That thin slice of land on the western coast of South America, Chile counts Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende amongst its literary luminaries. In her writing, the latter dabbles in magic realism. My introduction to the genre came in high school when we watched the movie adaptation of the Mexican novel, Like Water for Chocolate.
Chinese stereotypes boil down to noodles and Kung Fu. The Chinese are decidedly great at both, and as I’m fond of all kinds of cuisine and martial arts, these are stereotypes well worth indulging in.
The list of books I’ve read so far for Around the World in Words.
I don’t know much about Hungary, except that I used to mispronounce it as a child. From yet another amble through Exclusive Books (you can hardly walk through a mall in South Africa without coming across a branch), I found Magda Szabó’s The Door.
In almost 30 years of reading, I have read and loved the work of George Orwell, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, J.K Rowling, Jeremy Clarkson, Ben Elton, Enid Blyton, Daphne du Maurier, Nick Hornby, Leslie Charteris, and William Thackeray. This long list of English authors is hardly comprehensive.
I could wax lyrical about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all day. She is one of my favourite writers; but as I have not explored the work of many other Nigerian authors, I decided to choose someone else for my reading challenge.
I’ve never been to Russia, but I’ve drunk plenty of vodka. Does that count? Of course not, but the vodka thing really is no cliché. Even in the novella I read for the Russian leg of my challenge, it’s mentioned.
Contrary to confused belief, Five Fingers for Marseilles is not South Africa’s first Western. Our film industry is well-aged and with it comes eons of storytelling ingrained in our very souls. And this Western is neither the first nor is it original. It’s a pastiche of passion composed of Fordian frames and Leonean tension.
If you live in South Africa and have never met a Zimbabwean, you live under a rock. At one I point, I had two colleagues from Zimbabwe, one of whom (along with a South African colleague) recommended Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Her novel marked the first time in my challenge that I chose a book recommended by someone from that country. It’s something I hope to do more of, as I progress in my travels. Nervous Conditions also ticks the other boxes for this challenge: the author is from Zimbabwe and the story is set in Zimbabwe.
When I found War of the Newts on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore, I remembered reading about it in an article from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Back then the story appealed to me, and upon finding the book and discovering the author was from the Czech Republic (a country I had not yet travelled to for my reading challenge), it inevitably became my next destination.
