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“[I]t gradually resembles the best of Truman Capote’s writing, with acute observational powers, brilliant characterization, and narrative prose”
Mphuthumi Ntabeni reviews A Library to Flee on africaisacountry.com.

If an author writes with empathy, precision and authenticity about experiences foreign to their own, they’re a good writer and not a cultural appropriator.

The writer, Etienne Van Heerden, has admirable sweeping narrative powers to join events and cliffhangers into tight, jaw-dropping moments. He often grasps ideas by the nettle and delivers them in beautifully cut, clinical prose that produces intense emotions.

His new novel, translated from Afrikaans as A Library to Flee (original: Die Biblioteek aan die Einde van die Wêreld), is a collage of opinions about South Africa’s socio-political realities. At first, like most long reads, it feels disjointed and confusing—an inconsequential recording of semi-isolated occurrences and reportage culled from media outlets. But if you persevere, it gradually resembles the best of Truman Capote’s writing, with acute observational powers, brilliant characterization, and narrative prose.

Continue reading “‘Brilliant characterization’: Mphuthumi Ntabeni reviews A Library to Flee on africaisacountry.com” →

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‘A Library to Flee’ is difficult to navigate at the beginning, but is worth staying with, writes Sanet Oberholzer, as the reward is a novel of ideas as well as a brilliant historical fiction tale

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David Attwell, emeritus professor, University of York, and co-editor of The Cambridge History of South African Literature, 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.

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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.

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

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):

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.

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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/.

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