Kirjahaku

In this haunting tale of love and learning, the existential chaos of a life ravaged by circumstance takes on a rhythm of its own, one bound by loss and loneliness, but also an intelligent awareness of self. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes brutal, occasionally funny and infuriating, a journalist-comrade-lover caught up in the shade and shadow of politics and social injustice faces treachery and betrayal on every level. Set against the backdrop of a cityscape that taunts and tantalises, this is where love fails and passion wanes, “where suffering has no meaning”, where an individual escapes death only to find himself confronted with choices wrought by remorse and retribution, by conscience and character. And yet, with all trauma, there is a distinct musicality to the lyrical unpacking that follows a string of small things …

“I wrestled with life and lost.” So begins the story of Michael, a corporate lawyer known to his colleagues and associates as Sir Marvin, who picks his way – sometimes delicately, but more often in his own blundering way – through the unfathomable intricacies that make up a life: love and anger, humility and ambition, trust and distrust, selfishness and selflessness. A flawed individual with an acute understanding of the roads that must be navigated to achieve even the slightest insight into the human condition. In this study in introspection, embroidered with lyrical prose and astonishing intuition, the hero, meditative and melancholic, is at once both tragic and comic.

The Discovery of Love, explores and heightens one of the dominant themes in Nthikeng Mohlele’s literary oeuvre, that of love. In this collection, love is reflected upon in expansive and unexpected dimensions. It becomes the backdrop against which Mohlele delves into the intricacies of human agency with profound and often unexpected effects. These stories dazzle; they are wide-ranging in scope, yet particular in their authorial intent.

The Discovery of Love, Nthikeng Mohlele’s debut short fiction collection, set the scene for a treatment of a multiplicity of themes while maintaining the stylistic registers of his novels. The intensity and range of the earlier stories is transplanted and further developed in A Little Light, stories that explore the complexities and contradictions of human consciousness. There is in A Little Light more overt focus on contemporary global historical events and personalities, the nature of the human heart, politics, human mortality and the afterlife. From the dusty streets of Tembisa township of the 1980s to Osama bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Mohlele is cerebral, playful, speculative, incisive and, most of all, of a penetrating narrative gaze.

Storyteller-in-chief, Nthikeng Mohlele, spins another glorious tale: a former high-flying politician who now sleeps under a bridge in Johannesburg’s city centre and washes dishes to survive. As his mind wanders in this self-imposed exile, he contemplates his political party, the false promises, the jaded ideology and hypocrisy that runs rampant, and the deception and treachery underpinning it. As his reveries take him through past relationships and a marriage which ended in adultery, his disillusionment, his fractured mind and unravelling personal life which led to this strange spiritual retreat is revealed. Molehle is a master at probing the depths of human consciousness and in Revolutionaries’ House he asks: how do we hold a unified moral self?

Bantubonke is an accomplished and revered jazz trumpeter, composer and band leader in decline – an absent present and inadequate spouse. He lives for art at the expense of all else, an imbalance that derails his life and propels him to the brink of madness and despair. A story of direct and implied betrayals, Illumination is an unrelenting study of possession and loss, of the beauty and uncertainty of love, of the dangers and intrusions of fame.

This is the story of a dreamer, ‘an average man’, singled out by fate for an uncertain life. Jailed for 18 years under apartheid for unspecified sins, he emerges into a world that has no place for him. His fluctuating fortunes land him on the unpredictable, bitter-winter streets of Johannesburg, where ‘harmlessness’ is an ‘unfortunate trait’ but tempestuous skylines offer space to breathe. A trumpet and an indigent dog are his accomplices in survival. But it is his obsessive love for the erratic, hard-hearted Desiree that remains the one constant in his life and impels his search for the elusive meaning of existence. Through his protagonist, the trumpet-playing philosopher poet, Mohlele weaves his unique magic with words, posing powerful questions in his inimitably individualistic and evocative style.

Michael is a respected and haunted South African corporate lawyer – the narrator of this sweeping, intimate and intricate exploration of the plurality and mystery of things: love, grief, fate, lust – but most of all life. Nthikeng Mohlele once again delves into head-cracking and bruising questions, in this coming-out-of and against-age story; told with humour, beauty and calculated rage. Brimming with delicacy and authorial thunder, this part campus novel, part philosophical epistle, is one man’s rebellion against ‘life as we know it’. Rusty Bell is an appallingly wise examination of the perils of being human – by a writer who knows the beauty and savagery of words.