Filling a large South African hole
Gardening at Night
Diane Awerbuck
2003, Penguin SA
224 pages
Reviewed by Tony Simoes da Silva
Book reviewing is a funny business. So often it means ploughing through earnest but belaboured efforts, each page as heavy as an overweight whale, every word grating painfully on the mind. It can be a mechanical and dull experience, inducing an agonisingly slow wilting of the spirit. Each new work is usually surmised in two principal ways – ‘This one I liked because it used no word longer than four letters’, or ‘I found this novel so tedious as to exhaust my four-letter vocabulary.’
And then along comes a book such as Diane Awerbuck’s Gardening at Night (2004), and reviewing becomes what at its best it should be – a wonderfully energising and rewarding dialogue with someone else’s mind, alive and ‘life-giving’. Gardening at Night is the kind of book that takes the breath away, a raw and intense portrait of lives lived with passion and recklessness, but also with an acute alertness to the unfathomable of the everyday. Here, amidst the words, carefully, masterfully put together, there is music and magic, joy and lyrical evocation of the banality of everyday life in profoundly moving and accomplished ways.
In this, her first novel, Awerbuck has created a brilliantly seductive and powerful narrative, one that teases and shocks at the same time, leaving the reader holding on to the kaleidoscopic meanings inherent in each word, to the rhythm of simply but beautifully composed sentences, and immersed in the work’s dense use of symbolism. Awerbuck shows herself in full control of her narrative, and the novel’s mundane story of a coming of age becomes a unique insight into both the mind of the young female narrator and of a period in the history of South Africa. An intelligent and highly accomplished work of imagination, Gardening at Night is yet further illustration of the strength of contemporary South African fiction. In this sense, an autobiographical narrative – though not necessarily Awerbuck’s own – translates itself into a historical document.
For Awerbuck’s treatment of one of the oldest narrative forms to depict the journey between childhood and young adulthood, the bildungsroman, is all the more impressive for the manner in which she simultaneously creates an insightful and accurate portrait of contemporary South Africa. In this brave new world, post-apartheid, clichéd discourses speak of a nation reaching out across racial divides immured behind brutal historical foundations, Black, White and multicoloured multitudes emerging as one happy Benetton-like family. This is a world that Awerbuck brings under the rigour of her microscopic gaze, and Gardening at Night is situated in the space where such clichés are shown for the lifeless constructs they are. Here as in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994) we are confronted with a South Africa that is organised not only in neat terms of colour, but also of economics, gender and class; it is a cliché no doubt, and a hard one to live with, but poor Whites are one of the many species safely protect from extinction in this new South Africa. Along with fellow Black, Indian and Coloured South Africans.
Yet, although very much a South African novel, one in which the weight of history is not easy to push aside – the random but frequent acts of violence see to that – history is in Gardening at Night a faint presence. It is there, but largely as the background to what is essentially a eulogy to life, to youth, but also a recognition of the pain, paralysing anxiety and emotional torment at the centre of life’s journey. Gardening at Night depicts the bloody energy of new love, of new sex, of casual sex and sex entered into casually, for that is perhaps the one unadulterated privilege of the young; but afterwards because that is what growing up is also about, will come the consequences, the tectonic adjustments. Hence the (first) realisation that one’s parents have clay feet, the first death of a close friend, the first love betrayal, the first abortion; solutions when they come are made to look perfectly logical, but also saturated in the emotional and physical left-over scum of all that has to do with life. Joy to the world indeed, but trauma is also the obverse to unbound happiness.
In the tradition of the bildungsroman, the story Awerbuck weaves together is still one of firstness, a patchwork of the some of the various moments that together will remain forever as more or less strongly remembered markers in the self’s journey towards maturity – emotional, sexual and psychological. In language that impresses for its subtle lyricism and a tightly controlled turn of phrase, Awerbuck stitches together a complex whole made of the tiniest vignettes, each time furthering itself in the minute but earth-shattering way that a coming of age represents. In this world revolutions occur when one first ‘tongue kisses’, or the first time one stays out all night; the sound of full orchestras are reserved not for the grandiose public memorials that celebrate history, but the most intimate discoveries of new love, of academic failure and success, of the nurturing and destructive bonds of friendships. Banal as it may seem, it is no less true that “this must be what growing up is like – knowing that crying doesn’t make Maths exams go away” (112).
Perhaps because its setting is not Cape Town or Johannesburg, unusually among contemporary South African writing, but rather the uncouth ‘big hole’ that is Kimberly, this is a novel steeped in the sticky world of life’s great questions. Kimberly’s Big Hole becomes in some sense symbolic of the great void towards which we are being pulled from the moment we receive that first (life-giving) slap. Afterwards we go on living under the spell of that ‘moment of firstness’ and in writing that is all the more powerful for its unassuming quality, Awerbuck lays open a world where nothing is as it seems. At its most successful, the novel draws the reader along with the characters into a growing experience of discovery, and as readers we too emerge with a newly found maturity.
This is a fantastic work. If you want an easy-reading novel, the literary equivalent of the dross they play in the lift or in supermarket laneways, this is not it; if on the other hand you are looking for writing with punch and integrity, and politically relevant, Gardening at Night could not be a more inspired choice. At the risk of invoking the dullest dud in book reviewing, if you read only one South African novel this year, read Diane Awrbuck’s novel – read Gardening at Night and be mesmerised and stunned; laugh and cry; be happy and angry at once, but most of all be dazzled by the extraordinary talent of this new voice in South African literature.
Tony Simoes da Silva teaches at James Cook University in Australia
