Set in Nigel, South Africa. Reviewed on 2018/05: https://www.instagram.com/p/BjQ4n2oljBO/
“Then I felt totally numb. My mind had shut out all the pain. And, for the third time in about two weeks, I felt in the depths of me, the beginning of the kind of laughter that seemed to explain everything. And when the sound of laughter came out, it filled my ears, shutting out the pain even further. It seemed to fill out the sky like a pounding drum.” Have you ever started crying right after laughing almost uncontrollably? It seems contradictory, right? But it also feels as if the joy of #laughter has cracked your inner walls and your real feelings of #painand #sorrow come crashing down. That’s literally how I felt reading this book. #ndebele aims to paint us a very simple life in the #townships he grew up in with all their humanity and #survival skills. The joy of surviving #againstallodds and one day at a time. It’s fairly easy to analyze #apartheidin retrospective and sort of subdivide it in periods and whatnots. However what #njabulondebele achieves here with #foolsandotherstories is to give you a #microscopic view of the daily lives of those in the lowest category possible with no way out. Each #shortstory feels like an exercise on #observation Observing to understand? Observing to question? #observing to live? I’m going to let you be the judge of that… #highlyrecommended#southafricanliterature #nigel #charterston#johannesburg #ravanpress#staffriderseries
hebdo_readings 