Etienne van Heerden's novel is not easy to navigate in the beginning, but stay with it as the reward is a brilliantly told historical fiction novel of ideas
A Library to Flee ★★★★★ Etienne van Heerden, translated by Henrietta Rose-Innes Tafelberg
Etienne van Heerden has a gift for words that few possess. He’s won multiple awards, including the 2020 University of Johannesburg Prize for Literature for his novel Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld. Published in Afrikaans, the book has been translated into English by Henrietta Rose-Innes as A Library to Flee.
The novel is testament to van Heerden’s literary prowess but equally impressive is his capacity to take the reader into the mind and lived experience of characters so diverse and different from one another. It’s a capacity that draws heavily not only from insight into the world unfolding around the writer but from an empathy for those inhibiting the space.
His canvas? Cape Town 2015-2018. The novel plays out during the height of the #FeesMustFall movement and the University of Cape Town smells of faeces and teargas.
“Anger in this time of whiteness and gender wars and land grabs, of service-delivery protests and transit robberies. Of skin cred and image crafting, of rubber bullets and hair politics. Of scare quotes and blackface and post-fact. It’s also the season when everyone predicts the Cape’s taps will run dry. It’s a time for reclaiming land without compensation, state capture and women’s power,” Van Heerden writes.
A Library to Flee comes to life with the introduction of characters who play their part in an intricate plot. At the centre are two main characters: Ian Brand, an Afrikaner lawyer and former Rhodes scholar suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from his border war experience; and Thuli Khumalo, a student leader of the #FMF movement who grew up abroad after her parents, ANC patriots, were driven into political exile during apartheid. When she is hit by rubber bullets in the back in a student protest that gets out of hand, she earns the title of “the new Winnie Mandela”.
The two would scarcely cross paths were it not that they are in the same postgraduate translation class at UCT in which the liberal Dr Elliot — struggling to grapple with what's happening on campus — expects his students to not only translate words but to translate the world around them into text.
Ian’s sentiment that Afrikaans is suffering from a cultural cleansing earns him the unfair reputation as someone who hankers for apartheid. His questions and pushback during heated class discussions prompts Thuli to regularly decry his white thoughts and white tears. And when Ian shoots off a tweet during a moment of impatience his life changes irrevocably. What ensues is a social media onslaught which earns him the infamous title of Tweet Boor.
As Ian's life unravels, Thuli finds herself at a crossroads when she uncovers a shocking truth about her father. An impassioned defender of truth, she sets out on a mission to uncover the extent of the havoc being sowed.
Over 630 pages, the two face their own battles — Thuli, broke, naive and running out of time looking for answers in China, and Ian, cancelled, jobless and unsure whether he should jump into bed with the Stellenbosch mafia looking into the possibilities of infotech — as a dozen individual narratives slowly come to a head.
It’s not a quick read. One jumps between timelines in what at first appears to be a haphazard fashion, and often requires the reader to digest and mull over inflammable issues Van Heerden had the foresight to employ two sensitivity readers for. Labelled by the author as a novel of ideas, this is historical fiction that he says offers a “provisional account of history”. It covers identity politics; the effect of surveillance capitalism on privacy, identity and human rights; fake news and fact; and the politics of language and belonging.
In essence, it’s a brilliant portrait of contemporary South Africa: honest, real to a fault and sobering in the truths — and possibilities — it lays bare.
