely fun.

  Susan Scarf Merrell is the author, most recently, of “Shirley,” a novel about Shirley Jackson.

  THE TYPEWRITER’S TALE
  By Michiel Heyns

  St. Martin’s. 270 pp. $25.99

• RT Book Reviews
  https://www.rtbookreviews.com/book-review/typewriters-tale
  Word count: 392

  Romance / Historical Romance / America

  RT Rating:

  Genre:
  Romance, Historical Romance, America, Historical Fiction
  Setting:
  New York, 1907
  Sensuality:
  Mild
  Published:
  February 28 2017
  Publisher:
  St. Martin's Press
  BUY NOW!
  Amazon:
  Buy Now
  Barnes & Noble: Buy Now
  *This post contains affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and purchase an item from the vendor, we receive a percentage of the profit (even if you don't buy the item we've linked to). Thank you for supporting RT Book Reviews!
  BOOK REVIEWS
  All Genres
  Top Picks!
  Contemporary Romance
  Historical Romance
  Historical Fiction
  Romantic Suspense
  Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
  Paranormal
  Fantasy
  Urban Fantasy
  Young Adult
  Inspirational
  Mainstream
  Science Fiction
  Series
  Erotica
  RT Review Source
  RT RATINGS GUIDE
  5 GOLD: Phenomenal. In a class by itself.
  4 1/2: TOP PICK. Fantastic. A keeper.
  4: Compelling. A page-turner.
  3: Enjoyable. A pleasant read.
  2: Problematic. May struggle to finish.
  1: Severely Flawed. Pass on this one.
  THE TYPEWRITER’S TALE
  Author(s): Michiel Heyns
  Heyns explores what it might be like to work for famous writer Henry James; to be invisible and yet desire to be noticed. Well-written and carefully constructed with a slow, steady pace that allows for a complex relationship and plot, Heyns creates a solid portrait of James and the woman who must choose between safety and asking for more.
  After completing typing school at the top of her class, Frieda Worth takes a position transcribing Henry James’ words into a novel. She is to have no thoughts or words of her own. Although Frieda has literary aspirations, she follows “the master.” Life is dull until Mr. Fullerton, a Times reporter and longtime correspondent of James, arrives for a visit. Fullerton actually wants to steal back his letters, fearing they will fall into the wrong hands after the author’s death. He seduces Frieda and convinces her to hunt for the letters. Then Edith Wharton arrives, telling James of the rumors circulating about an illicit affair between Wharton and Fullerton. Frieda is soon caught between her loyalty to James and her love for Fullerton. (ST. MARTIN’S, Feb., 280 pp., $25.99)

  Reviewed by:
  Kathe Robin

• Stellenbosch Literary Project
  http://slipnet.co.za/view/reviews/the-novel-that-heyns-was-always-going-to-write-review-of-michiel-heyns%E2%80%99s-lost-ground/
  Word count: 1844

  QUOTE:
  Lost Ground is the novel Michiel Heyns was always going to write: one that brings together all his many talents – a highly pedigreed writing style (“horror kept in abeyance by the effort of lucid narration”), brilliantly witty satire, a nuanced and convincing rendering of place, people and time, a gay counter-narrative, and the type of dialogue that only a committed eavesdropper can produce.
  Whether you read it as a whodunit or as a portrait of the nation, Lost Ground is utterly compelling – exquisitely written, profound, hilarious and hauntingly familiar.
  REVIEWS
  The novel that Heyns was always going to write
  Posted on December 13, 2012 by Finuala Dowling

  Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2011

  Lost Ground is the novel Michiel Heyns was always going to write: one that brings together all his many talents – a highly pedigreed writing style (“horror kept in abeyance by the effort of lucid narration”), brilliantly witty satire, a nuanced and convincing rendering of place, people and time, a gay counter-narrative, and the type of dialogue that only a committed eavesdropper can produce. It is, in short, the best of The Children’s Day combined with the best of The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale and Bodies Politic.

  It’s also, unusually for Heyns, a work of crime fiction. But then, perhaps all fiction is crime fiction: we are scarred, and look for the origin of our scars. Heyns’s narrator reminds us that “nobody holds it against Shakespeare that he used the tragic death of two young lovers as a story opportunity. It’s of the nature of stories to deal with sad situations, and of the nature of storytellers to seek out sad situations.” Since Heyns’s narrator is, like him, a storyteller – well, a journalist – Lost Ground is also metafiction: a story about how stories are made and, most importantly, how in trying to tell these stories, we end up telling ourselves.

  When Peter Jacobs returns to his Karoo hometown of Alfredville in 2010 after a 22-year absence, it is ostensibly because he’s interested in the creative nonfiction “possibilities” presented by the murder of his beautiful and aptly-named cousin, Desirée. With the smug superiority of someone who, rather than simply “buggering off” in the last days of the old regime, left in a move of “principled emigration”, Peter thinks the New Yorker might be interested in his “angle”: Desirée has clearly been murdered by her jealous black husband in an Othello-type scenario, and the story will doubtless explicate racial attitudes in post-apartheid South Africa.

  As it turns out, the crime investigates Peter more successfully than Peter is able to investigate the crime. (“Home-town boy solves murder on second try,” jeers the murderer, eventually.) In a perfect irony that runs throughout the novel, Peter is incapable of seeing that it is, in a sense, his own murder that he is investigating.

  His cousin is his doppelganger: in beauty, glamour, and witting or unwitting sexual manipulation (“very lovey-dovey one day, very fuck-you the next”), she is his twin. She was murdered in the very house where Peter lived as a boy. Like Desirée, Peter has lived for the last several years with a partner who is a black man. James, an actor of Jamaican origin, is at this very moment involved in a London production of Othello.

  Mirror upon mirror. Like Othello, Desirée’s husband Hector, a struggle veteran, has won her with the glamour of his war stories, but the marriage has been weakened by a third party. Hector is the obvious suspect. His father-in-law, a regular Brabantio, holds the popular view: “You don’t expect rational thought from someone like that. He felt inferior, for all his airs and graces, and thought she was in love with every man she spoke to.”

  Except that Desirée is no innocent Desdemona. Like her cousin, whose attempts to research her death covertly are laughed off by the townsfolk (even the car guard approaches him with a version of the story), Desirée has left a trail.

  Desirée’s not-so-secret trail of intrigues leads Peter back to his own sexual past. The cousins, it turns out, have elicited love and jealousy from the same two people. Tall, blonde, beautiful and with an inbuilt sense of their own apartness, the cousins have been oblivious to the heartbreak they have caused.

  Desirée was bludgeoned to death with a replica of Michelangelo’s David, wrapped in an anti-macassar. Even the murder weapon offers a symbolic clue to the potent combination that lies (indirectly) behind the murder: a sublimated homoerotic impulse, and a small-town yearning to “own” cultural and aesthetic achievement.

  We always want we haven’t got. Why has Peter come back to Alfredville, really, if not to recapture some of the “lost ground” of the title? Though, as he observes, “Proust himself would have had a hard time with Alfredville.”

  Heyns describes with utter precision the understated charm of this fictional town, which shares characteristics with Barrydale, Montagu and Riversdal: “Now, running through the empty morning, I feel a certain appeal in the very emptiness, something melancholy in its meagreness and yet comforting in its permanence. It’s a landscape without clutter, without noise, without much ambition, neutral, perhaps even negative.”

  The urbane, cosmopolitan narrator pretends at first to be completely disaffected from his past and detached from his present. He is scornful of the town’s parochialism, its casual, entrenched racism (“he used our bathroom and everything,” says his aunt of her black son-in-law), its tradition of domestic violence, its bad decor and worse cuisine. (I cannot recommend the rusk-eating scene or the summary prediction of the Sunday lunch menu too highly – Heyns at his satirical best.)

  But with each passing day, the town’s grudgingly acknowledged appeal and in particular, Peter’s friendship with Bennie Nienaber, work together like appointments with an analyst to reveal what lies beneath his disdain: lyrically tender and funny recollections of his teenage years, moonlit Karoo summer nights, skinny dipping with a school friend, motor biking, pretending to like girls when they really loved one another. “Gryp jou geleentheid” was the school’s motto; Proust’s “The true paradises are the paradises we have lost” is the novel’s epigraph.

  Paradise is a place of innocence: when we are there we don’t know that we are there because we don’t know ourselves. Unconsummated relationships and unrequited loves fall into this category, but so do lost loves of all kinds. In Lost Ground, the narrator’s emotional centre is torn between a recently ended adult relationship in London and a tantalising adolescent crush that resurfaces in Alfredville. Along the way, the secret gay history of the Karoo emerges.

  The narrator remembers a farmer who preferred the company of his “boss boy” to his wife; and whose only son died “in the bed of his Mexican catamite”. These days, Alfredville’s new vet rather hopes the narrator might be stalking him, but prefers to keep his gayness a secret (the animals don’t mind, he jokes). We’re told that the lesbian owners of the new wine bar in town will throw you to the tarmac if you offend them. And the Queen’s (yes) Hotel is run by someone Peter remembers from school: “Fairy” Ferreira, who has scandalised the locals by having his black lover actually live in the hotel. I hope Heyns will one day return to this story to report on their wedding, which is announced towards the end of the novel.

  By contrast, the narrator’s discretion about his own sexuality seems, on the surface, an urbane choice. But his restraint is really just denial by another name, and it has blinded him to his own significance in the story he’s trying to tell. To the humble, poor and beaten Bennie Nienaber, their friendship was the one great achievement of his life. This relationship, narrated both in real time and in flashbacks, leads to the moving and dramatic climax of the novel.

  Lost Ground is a self-conscious novel in which the narrator often wrestles with his own choice of words and who expostulates: “I’m not here to write a whodunit, I’m here to write an account of a wife’s murder by her husband.” More specifically, the novel is aware of itself as a text that must find its place among other texts – Coetzee’s Disgrace, his Diary of a Bad Year, Krog’s Country of My Skull and Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart are all read or referred to by the narrator. Heyns’ novel is wittier than its intertexts. There are, for example, two key witnesses of the crime who cannot speak: Cedric, a Maltese, and Kerneels a wire-haired mongrel.

  Without obviously “ticking boxes”, Heyns knows just how to characterise contemporary South Africa: there’s the new black mayor of Alfredville who rides in a Mercedes with a blue light flashing; there’s a car guard from the DRC who was a practising advocate in his home country and who can quote Voltaire (“We must cultivate our garden”); there’s a black woman psychologist who reads JM Coetzee and who makes it her business to point out every assumption the narrator labours under.

  The novel uses the most mundane truth of contemporary South Africa – that no one trusts the police force anymore – as an integral part of its structure. None of the characters in Lost Ground contemplates for a moment handing over evidence or making a statement to the police. And in these days of botched prosecutions, wrongful arrests, rapes in holding cells, scrapped and postponed cases, miscarriages of justice and fabricated evidence, the reader completely identifies with them. (In a fascinating cross-reference, Heyns lists Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, about the Inge Lotz murder, in his acknowledgements).

  But even without a reliable investigating officer, people still want to tell; they want to lay their truth before a neutral, judge-like character. Peter Jacobs seems to fit the bill. One by one they approach him until he can no longer maintain his aloof, distantly curious persona. Stripped of his cosmopolitan veneer, his “so fucking superior” attitude, and unable to maintain his signature disengagement, the cool, cynical eavesdropping outsider breaks down in public: “I feel the relentless pull of loss, of the losses I have caused and the losses I have suffered, the drift towards annihilation that nobody and nothing can stay. But I hold onto Nonyameko’s hand, for all the world as if I could thus anchor myself to some saving vestige of identity.”

  Whether you read it as a whodunit or as a portrait of the nation, Lost Ground is utterly compelling – exquisitely written, profound, hilarious and hauntingly familiar.

• Quarterly Conversation
  http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-childrens-day-by-michiel-heyns
  Word count: 1430

  QUOTE:
  Heyns keeps things moving—there’s always a new character to present a new problem—and is able to deliver Simon’s reality with an affectionate grasp of a young, inquisitive, and self-conscious boy’s world, leavened with an adult’s arch commentary:
  gently humorous, good-natured story of coming-of-age in South Africa
  THE CHILDREN’S DAY BY MICHIEL HEYNS

  Review by Donald Brown — Published on September 6, 2011
  Tags: South African literature, tin house

  REVIEWED:
  THE CHILDREN’S DAY BY MICHIEL HEYNS. TIN HOUSE. 244 PP. $14.95.

  PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 25

  Late in Michiel Heyns’ The Children’s Day, set in South Africa, Simon, the book’s adolescent protagonist and narrator, reads Dickens’ Great Expectations. It’s a book the reader may have already been thinking about, since Heyns’ novel, like Dickens’, is a coming-of-age tale with a bit of a twist, and since it concerns a protagonist/narrator who is never quite as perceptive as he thinks he is. For Simon, Dickens’ novel, read while on holiday at the Cape in the summer of 1965-66, becomes an occasion for a friendly chat with an older man who has begun to take an interest in him. Flattered by the fact that someone notices he is a dedicated reader, Simon initially misses the erotic overtones of the interest, but, like Pip finally learning who his secret benefactor truly is, Simon learns the nature of something he has not understood till then.

  Simon’s story’s present day is December, 1968, when a tennis match between his white boarding school, Wesley College, and the “Clutch Plates” from a technical school, whose team includes Fanie van den Bergh, a poor Afrikaans boy from Simon’s village, sets off a retrospective narrative of Simon’s childhood, from 1964 to 1966, in the African Free State village of Verkeerdespruit. Simon’s parents are well-educated liberals, so his own homelife with his father, a magistrate, and his mother, secretary of a charitable organization, is more than usually enlightened, boasting a warm, gently humorous family circle, but the hazards of trying to read between the lines in village life and at school provide a succession of social lessons that, while potentially harrowing, tend toward comic acknowledgement of human foibles. In the end, the novel aims to offer a sense of individual potential beneath the deadening drabness of white middle-class culture in apartheid South Africa.

  Structured by the device of letting bits of action in 1968 set up the more lengthy retrospective sections, the novel’s transitions can seem at times a bit too pat; one almost has the sensation of those wavy fades that used to occur in old movies before a flashback. But the novel is entertaining as a coming-of-age story that becomes a coming-out story, and the device of a young boy learning about himself in the distorting mirror of awkward and epileptic Fanie, whom Simon professes to dislike to the point of infatuation, provides Heyns’ novel with the classical grace of other finely wrought tales of adolescence. As the narrator of his own growth, Heyns’ Simon is never quite as self-conscious as Dickens’ Copperfield, looking to find in the charming Steerforth the “hero of his own life,” but it’s clear that Heyns’ narrative knowingly plays with such motifs on a smaller scale, imbuing his novel with a vivid and compelling sense of student and small-town life.

  The retrospective narrative features a series of episodes or encounters in which Simon comes into conflict with the mores that dominate his world. Steve, a motorcycle-riding young man new to town, is a potential sexual liberator as he takes Simon skinny-dipping in a river, but Simon’s initiation is undermined by the forces of propriety that surround him. Rather, it’s Fanie whom Steve takes along on a joyride to another town (considered abduction by the authorities) and kisses (considered molestation), for which Steve is imprisoned. Heyns’ technique allows him to present events in at least three registers at once: Simon’s uncomprehending but faithful accuracy to events at the time; the point of view of social opinion, which Simon expresses as part of his own upbringing; and the point of view of grown Simon who has already learned the lessons he wants these childhood adventures to illustrate. The narrative’s manner of willful naïvete occasionally cloys, but Heyns keeps things moving—there’s always a new character to present a new problem—and is able to deliver Simon’s reality with an affectionate grasp of a young, inquisitive, and self-conscious boy’s world, leavened with an adult’s arch commentary:

  I had never considered [kissing] to be something that one might do voluntarily or because it gave anybody any pleasure. People did kiss in movies, but people in movies also did any number of things that people in Verkeerdespruit or even Winburg wouldn’t dream of doing, like bursting into song in midconversation or dying for their beliefs.

  The town of Verkeerdespruit offers familiar small town characters such as the quietly knowing phone operator Betty Brand, who hears all the business of the town, while the school scenes provide rich opportunities for the usual nemeses of student life—sadistic teachers like the lisping and sardonic Mr. de Wet, young idols, like the tennis coach Mr. van der Walt, and embarrassing sexual discoveries, such as trysts between teachers. Tried and true as such material can seem, Heyns has a sharp sense of how to convey both poignancy and satire in Simon’s scenes of instruction:

  Mr. Viljoen seemed to be doing push-ups on top of Miss Rheeder, and he was making grunting noises. They had evidently not heard me open the door. He changed position and I could see her face: her eyes were closed. Then she said in an out-of-breath sort of way, “This is better exercise than playing tennis with Nico van der Walt,” and they both laughed in that way I could now relate to its source. I was in the presence of The Mystery.

  Part of the emotion and humor of the moment is furnished by the fact that Simon has been sent to Mr. Viljoen’s office by Mr. van der Walt, who wants confirmation of his suspicion of what Miss Rheeder’s absence from tennis practice means. As in this instance, most denouements in these stories are tartly comic. Easily the most emotional story is the tale of Simon’s dog, Dumbo, alleged to have contracted rabies, and the confrontation between Simon and his parents that the fate of the dog occasions.

  The situation of a young boy, tried by such experiences, who wants to distance himself from the “gormless maladroitness of backwater living” is common enough to make Simon’s story universal, but the specifics of South Africa add a dimension that differs from other settings, as for instance when Simon learns about the implications of the Sabotage Act from his father: “sabotage is now . . . a matter of definition.” We’re reading, in a sense, a primer on class—and to a lesser extent, race—relations of the time as Simon gradually achieves a grasp of the social implications of his upbringing and his friendships, and the meaning—on various levels—of his interactions with Fanie. The full significance of the latter is left to the closing pages, with illumination for Simon literally taking place with a lightning-bolt.

  Handled particularly well is Simon’s sexual confusion and the lessons he learns from adults, such as his interlocutor at the Cape, or from Mr. Robinson, the headmaster of the school Simon attends in Bloemfontein. Both encounters are made the occasion for happy life lessons, when they could as easily have been much darker. Indeed, the headmaster takes what seems an unusually broad-minded attitude toward the activities between two boys that Simon feels compelled to report, with almost unbelievable naïvete at that point, but it all serves Heyns’ purpose of writing an enabling fiction about maturation.

  First published in 2002, The Children’s Day has finally reached the U.S. via the imprint of Tin House Books, which is to be commended for bringing to light a gently humorous, good-natured story of coming-of-age in South Africa in the era, as Philip Larkin would have it, immediately after “sexual intercourse began.”

  Donald Brown reviews poetry, fiction, and theater for The New Haven Review and The New Haven Advocate.

  PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 25

• Los Angeles Times
  http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/28/entertainment/et-book28
  Word count: 888

  QUOTE:
  Heyns' story goes beyond Simon's coming-of-age and broaches something much bigger: society's own struggles with coming-of-age.

  BOOK REVIEW
  'The Children's Day' by Michiel Heyns
  The debut novel set in South Africa during apartheid has well-written characters and humor, but is sometimes difficult to follow as it flits about adulthood, teen years and childhood.
  August 28, 2009|Amy Wallen
  Sex and politics on the playground. Yes, another coming-of-age story.

  Two potential drawbacks of such stories are the episodic nature of the telling, and the child's point of view: Episodic narrative fails when it is too disjointed. And a child's point of view -- though often cute -- can be shallow and uncompelling. South African author Michiel Heyns, in his first novel "The Children's Day," does deliver on both elements, one less successfully than the other. But with rich language and characters, as well as titillating humor, the imperfections are forgivable.

  Simon, a precocious boy, is naive in the ways of love. It's 1960s apartheid South Africa, and Simon is a white child living in the small town of Verkeerdespruit. His naivete leads to many puzzling situations: Why do the village mothers run out of town the slick motorcyclist whom all the village boys love and admire just because he takes them skinny-dipping? And what is the deal with the man Simon calls "my stranger" (as in don't-talk-to-strangers stranger), who offers to teach him how to masturbate?

  We are first introduced to teenage Simon at Wesley College, his boarding school. The tennis coach informs the team that they will be playing a special tournament with the Clutch Plates -- the team from a technical school: "As children of privilege and culture, it was our duty to share our amenities with the less privileged . . . and we resigned ourselves to our putative high-mindedness." When the Clutch Plates arrive, he is surprised to see his old chum Fanie van den Bergh step off the bus. Then Simon takes the reader back through his years as a primary school student when he had been a classmate of Fanie's and instead of plot we travel along these recollections through which Simon reflects on the intersection of sex, power and the world at large.

  In one of these episodes, Simon recalls a Ladies Home Journal cartoon with "S-E-X" in the caption. The dictionary was not much help in solving this mystery, so he "saved up the word and watched for things to fall into place around it."

  It is in Simon's analyses where we see the crossover of his child and adult mind filtering and interpreting the secrets he is trying to unravel.

  As the answers remain out of reach, he recalls his mother saying, "When you grow up you'll discover that you don't know much more, you just get better at living with your ignorance."

  Heyns paints the narrator, the reflecting adult Simon, in such subtle tones as to make him invisible -- more a conscience than overarching presence.

  The storytelling falters, however, when Heyns skips back and forth between Simon as child and Simon as teenager. He forces the connections via episodic flashbacks, but what the episodes lack in continuity, they reward with the splendid characters who inhabit them. Heyns creates empathy for the good and the bad in a short amount of space:

  Chinless Betty, an adult with whom the child Simon shares cream soda floats at the local cafe, answers some of Simon's recondite questions. Her responses, and his mother's, are heart-stopping and humorous moments.

  Betty, the village phone operator, recounts her disagreement with a caller who wants her to speak in Afrikaans first, then English, and she explains to Simon that it's a matter of principle.

  "What's a principle?" Simon asks, to which Betty replies: "A principle is something that you're prepared to make yourself unpleasant about."

  Simon suffers the trials and tribulations of love, as relationships sour or shift: His primary school crush dumps him for a rugby player.

  He observes aggressors and victims in relationships, tries to differentiate love from sex and power, distinguish human frailty from backbone.

  Simon also observes unconventional love struggling against society's prejudices: Klasie the postmaster who lives with his devoutly Catholic mother falls in love with Trevor the pink-shirted hitchhiker. Gradually, love begins to get crowded out for Simon and he begins to understand how people can abuse power in its guise.

  In one scene he discusses "Great Expectations" with "my stranger" and we see his conflict. "Miss Havisham did wrong . . . because she taught Estella never to love anybody, but I don't know . . . I can sort of see her point . . . the one who loves is weak and the one who doesn't love is strong."

  When his observations become more and more tainted, he is called a cynic.

  "What's cynical?" he asks.

  His mother replies: "[P]eople who don't believe in life anymore."

  Heyns' story goes beyond Simon's coming-of-age and broaches something much bigger: society's own struggles with coming-of-age.

  --

  Wallen is a book reviewer, novelist and the "Unconventional Relationships" columnist for the Faster Times.

• Gorry Bowes Taylor Blog
  http://www.gorrybowestaylor.co.za/reviews/157/invisible-furies-michiel-heyns
  Word count: 432

  QUOTE:
  Heyns turns an ironic eye on the most seductive city on earth, and traces with humour and insight the invisible furies of the heart.

  Invisible Furies
  by Michiel Heyns

  Publisher: Jonathan Ball
  Genre: Fiction
  Verdict: Passions in Paris
  Book Reviewed by: Gorry Bowes Taylor

  After a thirty-year absence Christopher Turner returns to Paris. He is here to extricate his best friend’s son from the mercenary machinations of some Parisian gold-digger – or so it is assumed, at home in South Africa. Christopher, with melancholy memories of Paris, is deeply ambivalent about the city; and, as for the young Eric, Christopher remembers him as a brutish lout with little to recommend himself.
  But both the city and the young man take Christopher by surprise: far from having been corrupted by the place, Eric turns out to have been immeasurably improved by it. The spoilt son has become a considerate and attentive host with charming manners. Furthermore, as Christopher is gradually introduced to Eric’s associates, he finds to his dismay that he likes them – above all, the beautiful Beatrice du Plessis, in her day a supermodel, now the mother of a young daughter apparently destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps. And Paris exerts her spell anew …
  As Christopher comes to know and enjoy this ambiguous world, he finds his moral categories challenged: is beauty a trap for the innocent young, or a self-validating, even ennobling attribute of a fully lived life? Responding to the gentle appeal of Beatrice, he feels ever more strongly that the young man’s place is in Paris with her, rather than on his father’s farm in Franschhoek. But Eric has ideas of his own …
  Exploring, as in the widely applauded Lost Ground, the tensions between the fatherland and a larger world, Michiel Heyns turns an ironic eye on the most seductive city on earth, and traces with humour and insight the invisible furies of the heart.

  Michiel Heyns has won the 2009 Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction, the English Academy’s Sol Plaatje Award for Translating, the South African Translator’s Institute Award for a Literary Translation for his translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. He is the author of five previous novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale, Bodies Politic and the critically acclaimed Lost Ground. He was until recently professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch, giving it up to pursue his passion for the pen..

• Diane Awerbuck Blog
  http://dianeawerbuck.bookslive.co.za/blog/2012/06/19/beauty-in-vileness-a-review-of-invisible-furies-by-michiel-heyns/
  Word count: 699

  QUOTE:
  The tropes in this accomplished book work well because they are ageless. We’ll always have Paris. Or – as it does Heyns – Paris will always have us.

  Beauty in Vileness: A Review of Invisible Furies by Michiel Heyns
  by Diane on Jun 19th, 2012 1 comment
  Paris has us, writes Diane Awerbuck about Michiel Heyns’ Invisible Furies
  Has any city been more worshipped than Paris? It must stand for everything except what it is – tall buildings with poor plumbing; impressive art, mostly by foreigners; and tasty, overpriced food.
  Appearance, as Michiel Heyns points out in his new book, Invisible Furies, is everything. To penetrate the world behind the façade and to know its secrets, animates a certain kind of traveller – and a certain kind of reader.
  Into the apparently unwelcoming milieu steps Christopher Turner, who is presented with “the half-truth, the mixed motive, the hidden agenda, the possible other case”. His mission is to retrieve from Paris the son of his old friend, Daniel de Villiers. To curry favour with le père (the father), Turner hopes to return the young man to the family wine farm in Franschhoek.
  Eric, le fils (the son), was an unreconstructed oaf in his previous incarnation, and Turner is curious to see what changes the French life has visited upon him. Turner is acquainted with the gilding effect of Paris. He last visited the city on a misbegotten student holiday 30 years before with his frenemy, Daniel who, for all his faults, “could and would be loved”.Their getaway was hijacked by Marie-Louise whomarried the desirable but brutish Daniel. Back in the present, Turner plays ambassador to their prodigal son, negotiating the tricky territory of personal desire and social duty.
  Still a victim of his heart’s “invisible furies”, Turner finds the French Eric is a more perfect avatar: “The son is what the father could have been, if he’d followed the generous impulses of his nature rather than the promptings of his caution. In Eric I can see what I loved in Daniel, as I once knew him.”
  That use of the past tense is significant. Turner’s position is untenable. In the course of his extended visit, he rejects his role as emissary – Eric is better off where he is. Turner is not thanked for his pains.
  Heyns has long been infatuated with Henry James, who referred to many of his own shorter works as deriving motive “from some noted adventure, some felt embarrassment, some extreme predicament, of the artist enamoured of perfection, ridden by his idea or paying for his sincerity”.
  These writer-hero characters are prone to confusing their fictions with the conflicting fictions of the “real” world. Heyns’s Turner is no exception – a man absurdly ill-equipped to deal with the Parisian present. Like the characters in fairy tales, he assumes that truth and beauty necessarily concur.
  This conflation lands him in trouble as soon as he sets pied to terre and finds his first new friend is a man of surpassing ugliness, while the physically perfect are corrupt to the core. This gargoyle Zeevee is Turner’s ticket to the Parisian cool set, into which Eric has inveigled himself as a claqueur, a hottie hired to applaud in the front row at fashion shows (and other dramas) – one step up from a “taxi-boy” or prostitute.
  By the end of the novel, Turner learns what Henry James could have told him at the get-go, that “hideousness grimaces at you from the bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms before your eyes in the lap of vileness”.
  The future of Paris belongs to the “rats” of Europe, like the Romanian rentboys who are “good-looking, before they lose their teeth”.
  The tropes in this accomplished book work well because they are ageless. We’ll always have Paris. Or – as it does Heyns – Paris will always have us.
  Invisible Furies is published by Jonathan Ball
  Jonathan Ball home
  Jonathan Ball @ Books LIVE
  This review is brought to you by Books LIVE Wire. Books LIVE Wire books sponsored by Exclusive Books.

• Stellenbosch Literary Project
  http://slipnet.co.za/view/reviews/a-stirring-elegy-on-lost-youth-departed-beauty/
  Word count: 2249

  REVIEWS
  A stirring elegy on lost youth, departed beauty
  Posted on August 30, 2012 by Lara Buxbaum

  Invisible Furies

  Invisible Furies by Michiel Heyns, Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg & Cape Town, 2012.

  A new Michiel Heyns novel is always a cause for celebration, and this, Heyns’s sixth novel in ten years, surely makes him of one South Africa's most prolific literary talents. Invisible Furies was released only months prior to the announcement that Heyns had won the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Award for Lost Ground. (He shared the award with Marlene van Niekerk in 2007 for his accomplished translation of her novel, Agaat.) No doubt the publicity machine will ensure a knock-on effect and spike in sales for this very different novel – a fact which is not at all displeasing.

  Heyns is uniquely talented in that his novels alternate between a South African and European locale and operate along a wide spectrum of different genres seemingly with ease. Invisible Furies is set in Paris, worlds away from the dusty fictional Karoo town of Alfredville, where his unconventional “crime novel” Lost Ground is set. If the backdrop to that novel “is not a landscape that conforms readily to a formula: it refuses to be reduced to cliché or even a meaning” (62), it is difficult to imagine a more mythologised and readily fictionalised city than Paris – the name alone conjures up an exhausting list of clichés in the global imaginary.

  Lost Ground

  The challenge for any author in revisiting Paris, then, is to present it afresh to a readership without resorting to a “formula”. This challenge to rewrite a familiar trope is amplified by the fact that the novel is inspired by Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903) or, as Heyns words it in the acknowledgements section of the novel, “substantially recas[t] and reinterpre[t] the Jamesian given” (296).

  While some readers of this novel may be familiar with the plot of The Ambassadors, I think it is fair to say that many will not, and so the problem facing the reviewer is what weight to accord the “Jamesian given”. While the novel is obviously a Jamesian pastiche, it is not just that. I have approached the text with its inspiration in mind, identifying affinities but also considering the novel in its own right, as it deserves. In fact, it seems the “Jamesian given” ultimately proves constraining for Heyns's prodigious imagination, as the plot at times strains against the strictures to which it must adhere.

  The most striking liberty that Heyns has taken with James's cast of characters is with the nature of his protagonist's loyalties. In The Ambassadors Lambert Strether is sent to Paris as an emissary of his fiancée, Mrs Newsome. He has been commissioned to recall her errant son to the mysterious family business in provincial Woollett, Massachusetts. In Invisible Furies, freelance editor Christopher Turner has been tasked by his childhood friend, and the object of one of his heart's “invisible furies”, Daniel de Villiers, to return the heir apparent, Eric de Villiers, to 'Beau Regard' (the humorously anglicised and ungrammatical version of the French for “beautiful look”) – a farm outside the town of Franschhoek, which is not immune to aspirations of faux-European grandeur.

  If one is asking whither the plaasroman in contemporary South Africa literature, here we are presented with its possible “sequel”: where Van Niekerk's Jakkie, in Agaat, escapes to Canada to become an ethno-musicologist, Eric becomes a claquer in Paris: he is “employed to look beautiful and applaud vigorously” at fashion shows. (52).

  With the emphasis on the fluidity of sexual attractions and the gay quartier of the Marais as epicentre exerting its magnetic pull on the events, Heyns has liberated James's mannered characters from their closet and, in his reappropriation, explicitly queers the Jamesian given (the implicit “queer” narrative in James's fiction has been the subject of much critical analysis – see for example Eve Kosofky Sedgwick's reading of “The Beast in the Closet” in The Epistemology of the Closet and the responses to it). Heyns's novel is set in a Paris, where as the actor Simon Cleaver sardonically observes, “bed no longer comes with breakfast” (98), and yet “nothing in Paris comes without a bed” (99).

  Christopher has not returned to Paris since his trip with Daniel thirty years ago. His happiest memory of their time together, in fact his one memory of unadulterated joy, is a night of drunken revelry, where in a scene reminiscent of Truffaut's Jules et Jim, they ran along the Seine “laughing and singing, ‘I can't give you anything but love, baby’” (23). But like that classic film, three is an unwieldy number, and Christopher's affections are soon usurped by the arrival in Paris of Daniel's lover and future wife Marie-Louise, and so his remaining time in Paris was akin to “a season in hell” (24).

  Since then, Christopher feels “nothing had happened to him” (121). The narrator observes drolly that Christopher's career as a teacher was “ultimately, taxing only in the toll it took of his youth, his enthusiasm, his love of his subject, his belief in the value of literature” (121). As an aside, there is of course the in-joke that Christopher, as a student and teacher of literature, is oblivious to finding himself a pawn in the plot of a James novel.

  Our protagonist seems impervious to the charms of the fabled “city of lights”: “One gets irritated with the implication that one should fall flat on one's face in worship each time one turns a corner in Paris” (12) and equally baffled by the world of fashion: “[T]that merely covering the human body could be such a multifarious business” (122). However, Christopher gradually falls under the spell of the seductive Eric de Villiers and his older paramour, Beatrice du Plessis – an ex-supermodel who hails from Potchefstroom, a fact “which did not open up many avenues of conversation” (115).

  His erstwhile love of order (135) is challenged in the course of his conversations with his Parisian interlocutors: “It's just that it's become so difficult to tell [the moral order] from all sorts of other orders of things.... The aesthetic order of things.... but also the pragmatic order of things, the politic order of things, the expedient order – and even just the merciful order of things” (223) and the validity of his mission is muddied.

  While Henry James is concerned with the interactions of America and Europe, it is the pathways between South Africa and France that are in focus here, and are responsible for some of the wittier interludes in the novel. As Martha confides to Christopher: “The French, as you may know, think they are mad about Africa, which to them means The Lion King with sex” (29). On another occasion, two Afrikaans tourists, unaware of Christopher's nationality, express their disappointment in loud Afrikaans: “Ag kak! … Nou't daai poephol ons tafel gegryp” (153). However, the migrations between the rest of the world and Paris are not merely fodder for amusing cultural anecdotes. The harsh reality of immigration and rising hostility to “outsiders” are variously alluded to.

  Towards the beginning of the novel, we are told that Christopher has kept a copy of L'Étranger next to his bed, “retaining a nominal connection with la langue” (18). On one of his first walks in the city, Christopher encounters an extract from Walt Whitman: “Étranger qui passe, tu ne sais pas avec quel désir ardent je te regarde”(Passing stranger! you do not know / How longingly I look upon you) supposedly adorning the front of the iconic Shakespeare & Co bookshop. However, the actual frontispiece of the store displays the motto of the late owner, that other Whitman, George: “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.”

  This interesting erasure suggests the central tension in the world of the novel: the call to be hospitable to strangers has been superseded by desire and the desire to look at the other. It is in this authorial erasure that the otherwise apparently conflicting themes of beauty and Parisian “outsiders” in the novel coalesce.

  As Fabrice darkly proclaims, “I have an eye. He is not from Paris, he doesn't inhabit his clothes as if he belongs in them, he doesn't walk the street as if he's at home in it. And most of the foreign boys are Romanian. Romania is very homophobic, so they can't ply their trade there” (279).

  Eric confesses to Christopher that, upon arrival in Paris, he longed to possess “the code, the Open Sesame to that secret world behind the door” (180). For Eric, the key to accessing this world is beautiful clothes, and it is ultimately revealed that his way was smoothed by Fabrice who euphemistically calls himself “a social coordinator catering to a niche market” (280).

  Maxime du Camp wrote of Paris in the late 19th century: “Fashion is the recherche – the always vain, often ridiculous, sometimes dangerous quest – for a superior ideal beauty.” It is these elements of vanity, ridicule and danger that Heyns attempts to capture and illustrate.

  In fact the most nuanced meditations on the meaning of beauty stem not from engaging with clothes or fashion but from the encounter with more traditional forms of art – sculpture, photography and painting. A Picasso painting is “beautiful but terrible” (245). Eric's obsession with two photographs, of a “terrifying and beautiful” horse, rearing away from invisible danger, and of a young black man, “his back disfigured by a single weal, his shoulder hunched against the next lash of the whip” (184-5) reveals his own capacity for brutality. Eric admits: “They were grisly if you thought about them, about what was happening there, but just as objects they were very beautiful.” On another occasion, during a spontaneous trip to Florence, to “assist” Eric in retrieving Beatrice's daughter, Christopher reflects on the contrasting depictions of brutality in the different versions of David. (Amusingly enough, a miniature statue of David exists as a more concrete incarnation of violence, as the murder weapon, in Lost Ground.)

  As these dark intimations suggest, the “charm” (273) that Christopher falls under is inevitably broken, as we know it must be, dictated by the denouement of The Ambassadors. Christopher himself, though, is slow to interpret these signs. Christopher's naïveté at times beggars belief, but any impatience the reader might feel is expressed in the person of Martha Samuelson, who acts as a necessary foil to him. Christopher's rapport with Martha, although often in the form of somewhat incongruous – and improbable in the contemporary setting – Jamesian dialogue is also one of the delights of the novel. Heyns's dexterity with language is given full freedom in their interactions:

  “I get the impression,” Martha said, “from the relish with which you say that, that you don't really mind being embroiled in this little imbroglio”.

  “Embroiled in an imbroglio. Do I strike you as so tautologically immersed?” (222).

  There is real pathos in the moment when Christopher's delusions about Eric are finally crushed. Although inevitable, Heyns rescues this moment from potential caricature or bathos with a descriptive tour de force:

  [A]ll beauty had been mired by the touch of Fabrice, all virtue made suspect by the dark confidences of the woman in black. The streets were just extensions of catwalks, the shops just purveyors of enhancements to the display of human flesh, the cafés just seating for phalanxes of claquers. (287)

  Olga, the woman in black, has alerted Christopher to the subterranean aspects of Paris. “People talk about the Seine … about its bridges, how beautiful, how romantic, but for me … they will always smell of piss and shit” (260). And yet, in his despair, he flees the Marais and descends to the world below the bridges, where he encounters the city's denizens, engaged in their own performances. Two men embrace, mirroring his own encounter, sans Daniel's clowning and irony, listening to a woman singing one of Mahler's “Rückert lieder” (292). She is oblivious of an audience, does not need a claquer as her songpleads for love, not for beauty or youth's sake, but for “love's sake alone” (293). And in this moment, despite his anguish, Christopher “felt consoled, by the consolation that beauty brings, however tainted its sources and vile its ends” (295).

  This ending recalls the melancholy end of Teju Cole's Open City (2011). Of Mahler's final works, Cole's protagonist declares, “[t]he overwhelming impression they give is of light: the light of a passionate hunger for life, the light of a sorrowful mind contemplating death's implacable approach” (250). One of the epigraphs to Heyns's novel, taken from The Ambassadors,includes the phrase “in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble”. Invisible Furies ends with the dimming light of Paris and what the light of Mahler reveals.

  If the many themes in this novel seem uneasily reconciled, then the desire to thread them through a plot already constrained by the framework of The Ambassadors sometimes falters. However, Heyns's treasure chest of vocabulary and dialogue, into which he habitually dips, and the sheer beauty of his writing, especially in the set pieces – reflections on beauty and regret, of daily life in Paris, descriptions of lavish or grotesque parties – ensures that, despite minor hesitations, this book remains a stirring elegy on lost youth and beauty in all its manifestations.

• LitNet
  http://www.litnet.co.za/review-a-sportful-malice-by-michiel-heyns/
  Word count: 771

  QUOTE:
  A Sportful Malice is a very funny book,
  Review: A sportful malice by Michiel Heyns
  I was spellbound by this novel throughout. At times it was like a Henry James novel with its convoluted thoughts and subtleties of mind. More and more I became deeply involved in the relationships and the revelations Heyns brings to us.
  Michael King
  2014-10-02
  Facebook ShareTwitter ShareLinkedIn ShareGoogle+ SharePinterest ShareCommentsMail to friendPrint Page
  Title: A Sportful Malice
  Author: Michiel Heyns
  Publisher: Jonathan Ball
  ISBN: 9781868426218

  Buy A Sportful Malice from Kalahari.com

  A Sportful Malice is a very funny book, fully accomplishing its subtitle “A Comedy of Revenge”. Michael Marcucci, a South African literary scholar, encounters a number of strange characters as he departs from Cambridge on his way to Gianocini, a small Italian village where he had rented a house to be able to complete his study of “Literary Representations of Tuscany”. Upon arrival in Italy he becomes increasingly unnerved as these characters start reappearing in his life in a sequence of actions which drive the story through to its thoroughly satisfying conclusion.

  This is Michiel Heyns’s seventh novel, a return to the comic mode previously displayed in The Reluctant Passenger – an approach very different from his acclaimed Lost Ground. While the subject matter might be less significant, there is no doubting Heyns’s masterful control of the variations in tone – always entertaining, steadily ironic, light-heartedly satirical, and very amusing. There is a lightness of touch that allows you to read at a brisk pace (except when you have to stop reading to catch your breath from laughing out loud).

  The characters that surround Michael are initially presented almost as caricatures. They are stereotypes – the coarse, uncouth, uneducated bouncer, the “bovver boy”; the elderly man who jumps the queue at Stansted Airport, with the “unironed looks of a long-time bachelor”, whose “slovenly shabbiness” is matched by a corresponding “lack of regard for decorum”; and the upright, uptight English lady with a voice like a diamond on cut glass. Heyns develops these stock characters by filling them to the brim with vigour and unexpected capacities. The bouncer, for all his crudeness of language and opinion, is developed as a voice with more than enough insight to satirise Michael’s pretensions and affectations. When Michael encounters the old man and the old woman in Gianocini, they turn out to be artists with definite, albeit eccentric, views on art and life, yet their arguments about art seem more authentic than Michael’s pretentiousness.

  This is a modern epistolary novel, and the story unfolds through the 12 e-mails from Michael to his Johannesburg-based partner J, and then one e-mail from one of the other characters. We are not given sight of J’s replies, but Michael does refer in passing to some of his partner’s reactions. We as readers know there is an addressed reader who is a part of the story, but we enjoy the excitement of eavesdropping on that correspondence, even though we are also aware that Michael is deliberately “writing up” his experiences for effect. But there is one e-mail, which comes unexpectedly from somebody else in the story, which sets up the resolution of the revenge tale. Introducing the e-mail from the other character is a very neat way of signaling a change of point of view, which allows the unexpected but nonetheless inevitable ending.

  The high points of comedy and satire are in the dialogue, especially the extended conversations in which Michael unwittingly reveals his pretentions and shallowness. For example, in the encounter between Michael and Cedric (the bouncer) on the airplane from England to Italy, Michael turns out to be no match for Cedric’s single-mindedness, where he articulates ideas which are totally at odds with Michael’s and for which Michael is unable to provide any sort of assured answer. Other extended discussions, such as those between Michael and the old man and woman that he meets up with again in Gianocini, or the exchange between Michael and Angela, provide Heyns with the platform to satirise the diction and rhetoric of “‘arty” discourse. Amusing as these exchanges are, the quality of Michael’s self-conscious and self-satisfied reflections are also continually amusing.

  The resolution is hugely satisfying. It would be a spoiler to reveal the details, but they are very satisfying. Revenge is a dish best served up cold, as Talleyrand is reputed to have said, and the nature of the revenge is exquisitely appropriate.

• Mmegi Online
  http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=7&aid=1821&dir=2011/June/Friday24
  Word count: 1230

  QUOTE:
  his volume is both a writer's workshop and an historical family portrait of the Pankhursts.

  Book Review

  An activist can become blind to the family so close to them
  BySHERIDAN GRISWOLD (GMT +2) 0 Comments Email Share
  Michiel Heyns (2008)
  Bodies Politic: A Novel. Cape Town and Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 312 pages, Softcover, with glossary and acknowledgements, P160. ISBN 978-1-86842-298-2. Available at Exclusive Books, Riverwalk.

  Bodies Politic: A Novel is Michiel Heyns' fourth novel. Following the success of his first novel The Children's Day he left the University of Stellenbosch to writer full-time. His other two novels published before Bodies Politic are The Reluctant Passenger and The Typewriter's Tale. All have been well-received. Heyns had studied at Cambridge University in England. In Bodies Politic he returns there to explore the lives of the famous suffragist family in novel form. This volume is both a writer's workshop and an historical family portrait of the Pankhursts.

  The Pankhursts as historical figures are fair game for a new interpretation of their complex lives. The bare facts are that when her daughter Christabel (1880-1958) went to jail for her actions in 1905 (arson had become a favoured tactic), that her mother Emmeline (1858-1928), with daughter Sylvia (1882-1960) continued the famous campaign to give women the vote, a militant struggle that lasted to the brink of the First World War.

  Heyns begins his story in April 1928 with Emmeline Pankhurst's thoughts (she died on June 14 - in her later years she had become vehemently anti-communist) and her conversations with her favourite, but manipulative daughter Christabel. She is the daughter who is closest to her mother, equal driving force in the movement, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), for gaining the vote for women. She is always demanding more of their followers, yet not quite joining in the sacrifices made by them, while Emmeline is willing to go to prison and even go on a hunger strike and be force fed, Christabel finds ways to go abroad and fire up the movement from afar.

  She and her mother agree on policy and see eye-to-eye on the content of their speeches and political heckling, while the second daughter, Sylvia, deeply resents the exclusive submission to her older sister. She is actively living amongst the poor in the East End of London doing very basic good works and there she founded the Federation of Suffragettes. The third daughter, Adela on the "lunatic fringe", was rejected by mother and sister and "banished" to Australia - due to her socialist views and intense sibling rivalry.

  A brief relationship with the Italian anarchist Silvio Corio has resulted in Sylvia's pregnancy - she had a son in 1928 out of wedlock - it is held against her. She genuinely worries about her younger brother, Harry whom she loves, who is suffering in an unnecessarily difficult school and then a job where his health is endangered. Yet Sylvia has no support from her mother, who always puts her movement at the top of her thoughts, thinking simply that Harry needs to toughen up; he is the only boy to become a man amongst these powerful women. He is not resentful of his mother's neglect; accepting her preoccupations as important and he always supports her causes in many small and big ways.

  The second part of the novel is written from Sylvia's point of view. The heading page quotes Emmeline: "You were always unreasonable, always have been and I fear always will be. I suppose you were made so!" (page 105).Sylvia was called back early from study of art in Venice to take over the Manchester shop, Emerson's, only to discover her mother had lost interest

  and her sacrifice was unnecessary. One thus feels that it was Emmeline who was being unreasonable. To the reporter, Sylvia declares her main contribution in life was her efforts to unite Ethiopia and Eritrea: "The struggle to bring justice to the Ethiopian people, in the face of the criminal indifference of the British government has been by far the most worthwhile and I think successful thing in my life.

  'More worthwhile than helping women get the vote?' the reporter asks. Yes, I say it was no doubt only a matter of justice that women should have the vote. But I must confess myself disappointed with the use to which they have put their hard-earned privilege. 'You mean...' 'I mean, amongst other follies, returning that dissolute old hypocrite Winston Churchill to power once again ...'" (page 119).

  Part Three is in the words of Helen Craggs, formerly a full-time organiser for the WSPU, who was asked by Sylvia to come to be with her sick brother and see him through his illness, for Harry is in love with Helen. It is quite a decision for her to make but we learn that she, in the end, benefited greatly from the experience and from his love.

  She became a pharmacist to help her first husband, but was now married to Fred Pethick Lawrence. He was very active in the Women's Social and Political Union, but later expelled from it by Emmeline and Christabel. He was a Labour MP and became Secretary of State for India. Helen shares with him her story of her relationship with Harry on his deathbed. This is now the third angle from which we view the sibling rivalry, the ruthlessness of mother and daughter, and the story of Harry, who had polio and a very painful death as an 18-year-old man.

  Heyns is a marvel in creating convincing conversations; between Emmeline and Christabel, and in like manner between all the different characters. Helen witnessed Harry's suffering and helped him to accept drugs rather than simply bear it grimly, having been told by his mother that it was not manly not to conquer one's pain. Very touching sweet exchanges are conveyed in these pages.

  The final scene is of Emmeline Pankhurst, when she finally arrives at the hospital: she is silenced at last by the sight of such suffering, as Harry is already out of control of his faculties and she hadn't realised how sick he was.She was totally undone with shock and one sees how an activist can become blind to the family so close to them, ever running around saving the world, but ignoring one's own.

  Helen said, "Harry dead was a more formidable challenge to Emmeline than all the massed male power of the law.And he defeated her" (page 292). "Sitting with him day by day I found that he came to be precious in a way that perhaps only something one is about to lose can be precious. And to have touched him and to be touched by him ... Harry was, I suppose, the experience one can never repeat, the rapture one is always trying to recapture, not knowing that it's youth itself one has lost" (page 293).

  I was spellbound by this novel throughout. At times it was like a Henry James novel with its convoluted thoughts and subtleties of mind. More and more I became deeply involved in the relationships and the revelations Heyns brings to us.

  E-mail: sheridangriswold@yahoo.com

• Not Now Darling, I'm Reading (originally in Cape Times)
  http://notnowdarling.co.za/review-a-sportful-malice/
  Word count: 931

  REVIEW: A Sportful Malice
  Posted on July 5, 2014 By KarinSchimke
  A Sportful MaliceA Sportful Malice

  Michiel Heyns

  Jonathan Ball

  REVIEW: Karin Schimke

  It is possible to rampage into a book by a favoured author without heeding any of the clues he or she has put on the reader’s path. Thus I found myself, a third of a way into Heyns’ new book, increasingly irritated and then, mercifully, puzzled, by the narrator.

  Mercifully, because if my slow-arising suspicions had not been stimulated, I might not have wrung half the fun I eventually did from this, his seventh novel. Heyns is too controlled and too practised a writer to present a character like Michael Marcucci without also poking fun at him.

  Michael’s is the prissiest and most pompous voice I’ve encountered in a novel in a long time. He writes letters to his partner in Joburg from England and Italy, where he has gone to wrap up research on his studies.

  Michael, whose father was Italian and mother South African, is interested in how writers have “appropriated” Tuscany for themselves by writing about it. He has the cynic and scholar’s distance to this appropriation, which in turn causes him to be blind to how he appropriates, and is appropriated by, this place about which so much has been written by Anglo-Saxon writers.

  Michael is an insufferable snob. But clever snobs can be very funny, and Michael’s bitchiness provides the reader with moments of great mirth. His letters expose him as clever and witty, but also as vain and superficial, concerned largely with appearances.

  Indeed, how things appear (as opposed to how they really are) is a motif that runs through this “comedy of revenge”, as the (observant) reader is alerted just under the title. The author’s intertextual references abound. The idea of a comedy of revenge calls to mind Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the novel deploys – successfully – some of the hammed-up elements of farce.

  Farce develops its humour from the foolishness of unintelligent people and Michael – for all that he is a scholarly smarty pants – is monstrously foolish. While he is cuttingly observant about other’s foibles, and sharp in his observation of art, literature and the beauty that surrounds him in Tuscany, he is blind to his own faults.

  An almost tragic self-awareness, coupled with comical lack of self-insight, creates the axis for the action.

  In Tuscany, having inadvertently acquired a hulking yob of a “friend” on the flight from Stansted airport to Florence, Michael stays in a house owned by a geriatric couple of British artists. Augustus appears to be an absent-minded old man, and his caustic partner Sophronia, a witch from deepest Belgravia. Both are cast in rich chiaroscuro. Being hosted by the couple provides Michael with plenty of material to write home about.

  Before arriving in the Tuscan village of Gianocini, Michael has used his time in England and in Florence to indulge his appreciation of art, visiting an exhibition of Caravaggio paintings in London, and various exhibitions in Florence.

  Art’s function in the novel opens two main intellectual paths for Heyns to draw the reader along.

  In the first place, it provides an arena for discussions about representative versus conceptual art, the latter being anathema to Augustus and Sophronia, who emphasise technique above all else when it comes to art.

  (In one of the most amusing episodes in the book, Michael has an extended conversation with an art dealer, a conversation that pulls out every possible stop on the pretentious language employed by those who consider themselves aficionados.)

  In the second place, the preoccupation with classical art rubs up against the thoroughly modern topic of social media.

  Caravaggio, whose painting of David with the head of Goliath is shown on the front cover, was a painter who inserted his own image into many of his paintings. Notably, in the picture represented on the back cover of the novel, his face is the one that adorns Goliath’s severed head.

  The artist therefore presents himself to the world, very much as people now present images of themselves on social media for public consumption.

  Can the artist be the art?

  A young artist who has piqued Michael’s sexual interest has been mentored by Augustus and Sophronia. While thoroughly schooled in classical technique, Paolo has developed an interest in conceptual art, but knows that his mentors’ disdain would put him at a dangerous disadvantage were he to tell them. And yet he finds the idea of presenting himself as Michaelangelo’s David – naked in public in the famous sculpture’s fey pose – beguiling.

  In much the same way, Michael has represented himself – and presented a concept of himself – on Facebook.

  Narcissism is not new and, for all its apparent sophistication in some instances, it remains a foolish and un-endearing trait.

  Michael’s interaction with the characters he meets in Gianocini is what this story is built around, but for all its intellectual preoccupations, it reveals itself as unpretentiously plain, even slapstick in places.

  But slapstick, in the hands of this master storyteller, is delightful and invigorating.

  I thoroughly, happily, greedily enjoyed this farce.

  This review first appeared in the Cape Times in May 2014

• Gorry Bowes Taylor
  http://www.gorrybowestaylor.co.za/reviews/261/a-sportful-malice-michiel-heyns
  Word count: 274

  A Sportful Malice
  by Michiel Heyns

  Publisher: Jonathan Ball
  Genre: Fine fiction
  Verdict: Sophisticated comedy and delicious revenge
  Book Reviewed by: Gorry Bowes Taylor

  When a young South African literary scholar, Michael Marcussi, is offered, via a Facebook contact, a house in the Tuscan village of Gianocini, he accepts with alacrity: this is just the space and quiet he needs to complete his study of Literary Representations of Tuscany.
  But even before he has boarded his plane at Stansted Airport, things start vexing him: an obnoxious old man jumps the boarding queue, and Michael is given the evil eye by a belligerent bovver boy covered in tattoos. Nor is this to be his last meeting with these objectionable characters: they turn up in unexpected places, first in Florence and then in Gianocini itself, with a frequency that cannot be purely coincidental.
  In the meantime Michael is pursuing his own extracurricular agenda, through the streets of Florence and the passages of the Uffizi, then through the medieval alleys of Gianocini, only to find himself the object of mysterious designs and the subject of some very disturbing paintings.
  Add to this the innocent but curious Wouter, the startlingly rude upper-class harridan, Sophronia, the beautiful but supercilious Paolo and a dog called Thanatos: the Tuscan sun never shone on a more bizarre mix.
  After the sophisticated comedy of The Typewriter’s Tale and Invisible Furies, and the poignant ironies of Lost Ground, Michiel Heyns here returns to the broader comedy of The Reluctant Passenger, in a scintillating tale of love and delicious revenge.

• IOL
  https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/lifestyle/review-a-sportful-malice-1758459#.VDOHLRarz_d
  Word count: 826

  QUOTE:
  delicious, wicked novel and has enough malice to add an edge to the hilarious passages and robust characters.
  Review: A Sportful Malice
  LIFESTYLE / 1 OCTOBER 2014, 11:40AM / BEVERLEY ROOS-MILLER

  Author Michiel Heyns superimposed over a photograph of Tuscany, where the central character lives in a charming hilled village.
  Author Michiel Heyns superimposed over a photograph of Tuscany, where the central character lives in a charming hilled village.

  Author Michiel Heyns superimposed over a photograph of Tuscany, where the central character lives in a charming hilled village.
  Author Michiel Heyns superimposed over a photograph of Tuscany, where the central character lives in a charming hilled village.
  1
  2
  by Michiel Heyns (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

  A Sportful Malice is a delicious, wicked novel and has enough malice to add an edge to the hilarious passages and robust characters.

  But then I was always going to fall for a sly parody on the famous “love affair with Tuscany”, which, though my favourite destination, admittedly sags with “under the Tuscan sun” myths, of lonely-hearts yearning for an Italian romance and pretentious people yapping about High Art.

  Tuscany is ravishing, but with a dark side, observes tall, quietly spoken author Michiel Heyns, as we sit under an oak tree in Somerset West, where he lives. An award-winning author and translator, former professor of English at Stellenbosch, Heyns has now turned his considerable talents to producing a regular slew of diversely thoughtful and entertaining books.

  Though not autobiographical, this novel is perhaps closest to his own life and heart. A friend told him that “this is the book you’ve been wanting to write”, and it’s also the one he’s most enjoyed writing, he says. It shows; there is a tart playfulness to its frankness.

  He is thinner than when we last met, at a freezing lit-fest in Richmond, and we reminisce about his beloved, handsome dog’s antics there. Dogs feature in one of this book’s wittiest passages. Michael, the main character, trundles off for a walk in the dangerous forests of autumnal Tuscany, where he encounters determined hunters who shoot at anything that moves in their quest for wild boar (an alarming season I vividly remember).

  Their territorial attitude is, “tourist, bugger off”, and their overexcited dogs (who have a walk-on piece in this particular passage) add to the chaos by joining in the bedlam: “Bau bau, bau bau.”

  Heyns talks about choosing to write the novel in an epistolary form, that is, a series of letters, from a rather pompous gay man (Michael) who grew up in Vasco, South Africa, and has achieved a smoothly polished life in Europe. He also has an elusive Italian father, and is taking a break from his hunky London lover (who, it turns out, is not so much taking a break as bolting) in a charming Tuscan hilled village, first popping in to Florence for the obligatory eyeball-popping art tour.

  His holiday/quest wobbles off the rails early. At Stansted airport he is outraged by an elderly queue-jumper; his “insufferable snobbery” (quote Michiel) is ramped up when he’s seated next to a belligerent bovver-boy, Cedric, who keeps turning up in his Italian journey like a bad penny. “Chedric”, as the Italians call him (bit of a linguistic in-joke there), is your basic middle-class nightmare; a crass, self-proclaimed philistine, untainted by finesse – the very opposite of Michael’s hard-won veneer of polish.

  The village also houses a handsome and feckless youth, Paolo, and an oddly Gothic couple, one of whom is the elderly Stansted queue-jumper and the other a woman who paints alarming canvases.

  There is a serious side to the novel, says Heyns, for whom art matters. He talks about his love of great self-portraits (which I share), now subverted by narcissistic “selfies”, and, as he sees it, the nonsense of performance art. Caravaggio, that criminal artistic genius, is also purposefully invoked. Some of the naughtiest passages are the jumped-up narratives on fine art, which Heyns reveals are rewrites of actual catalogues.

  It is Heyns’s most explicitly “gay” novel; “I decided, what the hell,” he shrugged. “Perhaps there will be those who don’t like that, but I respect that,” he adds. I don’t, I say, and think, not for the first time, that he is a kindlier person than me.

  The twists in this tale skim the farcical, steadied by his experienced hand. It contains both come-uppance and redemption, with “Chedric” the unlikely hero. He is, perhaps, the one honest soul among them all, the Untouchable, a pugilistic lout from the loveless world of lower class London, who responds to the warmth of Tuscany while doggedly pricking pretentions. There is poignancy to his role, and even self-revelation.

  Highly recommended.

Word Count