SJ NAUDÉ’s debut Alfabet van die Voëls (2011), now translated by the author as The Alphabet of Birds, has in a relatively short time gathered rousing acclaim from top authors Damon Galgut, Ivan Vladisavic, André Brink, Marlene van Niekerk, and Patrick Flanery, among others.
Details
- TITLE: The Alphabet of Birds
- AUTHOR: SJ Naudé
- PUBLISHER: And Other Stories
It won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize in 2012, and the Jan Rabie Rapport Prize. It is rare that a first-time author gets this kind of uptake, but in Naudé’s case one does not have to read very far into his volume of linked, long "short stories" to see why.
Most striking is that, like few Afrikaans authors before him, Naudé’s characters are the post-1994 Afrikaner diaspora dispersed across the world, from London to Dubai, to Phoenix to Berlin, to Pretoria to Paris to Johannesburg, in vectors that show no logic except exigency.
Any sense of "homeland" in Naudé’s "alphabet" is rendered ironic — the volume as a whole runs against the grain of social legibility — either by personal alienation and degeneration, or sociopolitical waywardness, or both.
Nothing runs to plan. The stories themselves, and their plots, are styled within a global, cosmopolitan idiom that is becoming emblematic of post-apartheid Afrikaans literature, as evidenced in the work of authors Marlene van Niekerk, and Etienne van Heerden and Australia-based Eben Venter, inter alia.
Like Venter, Naudé’s work shares the distinction of espousing the aesthetics of queer writing, in which socially marginal practices are central, upsetting yet another traditional Afrikaner apple cart.
The Afrikaner diaspora in these taut stories looks hauntingly inhospitable: one character, the wife of a South African executive who has moved to Dubai, sells her soul (in an affair) to an Arab businessman after it emerges her spouse is to be fired for fraud. Her lover is insisting on inducting her into a Muslim wedding, and the codes of Islamic patriarchy. Failure will expose her as an adulterer.
This same character’s sister is stranded in Phoenix, Arizona, where her estranged psychopath ex-husband persistently seeks her out as she moves from one movie-set-like habitation to another with the aphasic, disturbed child born of their union.
Not to be outdone, the brother of these two sisters is a London-based man of the elite financial markets who carries "the aura of a life beyond national identity", but he too is busy falling apart. He is about to be "let go" as recession takes its toll.
The third sister, the itinerant Ondien, who is visiting her siblings one by one (all flung into different parts of the world), asks this brother, Cornelius, whether he shouldn’t try doing something new.
Cornelius replies: "What else can I do, Ondien? I spend my days in conference rooms, between glass sheets. Calculations, negotiations. Finely calibrated conversations, the painful formulation of sentences that shift money around invisibly. The more abstract, the better. That is my life. Just that. And don’t think I can retire. The recession has taken its toll. My investments are buggered."
This, concisely, is the condition of the anchorless global citizen who has found a "home" in the mercilessly abstract global financial markets.
Naudé, a graduate of Columbia Law School, worked as a lawyer in London and New York before making the counterintuitive decision to give it all up and return to SA to write.
In an interview he says: "I used to be a lawyer, spending long hours negotiating business transactions — a life that felt diametrically opposed to one devoted to reading and writing. It did feel … as if one was close to the centre of the world.… It also felt as if many things were wrong with that world… acquaintances … were dumbfounded that one might want to ‘leave it all behind’ to pursue something as obscure as writing fiction at the southern edge of the world (and in Afrikaans!)."
Such are the inversions of Naudé’s world, which is that of a decisively postapartheid writer and a global citizen millions of miles removed from his predecessors of even two decades ago.
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