06h00 somewhere, and many hours later somewhere else
A road trip to Namibia, but no ordinary travel narrative. Non-linear, indulgent, challenging: this book demonstrates how language can be bent into new shapes, how stories can become something more than mere storytelling. Fun, sad, and occasionally repellent. Often all at once.
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06h00 somewhere, and many hours later somewhere else
A road trip to Namibia unfolds across these pages, but when? Yesterday, years ago, or never at all? Barbara Adair refuses to say, creating something between memoir and fever dream.
This is no ordinary travel narrative. Language shifts without warning: playful one moment, brutal the next. The text overflows with names of rivers, flowers, trees, places, and people, then suddenly confronts the cruel realities of history and contemporary life. Nothing stays still long enough for comfort.
Here freedom is captured in words: wind, mythology, politics, life and death all tumbling together. Questions emerge about technology, mechanics, the vacuous nature of our existence. The reader can never settle into complacency.
Mark Kannemeyer’s eerie illustrations enhance or deliberately undermine the text, offering visual refuge from the relentless verbal energy.
Non-linear, indulgent, challenging: this book demonstrates how language can be bent into new shapes, how stories can become something more than mere storytelling. Fun, sad, and occasionally repellent. Often all at once.
About the artist:
Mark Kannemeyer is an artist and illustrator (also known as Lorcan White) has had numerous exhibitions of his drawings. He works at the University of Stellenbosch in the Fine Arts department. He is also a regular contributor to alternative comics In-Jusi, Bitterkomix and Insig, and is the author and illustrator of his own comic Zombie.
Barbara Adair is a novelist and writer. In Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2004. Her novel End was shortlisted for Africa Regional Commonwealth Prize. WILL, the Passenger Delaying Flight … received much acclaim, and In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw, was nominated for the NIHSS prize. She contributed to Queer Africa and Queer Africa 2, and her writing, particularly her travel writing, has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria. She lives in Johannesburg.
What people have said about Adair’s writing:
“Tricksy experimentalism offers a bold and original read …” Maureen Isaacson on END, Sunday Independent
“A reading experience that lingers in the mind through the quiet compelling depictions of artistic grandiosity, hubris and despair set against a backdrop of power struggles in dysfunctional relationships and against the weft of politics and an economy of survival in a developing country.” Marlene van Niekerk, on In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot
“The concentrated force of these landscapes seem to bypass the rational mind to subvert order, coherence and any familiar structural organisation.” – Art on Paper
“It takes a tremendous amount of skill and wisdom – as well as, of course, courage – to be able to tear and resew the traditional fabric of a novel and turn it inside out, tossing convention to the ether. Will, the passenger delaying flight …, may well be unlike anything you have read before.” Robyn Sassens on Will, the passenger delaying flight …
“This approach to writing evokes the anarchic dynamism of the author of the Futurist manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, just before the First World War in Italy. He proposed, among other things, an up-ending of traditional language rules. The world was at the point of no return. Cultural practitioners were excited about changing all its values. Along these lines, Adair, takes a bow to Marinetti and uses her language with delicacy and care, but also with directness and rule-breaking wisdom and courage.” Robyn Sassens on In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw
“The book [In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw] creates a fascinating tapestry of multifaceted lives in a town where survival of the fittest is the driving force. The photo-essays and stories are evocative, and I believe that this is an important work, looking at the changes cities have undergone through the democratic era. Adair does not place a value judgement on which era is better, but she is rather the scribe/balladeer singing the song of South Africa in its current incarnation.”
Janet van Eeden Litnet on In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw
