What do you think?
Rate this book
Transformations: Essays
What does Playboy have to do with Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita and his obsession with a butterfly? Why is Shrien Dewani looking so cheap? And what can Ovid’s Metamorphosis show us about contemporary South African society?
Imraan Coovadia’s "Transformations: Essays" is a collection of short pieces in the tradition of the essayist: exciting, probing, intelligent and readable. The essays are on writing, politics and culture from a South African perspective. Written with his signature wit, and with subjects ranging from vuvuzelas to J M Coetzee, Tolstoy to Mbeki, Coovadia’s essays cast a wide net and, like literature and the country, never fail to surprise.
Imraan Coovadia’s "Transformations: Essays" is a collection of short pieces in the tradition of the essayist: exciting, probing, intelligent and readable. The essays are on writing, politics and culture from a South African perspective. Written with his signature wit, and with subjects ranging from vuvuzelas to J M Coetzee, Tolstoy to Mbeki, Coovadia’s essays cast a wide net and, like literature and the country, never fail to surprise.
176 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
18 people want to read
About the author
Imraan Coovadia
22 books25 followersImraan Coovadia was born in Durban in 1970. He is the author of the novels The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves, High Low In-between and The Institute for Taxi Poetry.
He has also published a study of V.S. Naipaul, as well as a collection of essays, Transformations, and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, N+1, The Independent, Threepenny Review, Chimurenga, and The Times of India.
His work has won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the M-Net Prize, and a South African Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
He is a graduate of Harvard College and directs the writing programme at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
He has also published a study of V.S. Naipaul, as well as a collection of essays, Transformations, and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, N+1, The Independent, Threepenny Review, Chimurenga, and The Times of India.
His work has won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the M-Net Prize, and a South African Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
He is a graduate of Harvard College and directs the writing programme at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 23, 2013
After the Introduction by the author, “Transformations: Essays” begins with an essay that focuses on J.M. Coetzee’s departure from South Africa, his native country, as the starting point for a thorough critique of the Nobel Prize winner. The criticism derives its arguments not primarily from J.M. Coetzee’s writings but rather from his more or less public personae and considerations confided on Imraan Coovadia by different individuals. This on itself has put me a bit off, as I do not appreciate the kind of approach. Although it can be informative to understand a near monopoly of the famous writer in the perception of South Africa’s literature abroad and how it can be constrictive upon the international diffusion of others, the underlying demonisation bothered me. It can be stimulating to assert a strong position based on artistic and ethical beliefs, and undoubtedly those of Imraan Coovadia would collide with the literary practice of Coetzee, but I felt that there was never a thorough discussion on these grounds.
The reading onwards proved much more gratifying with the author addressing a range of topics evolving mostly around literature and South Africa, evidencing his qualities. His rumination can be triggered by books and writers or objects like the “vuvuzela”, the symbol of the 2010 World Cup, as a starting point for challenging the clichés about the country, in and out of it. Clocks appear twice as a trigger for thought. The azan clock alerted Imraan Coovadia’s mother for the different times of her five daily prayers, and it alerted the author for the changes in the Muslim world as well as the perception on Marxism, including his own. The Doomsday Clock created after World War II “to raise public understanding of the possibility of the world ending in an exchange of atom bombs” serves as a metaphor for the expectations and concerns regarding the future felt by the different ethnic groups in South Africa, which “live by different clocks”.
A couple of the essays deal more strictly with writers like Nabokov or Tolstoy and their proclaimed masterpieces. Still, literary learning shapes the writers reasoning on most matters, even if in some of the texts literature is not at stake. As one progresses with the reading it is unavoidable to recall arguments previously purported by the writer. For instance, the essay “George Eliot’s realism and Adam Smith”, exploring how the 19th century author of “Felix Holt and “Middlemarch” was possibly influenced by the political economist’s views and how she re-read them in these later novels, illuminates “Cheapskate”, the text that precedes it in the volume’s index. Indeed, Eliot and Smith’s idea that “society is shaped primarily by its members’ intersecting trajectories” seems to play a part in how 21st century writer Imraan Coovadia examines a highly publicised murder case of a woman by her husband just at the end of their honeymoon abroad in South Africa, in 2010.
It is when he summons examples from classical literature to shed a light on recent history, that I find the author best. Events familiar to us are related to classical works, rendering these closer to our contemporary lives and underlining the relevance to go on reading them. In “How They See Us” the position of the USA towards the Muslim world is considered through Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”; in “One of Us” Joseph Conrad’s alter-ego Marlow is confronted with Imraan Coovadia’s student life experience; in “Transformation - Three Concepts” the transformative tasks that South Africa still has to undertake are best understood through the reading of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”.
Through his own practice, Imraan Coovadia asserts the need to exercise criticism, to hear beyond the speeches of politicians - as shown in his analysis of ex-president Mbeki’s letters to the nation - and to scrutinise power structures as well as those who play key roles in them. Furthermore, you feel the urgency for the awareness that “there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life” as expressed by George Eliot and quoted by the author. The remaining difficulty to speak up a private truth is thus an important feature of the entanglement that he identifies in contemporary South Africa, hence the relevance of invoking William Wordsworth in “Entanglement”, as the poet adopts and adapts “the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society... to the purpose of poetic pleasure”. I am glad that I got to hear Imraan Coovadia's challenging voice.
The reading onwards proved much more gratifying with the author addressing a range of topics evolving mostly around literature and South Africa, evidencing his qualities. His rumination can be triggered by books and writers or objects like the “vuvuzela”, the symbol of the 2010 World Cup, as a starting point for challenging the clichés about the country, in and out of it. Clocks appear twice as a trigger for thought. The azan clock alerted Imraan Coovadia’s mother for the different times of her five daily prayers, and it alerted the author for the changes in the Muslim world as well as the perception on Marxism, including his own. The Doomsday Clock created after World War II “to raise public understanding of the possibility of the world ending in an exchange of atom bombs” serves as a metaphor for the expectations and concerns regarding the future felt by the different ethnic groups in South Africa, which “live by different clocks”.
A couple of the essays deal more strictly with writers like Nabokov or Tolstoy and their proclaimed masterpieces. Still, literary learning shapes the writers reasoning on most matters, even if in some of the texts literature is not at stake. As one progresses with the reading it is unavoidable to recall arguments previously purported by the writer. For instance, the essay “George Eliot’s realism and Adam Smith”, exploring how the 19th century author of “Felix Holt and “Middlemarch” was possibly influenced by the political economist’s views and how she re-read them in these later novels, illuminates “Cheapskate”, the text that precedes it in the volume’s index. Indeed, Eliot and Smith’s idea that “society is shaped primarily by its members’ intersecting trajectories” seems to play a part in how 21st century writer Imraan Coovadia examines a highly publicised murder case of a woman by her husband just at the end of their honeymoon abroad in South Africa, in 2010.
It is when he summons examples from classical literature to shed a light on recent history, that I find the author best. Events familiar to us are related to classical works, rendering these closer to our contemporary lives and underlining the relevance to go on reading them. In “How They See Us” the position of the USA towards the Muslim world is considered through Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”; in “One of Us” Joseph Conrad’s alter-ego Marlow is confronted with Imraan Coovadia’s student life experience; in “Transformation - Three Concepts” the transformative tasks that South Africa still has to undertake are best understood through the reading of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”.
Through his own practice, Imraan Coovadia asserts the need to exercise criticism, to hear beyond the speeches of politicians - as shown in his analysis of ex-president Mbeki’s letters to the nation - and to scrutinise power structures as well as those who play key roles in them. Furthermore, you feel the urgency for the awareness that “there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life” as expressed by George Eliot and quoted by the author. The remaining difficulty to speak up a private truth is thus an important feature of the entanglement that he identifies in contemporary South Africa, hence the relevance of invoking William Wordsworth in “Entanglement”, as the poet adopts and adapts “the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society... to the purpose of poetic pleasure”. I am glad that I got to hear Imraan Coovadia's challenging voice.
March 18, 2019
Pure genius.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews