Transformations. Essays, by Imraan Coovadia

Transformations. Essays, by Imraan Coovadia. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2012. ISBN 9781415201381 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0138-1

Transformations. Essays, by Imraan Coovadia. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2012. ISBN 9781415201381 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0138-1

Imraan Coovadia’s Transformations: Essays is a collection of short pieces in the tradition of the essayist: exciting, probing, intelligent and readable.

Imraan Coovadia  

Introduction: Against the Book

The form of the essay is an expression of doubt in the book. The book has a practical existence; it is manufactured in printing plants, or now transmitted as a file, and marketed through the newspapers and the web and sold, for the most part in South Africa, and in however limited the quantities, in shopping centres which are owned by many of the same investment lands which run the mines and the financial industry. A writer's career is measured in books. Even and maybe especially in a country which doesn't incline to reading, the book is the concern of the large organisation - specifically, the corporation and the university. It is often imported. When not, it is sold at prices far above those in any comparable country and, indeed, far above prices in the United States and Europe and, in relative terms, at many multiples of those prices. Certain commodities, in our cartel economy, are priced to move, from the Mercedes Benz to the cheap cellphone. The same cannot be said of the South African book. The organisations which make and distribute it attend to a logic far beyond the reach of common sense. The book is also a kind of monument in words. It is celebrated by prizes, studied by historians, and mourned, today, in its declining period. Nobody criticises the book. There are almost no books against books (with the significant exception of Schopenhauer's 1851 essays on The Art of Literature). But it is increasingly ignored, if not entirely obscured, by the vast postmodern enterprise of culture- and connection-making: YouTube, Facebook, Mxit, video art, blogging, the tweet, and, of course, high television like The Wire, and low television like reality tv, dating shows, and American Idol. There is far more reading and writing than ever before yet a far smaller proportion of it flows through the book and is subject to its long-range structure. The book has become something of a religion, hollowed out by the required gestures of genuflection, and becoming ever more hollow when it is praised for mere existence. Yet the book is a form, as flexible as the human form, maybe more so. There are good books, and bad books, like human beings, and even good books can be as uneven as their authors' lives. Meanwhile, the existence of by tar the greatest proportion of books is a cause only for indifference, which, depending on the democracy and one's point of view, may or may not be true of human beings as well. From a writer's point of view the book has certain disadvantages, along with the admitted benefits which follow from its role as a middle-term between the writer and the organisation.The book cannot be brief and thus encourages the proliferation of subplots and filler material. The book, like the play and the film, is a joint investment, bringing in agents and editors, publishers and reviewers and book designers and booksellers, all of whom have their particular interests. The book has to hold a reader's attention, capture his or her imagination, and please his or her senses at length, and without taxing his or her endurance. This requirement shifts the values of prose away from the sentence, which mostly lives in indentured servitude inside the book, and towards the paragraph and the chapter. [...]

This is an excerpt from the book: Transformations. Essays, by Imraan Coovadia.

Title: Transformations. Essays
Author: Imraan Coovadia
Genre: Essays on South African topics
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2012
ISBN 9781415201381 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0138-1
Softcover, 15 x 22 cm, 208 pages

Coovadia, Imraan im Namibiana-Buchangebot

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