The Alphabet of Birds, by S. J. Naudé

The Alphabet of Birds, by S. J. Naudé. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9781415207130 / ISBN 978-1-41-520713-0

The Alphabet of Birds by S. J. Naudé is cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.

S. J. Naudé  

Introduction by Damon Galgut

When I was growing up in white South Africa, 'The Border' was a phrase that everybody knew, denoting both a physical and a mythical place. Physically it meant the northernmost edge of South-West Africa (as Namibia was then known), which South Africa was desperately trying to hold on to. In a more interior, psychological sense, it was the space that separated us from the rest of the world. Out there was the Communist enemy, but also every other way of thinking that was different and threatening. 'We' were not them; 'they' were not us. Inside the border, history hung heavily. Now that the border, psychologically at least, is no longer with us, white South Africans have had to learn that 'they' are not so very different after all. Nor is the outside world so very remote. These lessons are on full display in the writing of SJ Naude, whose stories inhabit what he refers to as the 'borderless world'. His characters - 'lapsed South Africans' - move as easily between London and Dubai as they do between Johannesburg and Bloemfontein. Mostly unanchored, drifting, they rub up against other drifters from far-flung places. In the same loose way, characters and images recur in different narratives; sexual identities are fluid; relationships form and dissolve like smoke; drugs are frequently imbibed. All of this gives a cosmopolitan gloss to some of these stories. But, more powerfully, it also gives them a surreal edge, which is enhanced by the visions that come to their protagonists. One of them, for example, 'dreams he is doing ballet with a Japanese man at the Voortrekker monument'. Or as another puts it: 'isn't it strange where ex-South Africans pop up these days and which subjects and worlds they join together?' Yes, it is very strange. Typically, at the heart of these stories, a man or a woman has left South Africa but, after years of absence, is drawn back by something personal. It could be a sick parent; it could be a search for some abstract truth that's buried in the past. As one of them says, 'Perhaps I'm grasping towards a core ... an origin.' If history is present at all, it's in a form that is almost metaphysical. One character reminds herself 'that she was unable to endure anything other than skimming over the surface of this country; that this was the reason for her original departure'. South Africa is not a historical place (the word apartheid' crops up only once) so much as a condition to be escaped from - or to come back to. But then again, 'return isn't possible. The past has a strong gravity, but it's also paradoxically out of reach. There is a painful longing running through this book, made more poignant by having no object. Something is wanted, but what it is exactly, and what solutions it will provide, is unclear. Instead, the yearning for what is lost is more likely to lead only to further loss. In a disturbing sequence, a woman lives in the empty room of an abandoned garden flat, listening to other rooms being plundered around her nightly. Entropy is felt as a purification, as if cumbersome layers are being stripped away. But towards what? [...]

This is an excerpt from The Alphabet of Birds, by S. J. Naudé.

Title: The Alphabet of Birds
Author:  S. J. Naudé
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9781415207130 / ISBN 978-1-41-520713-0
Hardcover, 14 x 22 cm, 237 pages