'A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a coup to overthrow their boss, the president of a nameless country. They are held captive in a palatial retreat in the mountains high above the capital city. Meanwhile, the chef's daughter, the portraitist's pregnant wife and the barber's lover watch their men from the shadows – for in such precarious times, intimate relationships are as dangerous as political ones. As the old order falls, so does the veil that hides the truth about the secret passions of these men and women.
'Drawing her readers masterfully towards the novel's devastating climax, Ceridwen Dovey reveals how humanity's most atavistic impulses – vanity, vengeance and greed – seethe, relentlessly, just beneath the surface of everyday life. '
'As compared to American or British literature, Australian literature has had far fewer overtly political novels or poems, particularly those attuned to actual electoral politics or public ideological configurations. Yet recently more concrete references to actual political figures occur in poetry, and contemporary Australian poets have spotlighted not only the sheer fact of the politician but the way the political affects the limits and conditions of the literary. In fiction by Peter Rose, Ellen Van Neerven, and Alexis Wright, fictional Prime Ministers represent possibilities and dangers of the political imaginary, while Charlotte Wood, Michelle De Kretser, Sara Dowse, and Alice Nelson pursue a literary path of writing around the nation rather than in or of it, showing how politics can at once be tacit and focal, interstitial and implicit. Importantly, these writers show that politics cannot just be included in narrative but can operate as a narrative.'
Source: Abstract.
'This article investigates three South African novels in an attempt to map the movement between transitional cultural production and post-transitional literature of the present. I briefly outline Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) as a formative text of the South African transitional period before discussing Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006) and Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin (2007) as post-transitional texts. These novels all circle around issues of place and space, while also revealing the shifts in South African cultural history, as they comprise a set of related perspectives that inscribe meaning across times and spaces. I argue that a palimpsestic reading of this fiction opens up the possibility of reconceptualizing the relationship between space, place, and transnational connectivity. Each of the three texts under discussion writes the space of the city as a type of situated transnationalism where the local and the global exist as coeval discourses of signification. The fecundity of a palimpsestic reading lies in the revelation of how one transitional experience is already present in another. By inscribing one discursive act over another, the ruptures and continuities between textualizations reveal a wealth of imaginaries that, I argue, define the idea of post-transitional South African literature. But perhaps most importantly, the post-transitional can be read as a palimpsestic concept itself, much like the fiction explored in this article, in that it enables a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it. Rather than moving in a temporal linear fashion, post-transitional literature creates a palimpsest in which we can read the imaginaries circulating through and shaping South African cultural formations today.'
Source: Abstract.
'This article investigates three South African novels in an attempt to map the movement between transitional cultural production and post-transitional literature of the present. I briefly outline Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) as a formative text of the South African transitional period before discussing Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006) and Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin (2007) as post-transitional texts. These novels all circle around issues of place and space, while also revealing the shifts in South African cultural history, as they comprise a set of related perspectives that inscribe meaning across times and spaces. I argue that a palimpsestic reading of this fiction opens up the possibility of reconceptualizing the relationship between space, place, and transnational connectivity. Each of the three texts under discussion writes the space of the city as a type of situated transnationalism where the local and the global exist as coeval discourses of signification. The fecundity of a palimpsestic reading lies in the revelation of how one transitional experience is already present in another. By inscribing one discursive act over another, the ruptures and continuities between textualizations reveal a wealth of imaginaries that, I argue, define the idea of post-transitional South African literature. But perhaps most importantly, the post-transitional can be read as a palimpsestic concept itself, much like the fiction explored in this article, in that it enables a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it. Rather than moving in a temporal linear fashion, post-transitional literature creates a palimpsest in which we can read the imaginaries circulating through and shaping South African cultural formations today.'
Source: Abstract.
'As compared to American or British literature, Australian literature has had far fewer overtly political novels or poems, particularly those attuned to actual electoral politics or public ideological configurations. Yet recently more concrete references to actual political figures occur in poetry, and contemporary Australian poets have spotlighted not only the sheer fact of the politician but the way the political affects the limits and conditions of the literary. In fiction by Peter Rose, Ellen Van Neerven, and Alexis Wright, fictional Prime Ministers represent possibilities and dangers of the political imaginary, while Charlotte Wood, Michelle De Kretser, Sara Dowse, and Alice Nelson pursue a literary path of writing around the nation rather than in or of it, showing how politics can at once be tacit and focal, interstitial and implicit. Importantly, these writers show that politics cannot just be included in narrative but can operate as a narrative.'
Source: Abstract.
