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The Book of Happenstance

by Ingrid Winterbach, Dirk Winterbach (translator)

3.14 of 5 stars 3.14 · rating details · 43 ratings · 12 reviews

A middle-aged lexicographer, Helena Verbloem, travels alone to Durban to assist in the creation of a dictionary of Afrikaans words that have fallen out of use. Shortly after her arrival, her apartment is burglarized, and her collection of precious shells, shells that she had been collecting for a lifetime, is stolen. Meeting with indifference from the local police, she dec

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Paperback, 254 pages

Published June 14th 2011 by Open Letter

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Jul 30, 2011 Jacob rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

July 2011

Several months before the death of her boss, Helena Verbloem's apartment is broken into, her seashell collection is stolen, and the thief leaves a turd on her carpet. It's an unusual crime, and so unremarkable the police barely seem interested in the case. If only the author felt the same way. But Helena is determined to find her stolen shells, and between days spent helping her boss, Theo Verwey (who has not died yet), catalogue old and obsolete words in Afrikaans for a book he plans t...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: african

If an author is superficial about character, thoughtfulness, introspection, or inner life, that will become apparent sometime between the opening pages (when nothing much other than descriptions and subject matter are visible) and, say, halfway through the book (when a character will have developed, if the character is ever to develop). In this case I stopped reading on page 78 out of 254. The principal character is strangely bereft when someone steals her collection of sea shells. We're suppose...more If an author is superficial about character, thoughtfulness, introspection, or inner life, that will become apparent sometime between the opening pages (when nothing much other than descriptions and subject matter are visible) and, say, halfway through the book (when a character will have developed, if the character is ever to develop). In this case I stopped reading on page 78 out of 254. The principal character is strangely bereft when someone steals her collection of sea shells. We're supposed to wonder why, and we're told people think she's "heartless." But nothing develops. In place of insight into her character, we get her own unrevealing descriptions of the shells, and then -- suddenly, incongruously -- she says:[return][return]"I do not see myself as heartless. I have a particularly heavy and sorrowful heart: dark, heavy, and saturated with blood. A hairy sack, like the sun in Revelations." (p. 63)[return][return]It's a typical writer's fault to tell us something that we should be given to understand through narrative. The book is full of these basic infelicities.This passage is also out of tune with the straightforward, often rote nature of most of the writing (as far as it's visible in translation from Afrikaans). Up to page 78, there is only one other comparable passage, and it's on the very next page: a gruesome and memorable description of the ugly body of one of the narrator's lovers. The rest is pale prose. It seems Winterbach had an especially inspired afternoon at the computer, but she didn't notice the incongruity or the relative lack of inspiration in other passages, and that insensitivity -- or rather, the sense I am compelled to imagine she had that these passages could fit with the rest of the book -- are irremediable flaws in the flow of the narrative and in the confidence readers can place in the writer.[return][return]Other infelicities and writer's errors: the chapters tend to begin with lists of obscure Afrikaans words (the narrator works as a lexicographer). As far as it's possible to guess in the translation (the book would necessarily read entirely differently in Afrikaans, because some terms would not be given definitions, but others would), Winterbach thinks that lists of words have a cumulative expressive effect. They don't: they're often fascinating, but that's not writing.[return][return]On p. 56, the narrator is driving home, and asks her friend to tell her stories while she drives. After some conversation, the friend speaks while she's driving. Winterbach notes, in the narrator's voice, "We are taking turns to drive." It's easy to see what's happened here: Winterbach has set up the scene in her mind with the narrator driving; she's shifted without noticing, so she explains the shift with this aside. But it's bad writing: she should have described the moment the two stopped the car and traded places, or else she should have fixed the passage so the narrator is still driving. It's a small point, but a characteristic one: Winterbach doesn't seem to notice that an aside like "We are taking turns to drive" is an enormous distraction, because it reminds readers that the writer isn't managing things.[return][return]Along with this sort of evidence of lack of skill, and lack of awareness of how characters develop in fiction, there is also a lack of ambition. The narrator gives the Latin names of the shells she's lost, but only glosses them with brief, half-imagined descriptions. Any number of authors -- Joyce, Canetti, Nabokov -- have given us apparently technical lists of apparently uninteresting objects, and fleshed them out with so much erudition, unexpected detail, and brilliant description that they have come alive and become capable of carrying all sorts of unexpected meaning. Nothing of the sort happens here: it's half-heartedly erudite, indifferently expressive, disengaged, light, superficial. This is not a good novel, and Winterbach is not a good writer.(less)

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Jul 12, 2011 Daniel rated it 2 of 5 stars

Goodreads asks, What did you think? A look at my rating and my status updates will give you an idea. In a single, brutal word: boring. The story in this book is dull. Little happens in it, and what does occur doesn't amount to much of anything. Some of it seems pretty random, too--and while I appreciate an author who can riff on reality and produce the strange out of the mundane, Winterbach shows more taste for, well, happenstance. I guess the title of this book (assuming it has been translated...more Goodreads asks, What did you think? A look at my rating and my status updates will give you an idea. In a single, brutal word: boring. The story in this book is dull. Little happens in it, and what does occur doesn't amount to much of anything. Some of it seems pretty random, too--and while I appreciate an author who can riff on reality and produce the strange out of the mundane, Winterbach shows more taste for, well, happenstance. I guess the title of this book (assuming it has been translated literally) could be taken as an open disclaimer.

I wonder if the translation does not do this book justice. This is not to say that the translator could have done a better job; it could be that this book does not translate well at all. I suspect this because the narrator spends a lot of time talking about words that are no longer widely used--if at all--in Afrikaans. This is in fact the nature of the narrator's day-job: assist a linguist who wishes to compile a dictionary of "lost" words in Afrikaans. Now, honestly, that sounds pretty frickin cool to me. I love weird, esoteric words; I savor them when I come across them, and if I get to use them in daily speech or writing, presto awesome-o, I'm a happy fish under the sea. The problem is, Winterbach only gets a limited amount of mileage from the theme. The narrator does go over a host of unused words--and the translator kindly provides these in the original Afrikaans, along with their definitions (I'm mostly certain that this is in line with the original text, mind you). But that's the extent of the exercise, and little mention is made of these words or their import in what follows.

Except: the narrator brings up some of the themes that these words evoked for her, and applies them to situations that she finds herself in. And it is these parts that I suspect the translation fails to convey the weight of the original text. It could be that Winterbach's narrator actually starts to employ these lost words in her narrative (the character is a writer, after all), and gives them life in her present. Unfortunately, I have no idea if this is the case, because--bingo--this is an English translation.

If this is the case--and the translation loses some of the meaning in the original--then the book suffers greatly for it. Because the fact is that the story that Winterbach tells is lackluster and difficult to attend to. Throughout, her narrator ponders a complicated relationship with her family; various paramours; the why and how behind the mysterious theft of some sea shells that she collected over the years; her infatuation with her boss; and the where and the how behind all of the big questions in life, such as, How did life begin? Altogether, Winterbach tells a story about an ordinary person going through some ordinary difficulties, and the resulting story is so ordinary that I felt like I was watching a tv documentary about a next door neighbor.

Who knew? She collects sea shells.(less)

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Jul 14, 2011 Tamra rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: goodreads-winners, fiction

I didn't love the book, obviously. My sister-in-law read it & loved it. She laughed and loved the authors writing style. Therefore I deducted, perhaps you need to be an somewhat of an intellectual to really appreciate this book. Which, I just discovered, I'm not. Shocking, to my system really. This book has a lot of etymology & Afrikaans words & language. And it's as if she vomits her (O.C.D.) thoughts and stupid shells and so much more on every page. How's that for a review? Oh, and...more

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Jun 20, 2011 Amy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: arcs-or-review-copy

The Book of Happenstance begins with loss, as a linguistic specialist’s home is robbed and defaced, with her precious sea shell collection stolen. While it may appear a minor crime, the shells and the concept of personal loss becomes an underlying theme that weaves the story along and helps address the issues of science, language, and relationships. Going beyond a crime novel, there are elements of social commentary in it that examine the causes and effects of cultural changes.

Helena is a lingui...more The Book of Happenstance begins with loss, as a linguistic specialist’s home is robbed and defaced, with her precious sea shell collection stolen. While it may appear a minor crime, the shells and the concept of personal loss becomes an underlying theme that weaves the story along and helps address the issues of science, language, and relationships. Going beyond a crime novel, there are elements of social commentary in it that examine the causes and effects of cultural changes.

Helena is a linguist assigned to help put together an Afrikaans dictionary before the language is completely lost. She and her boss painstakingly collect the words, the root meanings and usages, and document the often fascinating intersections of meaning that appear in disparate words. Despite her efforts, the Museum of Natural History where she is working is at the same time removing the Afrikaans books from their collection, only keeping the most popular titles on hand. The battle appears to be a losing one, as trying to preserve the language is costly and time-consuming. Yet the language is much like the shells: evidence of previous and historic life.

After the police appear uninterested in the loss of her shells, she tries to investigate the crime herself, while at the same time fending off the bizarre and rambling phone calls that she begins receiving from an old acquaintance that she can’t quite place, yet who seems to know her every move. The caller brings up old memories, and her life is thrown off balance by the sense of exposure she’s experienced. First her home has been violated, now her memories too are revealed and speculated upon. Helena is forced to examine what the sea shells meant to her, and why their loss is so devastating.

The novel is complex, and I really enjoyed what it had to say about language and the need to curate the past in order to understand it. I took a linguistics class last spring and was fascinated by how each ‘dead’ language still revealed something unique about its speakers. Similarities between completely different languages, and the ways that regional expressions expand or disappear make linguistics a fascinating study, and the examples of Afrikaans shown extensively in this text attest to that.

Yet Helena is, in many ways, an unlikable character. She has an edge that makes her less than sympathetic at times. For example, she schemes to seduce her married boss for no reason other than that she finds it amusing. Gossiping about her coworkers, again for amusement, makes her easy to dislike. As she analyzes her past, it’s clear she’s left a path of destruction that has many victims beyond her own wounds. Yet her behavior is easier to grasp as she continues reflecting on her childhood and the losses she experienced early.

The numerous coworkers at the Museum appeared to me as flat characters, serving only as blank outlines for Helena’s character to react to, instead of being fully developed on their own. This meant that in some scenes, the dialogue between them felt artificial and almost like a caricature of a typical office setting. I glazed over a few times as Helena questions one of her coworkers about the origin of life, which he rattles on about endlessly without much enthusiasm. His own boredom translated into extensive sections that weren’t that compelling and slowed down the narrative to a standstill.

Aside from that, there were some plot threads that seemed to end erratically, making me wonder why they were there in the first place. Some of these had foreshadowing that tricked me into expecting something else, yet instead of becoming a twist they just disappeared.

(less)

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Jun 01, 2011 Thejoshua rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am grateful to have received this book in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway. The Book of Happenstance is about a lexicographer named Helena Verbloem who has her most prized possessions, her shell collection, stolen from her apartment. We meet Helena's interesting friends, acquaintances, and co-workers as she takes the investigation of the crime upon herself. The book offers an interesting look at the issues of love, obsession, death, and a search for meaning in life. Ingrid Winterbach's writing...more

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Mar 13, 2012 Kathy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: gave-up

I think this likely turns into an interesting allegory, but the prolonged, slow, detailed stuff on Africaans words and seashells in the first 50 pp is more than I can take.

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Jul 20, 2011 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

I really enjoyed this delicate, beautiful book. The back summary makes it sound like a mystery, which it is and isn't; there's a whodunit element, certainly, but it's more like an unconventional love story about the mystery of loss -- the loss of people, the loss of things, and the loss of words -- and the mystery of what it is appropriate to catalog, mourn for, search for, or let go. I loved the author's use of (and obvious love of) language, which I suppose means that I love the translator too...more

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Feb 10, 2012 Nicky McHugh rated it 1 of 5 stars

What a b-o-r-i-n-g book. I grew up in South Africa and spoke Afrikaans so was eager to read this acclaimed novel. "The Book of Happenstance" is a book where nothing happens. Any attempt at tension (between love and loss, scientific and emotional, etc.) feels desperate and does not work here. The character is as empty as her shells which are stolen. And the whole thing just does not come together. For the Goodreads reviewer who wonders if something got lost in translation, I don't think this is t...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Anna rated it 2 of 5 stars

I had to constantly talk myself into getting through this book, which I found painfully boring.

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Jun 21, 2011 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

See my video book review in The Collagist here: http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagi...

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Jun 12, 2011 !Tæmbuŝu marked it as to-read

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, south-africa, ebook-available

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May 03, 2013 Jana Neethling rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Feb 10, 2013 Ester rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Sep 21, 2012 Marike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Shelves: buy

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Jul 24, 2012 Michael Culhane rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: africa-s-africa

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About Ingrid Winterbach

Lettie Viljoen was a pseudonym of the South African author Ingrid Winterbach, who primarily writes in Afrikaans. She is married to Andries Gouws and has two daughters. She lives in Durban.

She was born in Johannesburg in 1948. She studied Afrikaans, Dutch and Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Lettie Viljoen's first novel was entitled Klaaglied vir Koos ("Lament for Koos"), and was p...more

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