The Alphabet of Birds
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
‘Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.’ – Damon Galgut
From an ancient castle in Bavaria and a pre-War villa in Milan, to a winter landscape in
Lesotho and the suburban streets of Pretoria, the stories in The Alphabet of Birds take an acute look at South Africans at home and abroad.
In one story, a strange, cheerful Japanese man visits a young South African as he takes care of his dying mother; in another, a woman battles corrupt bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape. A man trails his lover through the underground dance clubs of Berlin, while in London a young banker moves through layers of decadence as a soul would through purgatory.
Pulsating with passion, loss, and melancholia, S J Naudé’s collection The Alphabet of Birds is filled with music, art, architecture, myth, the search for origins and the shifing
relationships between people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
South African expats confront dislocation and illness in this soulful, well-written debut story collection by Naud . Several stories center on characters returning to South Africa to care for sick family members. In "A Master from Germany," the unnamed gay narrator flees a love affair in Europe in the course of which he may have contracted HIV to tend to his cancer-ridden mother back home. In "War, Blossoms" an expat living in London returns to the Highveld to nurse a parent with the unsolicited help of a Japanese friend with whom he shared a spiritual, and possibly erotic, experience while traveling in Asia. Throughout the collection, Naud shows off considerable erudition in such subjects as language pathology, African music, and architecture. At times, his keen eye for detail offers great effect, as when, in Berlin at dawn, "the rising sun splashes against glass cliffs." Other times, his detours into academese "Loose" reads in places like a dissertation on dance lead to stalled narratives. Yet, whether examining the corrupt health-care system of South Africa or the "borderless world's financial elite" in places such as London and Dubai, Naud remains a breathtaking, tender writer.
