Henrietta Rose-Innes's Blog, page 10

“Nineveh” tours the States: Nov dates

In November, I’m very excited to be touring the States with the US edition of Nineveh from Unnamed Press, talking at various bookstores. All very welcome!

 

 

Nov 11: Ithaca, NY: 5:15 PM at Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College. (Flyer above)

Nov 14: Baltimore, MD: 7:00 PM at The Ivy Bookshop; Facebook invitation here.

Nov 16: Washington, D.C.: 6:30 PM at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café with Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow author Fabienne Josaphat; Facebook invitation here.

Nov 20: Los Angeles, CA: 5:00 PM at Skylight Books with In Plain View author Julie Shigekuni; Facebook invitation here.

Nov 21: San Francisco, CA: 7:30 PM at Green Apple Books on the Park with In Plain View author Julie Shigekuni; Facebook invitation here.

Nov 22: Portland, OR: 7:00 PM at Another Read Through; Facebook invitation here.

 

HEP EVE – “Homing” travels to Turkey

I’m delighted to announce that my collection of short stories, Homing, is now published in Turkish by Yüz Kitap as HEP EVE – I just adore the fresh and witty cover they’ve made for it.

Güney Afrika’nın en önemli seslerinden Henrietta-Rose Innes bu incelikli ve tam kararında yazılmış öykülerde bizlere bir dizi sıradan hayata sıra dışı bir bakış atma imkânı sunuyor … Cape Town’da yaşayan bu karakterler eve dönmenin yeni yollarını buluyor ve bu yolculuk sayesinde dönüşüyorlar.

Henrietta-Rose Innes, one of South Africa’s most important voices, gives us an extraordinary glimpse of a series of ordinary voices in this subtle and complete statement … These characters living in Cape Town find new ways of returning home and are transformed by this journey.

Nineveh in US: first reactions

With the first US edition of Nineveh appearing in the States in November, I’m happy to report that it’s been welcomed so far, with thoughtful reviews in Kirkus Reviews:

“A nimble, intriguing novel … A persuasive, witty exploration of a tough and unconventional young woman – and a consistently lively account of the entanglements of cultural politics, class, and architecture in contemporary South Africa.”

… and in Publishers Weekly:

“Surreal in style and atmosphere, yet grounded in the reality of place … a deep look at the ecosystems we create for ourselves as well as those we can’t escape.”

Knee-high to a beetle

When you’re a kid and close to the ground, you have a natural affinity with the smallest creatures, the tiny strivers that tunnel their way through the foundations of the world. I was always poking into spaces between grassroots and bricks, charmed to find them occupied by mantises, ants, grass-snakes and assorted goggas. Once, I watched a swarm of exuberantly furry orange caterpillars overwhelm a tree in my mother’s garden. It was a startling image that burrowed its way into my brain and lay there for decades, pupating, until it emerged on the opening page of my novel Nineveh.

These little guys, Promeces longipes,  encountered on Table Mountain, were the models for the mystery beetle that infests Nineveh. They’re a gorgeous iridescent blue, which you can’t see in my photo.

It’s lowly creatures like this that my protagonist Katya (proprietor: Painless Pest Relocations, the humane eradication service) traffics in. She’s employed by the powerful Mr Brand, developer of a glitzy housing estate outside Cape Town, to rid his property of a plague of rare and troublesome beetles. It doesn’t help that the whole place is sinking into a swamp – helped along by an array of subversive forces, of both human and insect varieties.

The estate is named “Nineveh”, after one of the great cities of human history: the Assyrian stronghold, famously destroyed – in the Biblical account – for its hubris. The epigraph that begins the book is from Zephaniah 2:15, the verse relating Nineveh’s downfall:

This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!

This is meant as an image of utter despair, but I rather like the idea of wild creatures moving in and repurposing our ruins, at least until something else is built in their place. The power of the smallest to undermine the greatest is heartening; the sense that what seems oppressively monumental can be toppled – or at least tweaked – by the most despised. What results is not “a desolation”, but new, unbidden constellations of life. “Nineveh” stands for this rise and fall, this flux.

It’s where most of us live in now: rapidly changing urban worlds, where every inhabitant – large and small, powerful and weak, human and other – must perpetually adjust to shifts in circumstance, negotiating life with our neighbours in complex and unpredictable ecosystems. There’s anxiety in that, but also possibility.

Me in front of the famous lion-hunt friezes from Nineveh, now in the British Museum. I’ve always loved these wrenching, beautiful images from the ancient city, and was determined to call one of my novels Nineveh, come what may.

Nineveh the novel is not about destruction. Although it deals with in part with rootlessness, fear and insecurity, it’s also the funniest and in some ways the most hopeful thing I’ve written. There’s comedy (for me!) in a vision of grubs and tadpoles battling with single-malt-swilling businessmen for control of a real-estate empire. That comic energy is personified in the anarchic, malodorous figure of Len, Katya’s disreputable dad, indestructible as a cockroach.

I just hope that not too many of my readers suffer from entomophobia, excessive squeamishness with regard to frogs, or intolerance of pigeons and meerkats; and that their memories of being knee-high to a beetle remain as fond as mine.

Nineveh comes out in the and in the UK in November 2016 – pre-order now.

Do you have a great picture of an insect or some other bug, critter or creepy-crawly? post it with the hashtag #ninevehbugs on Facebook, instagram or twitter for a chance to win a copy of Nineveh from Aardvark Bureau. More details here.

Aux lions in Switzerland and France

I had a wonderful time travelling to Switzerland and France in September to launch L’Homme au lions (Editions Zoe). I was met by several warm reviews in the Swiss press:

Henrietta Rose-Innes crystallises the fears and projections the big cats arouse … if “L’Homme au lion” has a metaphorical character, there are also complex and vivid characters. – Le Temps

One of the most interesting young voices from the rich South African literature … the novel contains wonderful pages on friendship and the lure of the wilderness. – Le Courrier

The excellent translation by Elisabeth Gilles allows us to discover a magnificent fable in which, as the book progresses, nature’s wild side takes the upper hand over humans. – Culture Chronique

A unique and addictive novel – Les libraires masqués du Grenier

In between our events at the brilliant bookshops Librairie du Boulevard (Geneva) and Librairie La Méridienne (Chaux-de-Fonds), we managed to squeeze in a little reading/interview  in the perfect surroundings of the African fauna section of the Natural History Museum of Geneva. (English with French subtitles.)

In the French press, I was extremely touched to read a lovely, personal appreciation of L’Homme au lion, in the form of a letter to me, from esteemed critic Catherine Simon in Diacritic magazine:

The theme of disappearance is recurrent you. That of devouring, ditto. Like ghosts, Henrietta! You are fascinated by the underground things, not the net world, you do not tire of exploring the boundary between … the human and the animal, the living and the dead. Still, your stories walk on the edge of thriller, science fiction and poem. Still, they captivate. As ever, you do not forget the drive, never fail to tell a story, you never let go of our hands … you create, book to book, with three pieces of string and some beasts, a bizarre universe like no other.

In Paris, I fitted in a radio interview with RFI (Radio France International – in English):

http://www.culture-chronique.com/chronique.htm?chroniqueid=1636&typeid=3

L’Homme aux lion also received a thumb’s-up from bookseller Marianne at Librairie Les Lisières in Roubaix, France:

 

Thank you to Editions Zoe and to all the warm and welcoming booksellers and readers I met in Geneva, Chaux-de-Fonds and Paris. Thank you also to the impressively dynamic Geneva Writers’ Group for their generous hospitality.

L’Homme au lion celebrates in Chaux-de-Fonds

I’ll be in the town of Chaux-de-Fonds on Saturday 24th Sept at 12 noon to read and talk about “L’Homme au lion” at Librairie La Méridienne, who are celebrating their 20th anniversary with a weekend of activities, including readings, literary talks, comedy, art and musical performances.

L’HOMME AU LION comes to Geneva

The first Geneva launch of L’HOMME AU LION (Green Lion), the beautiful French edition from Editions Zoe, will take place on 16 Sep, Librairie du Boulevard, at 6pm. All welcome. Further Paris and Geneva dates to be announced soon.

“Haunting, sensual” L’Homme au Lion in bookshops now

L’HOMME AU LION – the French edition of Green Lion, from Editions Zoé, translated by the wonderful Elisabeth Gilles – is in bookshops today. Here’s a brief early review by Anne-Sylvie Sprenger, Payot/L’Hebdo (to the best of my and Google Translate’s ability):

With a haunting pen, the South African author pulls us into this fable which tries to penetrate the close and ineffable ties between men and beasts. Even invisible in our modernised cities, their menacing (and magnetic) presence continues to arouse strong feelings and animate conflicting passions. Highly sensual, this story resonates with deep themes of the disappearance of loved ones, the weight of guilt and of our crying need for something larger than ourselves.

Avec une plume envoûtante, l’auteure sud-africaine nous enrôle dans cette fable qui tente de percer les liens aussi étroits qu’indicibles entre les hommes et les bêtes sauvages. Même invisibles, dans nos villes modernisées, leur présence menaçante (et magnétique) ne cesse d’échauffer les esprits et d’animer nombre de passions contradictoires. Hautement sensuel, ce récit résonne encore de thématiques aussi profondes que la disparition des êtres chers, le poids de la culpabilité et celui de notre besoin, si criant, de quelque chose de plus grand que nous-mêmes.

I’ll be bringing my “haunting pen” to Geneva and Paris in mid-Sept to launch the novel. (Dates to come.)

Jurassic celebrates “extinction event”

If you’re near London on 20 October, 7pm: come to the launch of the terminal publication from spec-fic press Jurassic London, where the marvellous Jared Shurin and Anne Perry have given so many writers invaluable breaks and boosts, and put us in such gorgeous books. The FB invitation is here. Read more about the collection & contributors (among them, South Africans Louis Greenberg, S.L. Grey, Charlie Human, Joe Vaz, Joey Hi-Fi and Sam Wilson) – here. I’ve got a little story in there about bronze-age warrior ghosts. Also, the “extinction” dress code means I will almost certainly have to attend in a lion suit, so there’s that to look forward to. And isn’t this the prettiest nouveau-dino-dodo invitation you’ve ever seen? Jurassic will be sorely missed, but this is a very grand way to go out.

Nineveh: the cover comes together

Delighted to present the full jacket of the UK edition of Nineveh, due out in Nov from Aardvark Bureau.

They run over her knuckles. Their carapaces glitter purple, green and gold. Thousands of them. She examines one on the back of her hand. It waves its jointed feelers wildly in her direction, semaphoring something: insectoid exuberance, the joy of the swarm.