The stories in The Alphabet of Birds are full of quirky machines, hybrid musical compositions, and improvisatory dance and theatre pieces. These other artworks are keys to understanding the fictions themselves: they are intricate constructs, with their parts sourced in many different cultures and corners of the world, from German opera to Japanese Noh, from ruined castles in Bavaria to dilapidated farmhouses in the South African countryside, from the underground dance clubs of Berlin to the indoor ski slopes of Dubai. Like the music made by the ‘Victorian Native Ladies Society’ in one of the stories, the individual fictions contain a multitude of influences and elements, and their combinations are often unpredictable or dissonant. Yet the connections between the pieces are resonant, and they gradually reveal themselves as a set of variations on themes, making for an unusually tight-knit and satisfying volume.
Naudé writes compellingly about South Africa and its dilemmas, but he is equally at home, or perhaps not at home, in many other places, in Hanoi, Phoenix, London, Tokyo. His characters are restless, drifting between cultures and languages, the farm and the city, the difficult present and the vanished past. A few of them slip across the borders into illness, senility and death. They create new identities, which do not quite hold, and transient communities of the dislocated and mismatched. This is fiction attuned to the ‘borderless world’ inhabited by the ‘lapsed South Africans’ of the post-apartheid era.
Naudé’s debut was acclaimed in the Afrikaans literary world, marking the arrival of a questioning, cosmopolitan writer. This English translation will bring him the wider readership he deserves.