The highs, the lows, the in-betweens: they are all there in Imraan Coovadia’s astonishing novel, writes Bongani Kona.
The 1990s — a decade book-ended by two wildly contrasting historical events, the release of Nelson Mandela from Victor Verster Prison and the Columbine High School massacre — sailed by miserably for the writer Imraan Coovadia. He was living in the United States at the time and despite graduating with a masters in fine art from Cornell University the decade vanished as he struggled to make a start as a novelist.
“Well, I tried,” Coovadia says, in a deadpan sort of way, “but I was trying to write a novel about a guy who is only marrying the daughters of Nobel laureates.” It was meant to be a satirical novel but for myriad reasons the book just didn’t work. “It was like this really brittle, not really funny satire and stuff … I was at a dead end and I stayed in that dead end as a writer for eight years.”
Since recovering from that prolonged spell of writer’s block, Coovadia (43) has over the past 10 years or so emerged as one of South Africa’s foremost fiction writers.
To date he has written five novels — The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves, High Low In-between, The Institute of Taxi Poetry and the just published Tales of the Metric System — and won every major literary award in South Africa. He has also published a slender collection of essays, Transformations, and a study on Trinidadian Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Authority and Authorship in VS Naipaul.
He was born and raised in Durban, the cultural milieu of which he has mined for most of his novels. His family has ancestral roots in India and his father, Professor Hoosen ‘Jerry’ Coovadia, is an internationally acclaimed scientist who has led ground-breaking research in mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
After matriculating from Hilton College, near Pietermaritzburg, Coovadia moved to the United States in the early 1990s. “I went to the US to go to college, planning to be a physicist. I thought it was the one country in the world where people weren’t determined to make other people strangers. When that changed, to summarise a long process, I came to Cape Town, the city in our country with the highest propensity to make strangers out of citizens and friends out of foreigners.”
He started writing fiction when he was in his 20s and by his own admission it was mostly “terrible” stuff. When he finally found his voice it dazzled with comic wizardry, to paraphrase JM Coetzee’s cover blurb for his breakout novel, The Wedding.
In recent times, though, Coovadia has adopted a more serious tone in his fiction. His third novel, High Low In-between, won the 2010 Sunday Times fiction prize, and looked at the poisonous years of Aids denialism during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. His new book, Tales of the Metric System, is a historical novel in the same vein as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s classic, Half of a Yellow Sun.
The book spans four decades of South Africa’s contemporary history beginning in Durban in 1970, the year Coovadia was born. “It sounds like the melodramatic thing writers say but it really took me my whole life [to write this book].”
Reading Coovadia’s book now, at a time when the ANC, once the vanguard of the anti-apartheid struggle, is mired in all sorts of controversies, is not an exercise without poignancy.
“In terms, however, of the enormous complexity of different situations: what it felt like to be there, in that situation, what values, what principles came to the fore and why, how these related to individuals and how they embraced, challenged or evaded them, can only come through literature. It does not come through history in the same way, not how it felt to be there, not the confusion of feelings, ideas, emotions, beliefs.”
This is what Coovadia has done with Tales of the Metric System; to capture what it felt like to be there — the confusion of feelings, ideas, emotions and beliefs. It’s his finest novel to date and maybe one that others will read long after our time has passed.
For full article by Bongani Kona see Mail & Guardian