Etienne van Heerden's Blog, page 9

David Attwell writes about A Library to Flee on Facebook

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David Attwell, emeritus professor, University of York, writes on Facebook:

Etienne van Heerden’s new novel, A Library to Flee (translated from the Afrikaans Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld, literally ‘The Library at the End of the World’) is a huge, inventive, fascinating, funny, troubling, and highly courageous book. It inserts a story about global surveillance capitalism into South Africa’s atavistic racial politics. Strongly recommended.

‘Van Heerden’s writing is never boring’: TimesLIVE review of A Library to Flee

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“Van Heerden’s writing is never boring but A Library to Flee is not an easy read and hovers, sometimes uneasily, between realism and fantasy, between then and now.”
Margaret von Klemperer reviews A Library to Flee on TimesLIVE.

It is almost impossible to categorise Etienne van Heerden’s latest novel. It is immensely long – 630 trade paperback-sized pages excluding a glossary and author’s acknowledgments – and is by turns a political satire, a dystopian horror and a morality tale.

The novel, set at the time of the Rhodes and Fees Must Fall protests on campuses, specifically the University of Cape Town, is Dickensian in its scope, with a huge cast of characters. The main two are Thuli Khumalo, a child of the exile years and a leading Fallist, and Ian Brand, a social media lawyer descended from a long line of proud and reactionary Afrikaners, though he feels he has repudiated the past. That is, until a thoughtless and irritable tweet sends him into a maelstrom of hate, trolling and chaos.

In the background are a most peculiar plastic surgeon with a dubious past and a fixation with the back of people’s knees which, in case you didn’t know, are called the popliteal fossae; a mystery man stalking the mean streets with a crossbow; a so-called coloured student, broke and desperate; an anxious white English-speaking liberal academic; an inventor of board games; a sex-obsessed publisher; Thuli’s father, who is a well-connected ANC cadre; extreme right-wingers, and; that almost clichéd figure, a mysterious Chinese man.

It is difficult to describe the plot without giving spoilers, but central to the novel is the theme of artificial intelligence and spyware being built into everything you can imagine — your computer, phone and the smart devices in your home (I would certainly avoid those, having read this book). Never think it’s only your face that can be recognised. Big Brother will be watching more than that.

Both sides of South Africa’s political divide are anxious to be the ones who will control the monitoring process, for different reasons. It’s hard to know who is a hero and who is a villain as the setting moves between Cape Town, China and the Karoo and we shift backwards and forwards in time.

Van Heerden’s writing is never boring but A Library to Flee is not an easy read and hovers, sometimes uneasily, between realism and fantasy, between then and now. While it entertains, it also disturbs, and there are no easy or neat conclusions to tie up any loose ends. The monumental length of the novel requires a level of commitment from the reader that is pretty uncommon in these days of the 280 character tweet.

First AI poetry collection in Afrikaans included in literary terminology encyclopedia

The first AI poetry collection in Afrikaans, Silwerwit in die soontoe (transl. Silverwhite in the Distance), trained on A Library to Flee, has been included in the lemma for electronic literature in the Afrikaans literary terminology encyclopedia, Literêre terme en teorieë (transl. Literary terms and theories):

Screenshot from “Elektroniese literatuur”, Literêre terme en teorieë

The first AI poetry collection in Afrikaans trained on A Library to Flee

Silwerwit in die soontoe (transl. Silverwhite in the Distance) is a groundbreaking attempt to explore the creative potentialities of language with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) – a first in Afrikaans, as well as in South Africa. The poems in this volume were composed co-creatively – a human in collaboration with a machine. The poet, Imke van Heerden, delicately interweaves phrases of AI-generated text to create verse, as part of an experiment that examines the following timely question: How might this technology augment and challenge the art of poetry? In poems on AI, Africa, Cape Town and the Karoo, waves glisten, air burns and a machine dances on the outskirts of language.

About the contributors:

Imke van Heerden and Anil Bas lead a research project titled AI as Author in Istanbul. In 2020, they developed a generative language model called AfriKI – an abbreviation for Afrikaans Artificial Intelligence. To learn Afrikaans, the AI read, as dataset, Etienne van Heerden’s novel Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld (transl. A Library to Flee). AfriKI was used as an instrument to help create the first AI poems in Afrikaans.

Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée: 22–24 September 2023

A Library to Flee: Interview on SABC News

David Attwell, translator Henrietta Rose-Innes and Etienne van Heerden discuss A library to flee – LitNet

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Listen to a podcast of the discussion, see photos of the launch and read the text of David Attwell’s introduction at the Exclusive Books launch of A library to flee at the Cape Town Waterfront on 9 November 2022: https://www.litnet.co.za/david-attwell-translator-henrietta-rose-innes-and-etienne-van-heerden-discuss-a-library-to-flee/.

Interview with A Library to Flee translator Henrietta Rose-Innes

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A Library to Flee: Article in Die Burger

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Cape Town launch: A Library to Flee

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