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Books 2009
| Date: |
29 November 2009 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Diana Lucas
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| Presenter: |
Jenny Crwys-Williams
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Jenny Crwys-Williams (Carte Blanche presenter): 'I'm privileged, these are just a fraction of the books I have managed to read and cook through this year. Not all of them are cook books, but some of them are. And so I thought I would select some of my favourite books for this year to share with you. But all of them are worth a read, all of them are worth somebody's attention and some of them might just change your life. But every single one is going to entertain you in one way or another - share them.'
Cook Books
Jenny: 'One of the joys of a really good book is the food that is inside the good book. And, of course, I'm talking about cook books. And in South Africa this year there have been the most astonishing cook books - equal in quality to anywhere in the world:'
And when you look inside it ['Festive France'] is absolutely gorgeous, it really and truly is. Now that is a pure South African production.
Now this ['Emperor Can Wait'] is a foodie memoir by a Taiwanese citizen who is now a South African citizen. It is just the most glorious book filled with her own recipes.
This, I think, is almost an iconic South African book. It came out earlier this year. 'Prickly Pears and Pomegranates' - it comes from the farm that Eve Palmer used to live on in the Camdeboo just outside Graaff-Reinet.
How about this one? It is simply called, 'Sumptuous' and its sumptuous from beginning to end with some of the most accessible recipes you could find. It's a mixture of South African and French food and I think that's why I love it so much. So you've got a tarte tatin and a tweaked up bobotie.
This ['The Cookbook'] is done by three clever girls, with very, very different styles of food.
The question is which is my cook book of the year?
And the answer is - Justin Bonello's 'Cooked in Africa'.
Jenny: 'Are you surprised at the success of 'Cooked in Africa'?'
Justin Bonello (Author): 'I'm completely overwhelmed. It's a sphere I didn't quite understand, you know? It's one thing to think, 'I have an idea' and it's another thing to put it out there and then it's another thing completely to see what happens with it.'
For Justin it all started with a cookery series he dreamt up, self financed and then sold to the BBC. Last year he got the call from Penguin publishers - they wanted a book.
Jenny: 'You rebuked me when I described your book as a boy's own annual. What you have managed to do, is you have actually managed to let people live vicariously through you. Because how many people are going to go get their own mussels off a beach? They're not!'
Justin: 'Yes, it is maybe a bit more male-orientated, but it's a celebration of being South African. It's the fact that we can go out into the outdoors [and] that we live in one of the most incredible places in the world. And that we have a lifestyle that the rest of the world probably hankers after.'
Jenny: 'Now you have to have favourite ingredients, so what are your 'must-haves'?'
Justin: 'Salt, black pepper, olive oil, garlic... the rest I'll find along the way.'
Non-fiction
Jenny: 'With the non-fiction books of this year I've only selected a few. There's Antjie Krog's just been published 'Begging to be Black'. I loved it but I would not take this to the beach - I think it's a read that is going to test you, enlighten you, and maybe going to do something quite special for you as well.'
And then Albie Sachs is also very similar. This is the strange 'Alchemy of Life and Law'. Really what he is examining is the emotional aspect that you have as a judge - your previous experiences that somehow, in spite of the law, come into play when it comes to making a judgement. It's very warm and it's very easy to read.
But the book that I've selected as my non-fiction read of the year is Antony Beevor's magnificent 'D-Day'... its substantially narrative journalism, its narrative writing. He's also had access, as he had with both Stalingrad, and with Berlin, to Soviet archives and other archives that hitherto have not been opened. And I think that's what makes 'D-Day', which has sold incredibly well, that's what makes it so worthwhile reading.
So the book moves at a rapid pace as all of his books do. It is full of incident. There are some of the scenes on the beaches that I found difficult to read, but remind yourself that it's the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings. World War II itself was declared 70 years ago and we're losing the soldiers because they are dying of old age and I can think of no more fitting memorial to them than this absolutely wonderful book. And I can't think of many
people who do enjoy history not being totally absorbed by some recent history that literally changed the face of the world.'
Fiction
A small sample of the fiction I've absorbed this year - Justin Cartwright's 'To Heaven By water'; 'A Mercy' from Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison, 'Netherland', by Joseph O Neill.
Jenny: 'And then the book that I fell in love with, and it's called, 'The Help' by Katherine Stockert, set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962. So that immediately gives you a frame of reference that is vitally important to this novel. If you don't wipe a tear away from your eyes, if you don't bite your nails, if you don't rejoice, and if you don't feel just a little bit ashamed at the lives other people have been forced to live, then I think that probably, you don't deserve this book. Or maybe the book doesn't deserve you.'
Crime Fiction
Margie Orford (Author): 'What you're doing when you're writing a crime novel - you're doing two things: you're doing an elaborate construction of fear so that your reader is warm and cosy in their bed and absolutely terrified.'
Margie Orford's latest book 'Daddy's Girl' is a chilling gangster read dealing with the kidnapping of a six-year-old girl. It's very dark.
Jenny: 'I don't know after reading 'Daddy's Girl' if Cape Town is going... ever going to be that gorgeous sunny place of extreme beauty for me, because underneath it's very, very ugly.'
Margie: 'I came back to South Africa in 2001. I had been in New York. When I first got back here I was overwhelmed by the sense of violence, especially in Cape Town. It pulses like that 'Jaws' music does all the time. The reason that led me to crime fiction was that I realised that the only way of navigating this massive social divide between Clifton and Constantia, Belhar and Valhalla Park, was to use a cop and a journalist. They are the only people that can go anywhere.'
Heroine Clare Hartford's character struck a nerve with crime readers all over the world. So the trilogy has been translated into nine languages and it's all in the writing.
Margie: 'What you get with the heroes of crime fiction is a pair of eyes which you the reader are going to put behind somebody else's webcam. And you know they are going to look at the kind of things that you want to look at and they are going to 'bliksem' [beat up] the bad guys in the way you want them to be bliksemed. People who buy crime fiction, they need to trust the authors. It's very much a fantasy genre in the sense that you give the reader a disruptive world and you carefully reconstruct a moral universe.'
Gift Books
Well in the new speak about books, coffee table books aren't called coffee table books any more. They are called 'gift books'.
Jenny: 'If you just take a look at Alf Kumalo's exuberant history. And of course Alf has photographed everybody from Nelson Mandela to the Rumble in the Jungle. He's captured the serene, he's captured the joyous, he's captured the frankly terrifying in his lengthy career. And this book is a summation, really, of his career. And it's very dear to my heart. I think it's a wonderful book.'
Jenny: 'This book as well - 'Gaining Ground as it Goes Along' - it's by artist Sue Williamson. And all she's doing, she's just looking at some of the great South African artists, from her standpoint. But if we are talking collectable, I think this book is an iconic piece of Africana. It is two books on the works of artist Alexis Preller. I didn't know until I went to see the exhibition that Alexis Preller invented a kind of a mythic world. It was a world of Africans in mythic situations: as gods, as lords, as kings. And this book, which was put together by two eminent South African artists Esme Burman and Karel Nel, I think is a collector's item. There is this one, 'The Life and Love of Trees' and I suppose this is what you would call a coffee table book, except we're not anymore. And when you open it up, I don't know, there's a kind of peace that creeps over you.'
Jenny: 'So this year, my gift book of the year is a message of hope from one end to the other. The thing this book does in this hymn to trees is it just says that the link between trees and us is tangible. And what you can do, they say, is you can go up to a tree and you can feel it, and somehow or other you can actually feel that the tree is responding... because trees apparently can respond to huge doses of love. So the message is: hug a tree, don't be ashamed. And if other people can't open their hearts to a tree, well it's up to you really.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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