At the highly impressionable age of eleven, I moved with my mother from the smallholding that had shaped my young life and nascent imagination to a wonderful bungalow in the suburbs of Bulawayo. All the houses looked the same—modest single-story abodes tucked away on acres of land and bordered by bougainvillea or hibiscus hedges. All houses that is, save one. The house that broke the uniformity was not a house at all but a castle—a seemingly abandoned, crumbling ruin hidden behind a fortress of never-green savannah vegetation—situated two houses down from where I lived. The entire place was shrouded in mystery for me. Who had built it and why? And, perhaps, more importantly, why had they abandoned it and left it to decay? While I had much curiosity and strong powers of invention, I must not have possessed even a modicum of courage for I never ventured onto the property to steal my way into its cavernous interior, scurry along its secret passages, creep up its decrepit stairwells, encounter its undoubtedly many ghosts and find myself trapped in one of its ancient chambers. However, it was a place that undoubtedly haunted me throughout my life’s journey for it will probably not surprise you to learn, Dear Reader, that after such an auspicious beginning, I have written an African Gothic novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People.
At least, I think that is what I have done. If you type ‘African Gothic’ into your favorite browser chances are that the search will not yield many results that seem pertinent to what you are looking for. You will be encouraged by certain results only to be disappointed when you realize that they point to canonical texts of African Literature onto which literary critics have read ‘elements’ of the Gothic.
For more than 50 years, Ny-Ålesund has housed an international community at the top of the world just 1,200km (745 miles) from the North Pole. Remnants of scientific equipment from the mission which mapped the lines of longitude which define our time zones, still stand at Ny-Ålesund. More recently, Nasa used the base for its satellite lasers and measurements of the Earth's electrical field. Now, scientists from 10 countries live there to conduct their research. For almost three months at a time, they wake and go to sleep in darkness. Their experiments stretch from space to the mysteries of phytoplankton, microplastic pollution, walrus behaviour and alterations in Arctic cyclones.
The need to protect the unique polar archipelago resulted in the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act, which was one of the world's first international environmental protection agreements. But the impact left on this pristine landscape by the researchers is necessary, the scientists say.
The highs of communal dining can be so much higher than when you’re at a private table, the thrill of an entirely unpredictable evening on top of having a good meal. Unpredictability can also bring deep lows. As I left after that recent meal, I realized that while the dishes had been sublime, the story of the night was about the annoying man. But it made me want to return, to gamble another night to see if the company could match the food. What a risk, but what a reward.
At a brief 164 pages, this novel is a stark yet superb exercise of narrative control, equally unsettling and fascinating, worryingly plausible. Harpman provides just enough detail for us to draw our own conclusions about the cataclysmic event that occurred and what purpose these women served in captivity. We relate to our narrator as she reconciles her place as heir apparent to a vast and empty world.
While The Many Lives of Anne Frank is almost too exhaustively detailed, and at times disorganized, Franklin makes a young girl who has mutated into a cultural phenomenon come alive in her own mercurial right. In doing so, she deepens the tragedy of Anne’s end and renders her own book as much an act of devotion as of scholarship. In Anne’s introduction to Version B, she had written, “Neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.” How wrong she was.