In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot is a novel set in Morocco in the 1940s and weaves a story around the well-known writers, Paul and Jane Bowles. Paul was a composer and author of The Sheltering Sky, and Jane was the author of Two Serious Ladies. This mesmerising novel draws the reader into the creative, erotic and exiled minds of Paul and Jane Bowles. Their struggles to write and their struggle to love, both each other and others, creates an unusually rich experience for the reader, and one which is hard to forget.
This collection poses two overarching questions: Is there a role for the literary imagination in postcolonial studies? And where might one locate South Africa or, more generally, South/African perspectives, in a field delineated primarily by northern institutional purposes and practices? While engaging with contemporary debates the essays seek to turn current postcolonial emphases on theoretical formulations and issue-driven interpretation towards the subjective experience of literary texts in specific contexts. The Introduction, “Postcolonialism: A Literary Turn”, suggests a template of ‘late postcolonialism’ beyond empires writing back to the centre. Instead, ongoing challenges include settler identity, past and present; independent or compromised African/diasporic voices; the character of the postcolony in which the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern contest a single though heterogeneous place, or space; and the ‘voicing’ of the silent subaltern alongside the ‘postcolonialising’ of Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Despite the utopian political pronouncements of many postcolonial projects (the West’s own undoing) this collection wishes to stimulate us—students, academics—to see afresh, and comparatively, across worlds. In this, a literary turn may achieve an ethical dimension.
Tackling a barrage of relations and eccentrics while dealing with the devastation of war and politics, this poignant narrative explores a country's recent history in a pervasive poetic style. This lyrical account of veiled truths and panoramic splendor--where the true nature of change is revealed in a detailed narrative collage--saturates the senses, shifting masterfully through postcolonial identity, spirituality, and African-ness.
In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw is an exploration, and stories, of people who live in the Art Deco buildings of Springs. It is the imagined lives of those who live in a space that is not theirs historically but one that they have reclaimed. This work, in times of doom and complaint, creates a new narrative: one of revival, vigour and celebration. ‘The writing tries to capture the “grain” of a place, object or conversation, as if a swatch were cut from a larger fabric. One could trace the use of similar techniques back to the canonical modernist works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams or to a later experimenter like Burroughs … Adair uses these techniques with flair and purpose … the book’s method is to declare and contradict, to present one side and then another, keeping both present.’ Ivan Vladislavic
A professor contemplates the ruins of his life while delivering a passionate final lecture; a city girl suffers an unaccountably cruel twist of fate in a stranger's apartment; a rising executive flies blindly toward his past; and, darkly fleeting, a young boy haunts the lives of all who cross his path. It is the district of Suffolk that binds them together, a place so carefully and imaginatively constructed that it evokes the novels of William Faulkner. Through a beautifully crafted mosaic of different voices brought to life in dazzling, original prose, this novel creates a world that breaks new ground in literary convention and leaves a mark long after its poignant end.
Focusing on the epic love affair between a former amateur musician--who happens to be a bootlegger, mercenary, and killer--and a shebeen queen, this South African love story traces the couple's lives and loves through the interweaving of history and memory in the tradition of village storytellers.
South Africa's foremost counter-culture revolutionary shares "letters" to and from his father, God, and the Devil, in this irreverent and pithy book about the world. Serious and philosophical issues of everyday life arise from the naive voice of the protagonist in this off-beat, avant-garde rant. Readers will laugh or cringe at the author's sharp, inquisitorial eye and insatiable curiosity, which serves to remind them that we don't really have a culture at all.
Plunging the reader into a phantasmagoric world where streets are paved with human remains and men are apocalyptically condemned to death by the fire of their loins, these short stories strike a fabulist and magical realism drawn from African traditions and present-day conditions. For all its contemporary relevance, this collection has at its core a dialogue between the living and their ancestors that creates a powerful resonance between the bones of the dead and the echoes of their survivors.
Revolving around a group of students who are caught up in South Africa's political uprising in 1976, this novel focuses on the parallels drawn between apartheid and experiences in Stalinist Greece. It is a moving story of bravery, betrayal, and unrequited love in which the despair and danger of the characters' lives mirror each other. An inspired study in moral uncertainty, it reveals the conflicting nature of political and sexual choices and their unforeseen consequences.
Set amidst erupting violence and an edgy, war-torn Johannesburg, South Africa, in the 1980s, this brutally witty and unnervingly erotic postmodern novel explores destiny’s uncertainties.
