Excerpt from interview

Sophie Roell: Let’s go on to A Library to Flee, by Etienne Van Heerden. I think this was written in Afrikaans and then translated.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni: Yes, it was translated into English last year. There is something that we call here the UJ Prize for Translation, which is awarded by the University of Johannesburg. The translator, Henrietta Rose-Innes, won that prize this year. It’s quite exciting.

The genre of this book is the most popular one at the moment. Now, let me first make you understand what kind of a genre it is. There is this thing that is happening now, especially in South Africa, whereby stories are also set in some global cities outside of South Africa. And we’re no longer only looking west; apparently, we’re also looking east, so there are a lot of stories now that are set in China. This one is part of that movement: It’s partly set in China, and generally set in South Africa.

The most popular one in this genre at this particular moment is C. A. Davids’s How to Be a Revolutionary. I’m sure you would have heard of it because it’s published in the UK by Verso. It has won quite a lot of prizes in South Africa: the Sunday Times Literary Award and the UJ Prize for Writing in English.

But what I like more about Etienne Van Heerden’s one, A Library to Flee, is that I find it’s a little bit more nuanced and the prose has got more finesse to it. It follows a Black woman who comes across some kind of data harvesting business. She realises that her father is involved in this, and there’s some corruption because it involves the government during the Zuma years of our presidency. It follows the sniff of this corruption to China, and that’s where tragedy strikes.

What I love most about it also is that it’s got a lot of diverse characters: a Xhosa woman, an Afrikaner man, an English man. It mixes and intermixes these characters together and it all comes to a very beautiful ending – I can’t mention it, but it’s plotted very well. It’s got a very surprising ending. It’s a thick book, but actually, by the end, it rewards your patience.

SR: It’s about 600 pages, isn’t it?

MN: Yes, it’s a very long book. It helps that the prose is written in pleasing poetic flashes, so you hang in there. I can understand how readers might be discouraged because it’s got a lot going on initially, but if you have patience, the plot has got a very pleasing, rewarding end, where it brings everything together.

SR: But you wouldn’t describe it as a crime novel, even though it starts with a murder?

MN: It mixes a lot of genres. It’s a spy novel also; it eavesdrops on history. It’s got a lot of things going on. And then, it’s contemporary in the sense that it interrogates how AI will affect us, especially security clusters because of the cameras on the streets, the cameras in shopping malls. Also, it showcases – it’s almost a legal drama in itself – arguments about how ethical data harvesting itself is.

Click here to read Sophie Roell’s full interview with Mphuthumi Ntabeni.