Great fun!

Full review at: https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/black-diamond-zakes-mda-seagullbook...

( )

Great fun!

Full review at: https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/black-diamond-zakes-mda-seagullbook...

( )

That is one of those books that could have been a lot better. Should have been even - all the elements to help that are present and yet something does not click. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, the novels follows the lives of people that are so different that you would not expect them to meet. And yet they do. The white magistrate Kristin Uys, the black ex-model and now an owner of a model agency Tumi Molefhe, her boyfriend and ex-guerrilla fighter, current security company employee Don Mateza and the criminal family Visagie (and even if the two brothers are the nasty ones, the really scary one is the mother) get introduced very fast and on decision of the magistrate to hit Stevo Visagie with 6 months for contempt changes all their lives.

The Visagies (or at least Stevo) swears to take revenge, Kristin ends up needing a bodyguard and Don is sent to her and things go downhill. The story itself is almost a cliche but the background of Johannesburg and Soweto keep the book from being boring. You can see actions happening long before they do, you know where the story will lead (or most of it anyway - the end managed to surprise me) but that different world is there.

Some of the characters are exaggerated to the point of a caricature - Tumi for example is so 2-dimensional that in some places I was loosing even the sense of the second dimension; her constant whining about Don's inability (or maybe lack of desire) to become more and her trust in him are almost comical. The Visagie brothers are more types than real people. On the other hand their mother and their ex-maid, turned helper Magda are so exotic that you cannot stop wondering if they are not based on real people - there is a sense of the different and the unknown in them that adds that additional dimension. At the same time Don and Kristin are fully realized, with their complex backstories and thoughts (and as any normal person with their faults and issues). Even if their story is cliched, it works to some extent.

The author's style is a mix between second and third person narrative, with a few notable moments when he is talking directly to the reader. And this works better than anything else - it adds to the exotic feeling of the whole text. I had not read a lot of African literature so I am not sure how common that is but it is an interesting way to differentiate and highlight some places.

And somewhere between the storyline and the annoying characters, lays the real character of the story - the South Africa of now, a country trying to change but getting stuck in the middle, with problems that are unique for it and some that are the same as anywhere else. I wish Mda had spent more time on this than on the banal story - but then I guess the character story was supposed to be the story. And I suspect the fact that I am not a big fan of contemporary fiction did not help my reading of the book either. Still the novel is worth checking, despite its flaws. ( )