‘Bruns’ by Norman Rush

In the early 1980s, Botswana boasted an unlikely concentration of nascent literary talent: Alexander McCall Smith was teaching at the University of Botswana; Hilary Mantel was living with her geologist husband in Lobatse, an hour’s drive from Gaborone; and Norman Rush was co-managing (with his wife, Elsa) the US Peace Corps. Was there something in the lack of water, there on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, that nurtured literary talent? “I’m sure it was simply happenstance,” Norman told me a few years ago. He arrived in Botswana expecting to get a lot of reading and writing done, but his duties during his five years there left him with very little spare time. “I managed to read Bessie Head standing up at the Botswana Book Centre.”

Bruns, set in a fictionalized town based on Mahalapye (notable for straddling the Tropic of Capricorn), marks the debut of a narrative voice that he later utilized in his novel Mating (1991), which won the US National Book Award. The story was first published in The New Yorker (an earlier story, After the Life Class, was published there in 1978, before he went to Botswana), and is the linchpin of his collection, Whites, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

First published in The New Yorker in 1983, online here. It was collected in Whites, Alfred A Knopf, 1986

‘There Here Then Now’ by Naomi Mitchison

My father was the director of The British Council in Botswana from 1980-83. He was usually unflappable, but one announcement was guaranteed to change his mood: “Naomi Mitchison’s here.” He’d deflate with a sigh.

She was the doyenne of Scottish letters, and had been famous for more than fifty years. In 1960, in Scotland, she met Linchwe II, the young paramount chief of the Bakgatla tribe, who was travelling on a British Council grant. He invited her to his tribal seat, the village of Mochudi north of Gaborone. So began an association that led to her adoption as the mother of the tribe. She visited Botswana often, and regarded the British Council, and whoever was director, as being both at her service and an adversary.

In the last thirty-five years of her long life (1897-1999), she wrote prolifically about Africa, and drew on local folk tales. In There Here Then Now, three brothers – symbolising a Bushman, a Mokgatla (a member of the Bakgatla tribe), and a European – represent the clashes of hunter-gathering, agriculture, and industrialisation.

Batswana folk tales were also a rich source for fellow Scot and resident of Mochudi, Alexander McCall Smith. Criticisms about cultural appropriation continue to rumble, but both writers are largely venerated within Botswana.

Appears in the collection Images of Africa, Canongate, 1980

‘Starlight on the Veld’ by Herman Charles Bosman

Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951) was South Africa’s greatest short story writer, but his career almost ended before it began. He was condemned to death for shooting his stepbrother. The sentence was commuted to four years, after which he became a jobbing writer, and drew extensively on his time as a young school teacher in remotest Transvaal prior to his legal troubles.

He wrote two major short story sequences, published in local literary magazines and newspapers. The first centres on a campfire raconteur, Oom Schalk Lourens. The second, the Voorkamer stories, eavesdrops on a bunch of Afrikaner farmers putting the world to rights as they await the arrival of the weekly mail lorry at a rural post office. Written in English with an Afrikaans cadence, his stories were both of their time (beware of racial epithets) and before their time (some criticize apartheid). They are all worth reading, but start with Starlight on the Veld, which showcases the lyricism and humour that runs through his work.

First published in The South African Opinion in January 1936, and subsequently featured in numerous collections and anthologies. It can be read online at Narrative

‘Joburg, Sis!’ by Barney Simon

In 1989, I was interviewing Pieter-Dirk Uys (South Africa’s Barry Humphries) at the café outside the committedly multiracial Market Theatre in Johannesburg, when a frenetic, bald, bearded man stopped to chat with us. It was Barney Simon, co-founder of the theatre, and still, then, basking in the success of the worldwide smash, Woza Albert! (co-written with the two stars, Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema). The play imagined the second coming of Christ in apartheid Johannesburg (a BBC documentary can be found, fuzzily, here.)

Simon’s love-hate relationship with his home city, as well as his theatrical inclinations, are on display in his short story collection, Joburg, Sis! The title story is a gritty, dramatic monologue in South African dialect, incorporating multilingual slang. (‘Sis’ is an exclamation of disgust.)

Originally published in the collection Joburg, Sis!, Bateleur Press, 1974, and has featured in several anthologies, notably A Century of South African Short Stories, edited by Jean Marquard, AD Donker, 1978

‘Calls’ by Masande Ntshanga

The struggle against apartheid was one of the great moral campaigns of the 20^th Century, giving rise to a celebrated body of literature and two Nobel Laureates (Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee). Post-apartheid writers subsequently explored the complex aftermath of minority rule, including the HIV/AIDS crisis.

But where are we now? Post-post-apartheid? The current crop of writers is young, diverse, with a wide range of urgent preoccupations, and a desire to break free of the tropes of the past.

One of the most notable is Masande Ntshanga, who published his first short story at 18, and has since produced two genre-bending novels (The Reactive and Triangulum). ‘Calls’ is a lively blending of speculative fiction and African traditions.

First published in New York-based n+1 Magazine in Spring 2016, online here

‘A Sunrise on the Veld’ by Doris Lessing

For seven years, until 1994, my father was the British Council representative in Malawi, and I was a regular on the British Airways service from Heathrow, with a fuelling stop in Harare. On one return flight, an unmistakable woman, grey hair pulled tightly back, sat in front of me on the leg from Zimbabwe. At Terminal 4 baggage claim, I helped her with her suitcases. No other passenger seemed aware, or remotely interested, that they’d shared a flight with Doris Lessing.

A Sunrise on the Veld captures the endless possibilities of an African dawn and a 15-year-old boy looking to his future…until a horrific incident changes the outlook. This is one of Lessing’s greatest stories, standing out in an oeuvre that earned her the Nobel Prize in 2007. (How did she take the news?)

First published in the collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country, Michael Joseph, 1951); has since appeared in several other collections

‘The Ultimate Safari’ by Nadine Gordimer

Our time in Malawi coincided with an appalling civil war in Mozambique, estimated to have displaced two million people. Refugees fleeing to Malawi only had to cross a road. For a stretch, the main north-south highway formed the border, and on the Malawian side there were huge refugee camps. The crossing into South Africa was more perilous. Thousands of refugees traversed Kruger National Park, a reserve the size of Israel, taking their chances with elephants, buffalos, and lions. The flow has never entirely ceased.

Once, during one of our extended self-drive safaris there, my wife and I saw in the distance a group making the crossing, porting all of their belongings with them. Nadine Gordimer’s The Ultimate Safari, published in 1989, puts the reader in the shoes – or lack of shoes – of the refugees.

First published in Granta in 1989, and then in the collection Jump and Other Stories, Bloomsbury, 1991

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ by Ernest Hemingway

No author has stamped their name on the world quite like Hemingway. In thirty years as a travel writer, I keep bumping into him: his homes, hotels he’s stayed in, bars he drank at, and – at Murchison Falls in Uganda – the site of one of his two successive plane crashes. I even spent a morning in Cuba with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s boat captain (who claimed to be the inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea).

The personality overshadowed the work. For half the literary world Hemingway is now firmly out of fashion, while the other half keeps the flame burning. I’m in the latter camp.

There are a dozen Hemingway books on my shelves, red flags be damned. This story is one of the reasons. Compare and contrast to Muriel Spark’s The Go-Away Bird. They both culminate with a hunt gone wrong. But which female protagonist has agency?

First published in Cosmopolitan in 1936, and collected in The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories, Charles Scribner, 1938. It has subsequently appeared in many other collections and anthologies

‘Loss of Face’ by A. S. Byatt

My father’s only non-African overseas posting was South Korea, which even in the mid-1980s was on the international cultural circuit. Antonia Byatt was one of the British writers who visited under his auspices. Holidaying from school at the time, I took her shopping for pirated cassettes in Itaewon, our local district in Seoul. She visited our house for meals, and, perhaps significantly, spied on our shelves my mother’s collection of novels by Margaret Drabble, her sister.

The house and my parents feature in Loss of Face. The portrait of my mother is not entirely flattering; our home in Durham is referenced, and, by implication, her provincial northern roots. (Unlike Antonia – and my South Shields-born father – my mother retained her regional accent.) She was an infant teacher at the Seoul British School, and her enthusiasm for Beatrix Potter’s books is mentioned somewhat condescendingly. No matter. My parents and two of my former homes appear, albeit in fictionalized form, in a story by a Booker winner. I’ll take the win.

Collected in Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1987

Introduction

Those familiar with the water colour Dickens’ Dream by Robert William Buss should be able to picture the scene. The author is depicted sitting in a bentwood chair he has pushed back from his desk. He is either in a state of deep concentration or—more likely given the title—he has dozed off. In the air around him swirls a mist of his creations—scenes and characters from his novels, some so hazy as to be almost imperceptible, others resolving themselves in stronger lines and clearer colours.

I took a similar approach when invited to compile this anthology. After a quick tour of my shelves I sat in my own office chair and let candidates swirl around me till a dozen emerged from the fog, although where Dickens is impeccably dressed in a black frock coat and breeches, and his white-socked, leather-slippered feet sit on a velvet rest, I was probably wearing sweat pants. Let’s, if only for the sake of decency, assume as much. I don’t have a unifying principle to justify the selection except that I do believe it would make a very nice book for the reader keen to revel in the form.

‘101’ by May-Lan Tan

Really, this one line would justify its inclusion: “They got married at the end of the summer, before God and five hundred Korean people in a Gothic church on Wilshire Boulevard.”

It’s a story about the things we have to carry alone, the things we choose to. About the imaginary lines we trace between what we think are our transgressions and the prices we pay for them. About how sometimes there is a need to forgive someone who hasn’t wronged us. About how nothing is ever done. The prose is exquisitely spare—it makes the kind of poignancy possible that is lost the moment an author lays it on with a trowel or indicates what a reader should think. Tan can do with a word, an observation, what Satie could do with a note. The story is laced with many more memorable lines but I won’t quote them. It’s a short story—you won’t expend much energy in finding them and you will be disproportionately rewarded. I don’t recommend you read it in the garden—May-Lan Tan is dry enough to kill your lawn.

First published in The Reader, and collected in Things to Make or Break, CB Editions, 2014, and in a new edition, Sceptre 2018

‘Flower Crazy’ by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Jonas Elbousty

This is an outlier on the list. No matter how much I might tell myself my tastes are wide-ranging and catholic, I am drawn to stylists—and Mohamed Choukri is not that. Sometimes his sentences, at least as they’re rendered in English, read like bullet points, as though style were the enemy. ‘Flower Crazy’ deploys multiple perspectives to contrast Tangier’s public persona with Choukri’s home territory—the city’s impoverished underbelly.

To this day it is possible for a foreigner to go for a short walk in Tangier and encounter people for whom she has no reliable points of reference—individuals whose weatherings and eccentricities have been sculpted in circumstances beyond her ken. Choukri’s fictions are monuments to these people. He depicted them without a trace of judgement or superiority—because he was one of them. Unusually for a writer, he learned to read at the age of twenty, while in prison, following a childhood and youth I suspect most of us would rather not think about, let alone experience. I could have chosen any story by him—his value (and appeal) as a writer transcends the individual works.

First published in Arabic in 1979. Choukri’s complete short stories are now collected in Tales of Tangier, Yale University Press, 2023

‘Home, Sisters’ by Emma Devlin

This is going to be difficult to describe. Devlin does something here which I consider to be both masterful and rare, but which doesn’t sound right when I try to put it into words—she leaves us floundering, but in precisely the right way. We are dropped mid-current into a time and place that will never fully reveal themselves to us, introduced to characters that will remain (just, exquisitely) beyond our understanding, and delivered an ending that isn’t an ending. She does everything wrong, in other words, at least according to the tenets of convention. But this is how, in the hands of a skilled writer, a short story can be an enormity, exceeding the limits of a reader’s vision. The lack of resolution is the resolution—the clarifying in our view of a world, depicted in miniature, that is anything but miniature. You will not need the reassurance of obvious meaning if you read ‘Home, Sisters’. You will not need to formulate a quick response—the story will move into you, to stay.

Winner of the 2019 Benedict Kiely Short Story competition, as yet uncollected but available online on the Irish Times website

‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, tr. William Weaver

If asked to write about Calvino in another context, I’d probably start with Invisible Cities, but since this is an anthology of short stories, it has to be ‘The Distance of the Moon’, a story from Cosmicomics that exemplifies Calvino’s ability to return a reader to an earlier state, in which our wonder at an unfolding tale is childlike. No coincidence that among his accomplishments is a definitive collection of Italian folktales.

I love lists, and ‘The Distance of the Moon’ is the story that, in its description of moon milk, gave us not only ‘vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue’ but also ‘fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish-hooks, at times even a comb’.

Luminous is an overused word but it might have been coined for this story. From a luminous, irreal palette, Calvino paints a portrait of the kind of longing any of us will have known who have played our part in a love triangle (quadrangle, pentangle . . . )

First published in Cosmicomics, Giulio Einaudi (Italy) and Harcourt Brace (US), 1965. Currently available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2010