What I’m reading

CRAIG HIGGINSON is the author of Last Summer, the award-winning The Landscape Painter and The Dream House, which was released last month. His plays include Dream of the Dog, The Girl in the Yellow Dress, The Jungle Book and Little Foot – all published by Oberon Books, London. His next two plays, The Imagined Land and The Red Door, are scheduled to be produced in the next 18 months. He lives in Johannesburg. I RECENTLY finished reading Graham Swift’s collection of essays on writing Making an Elephant, which I’d recommend to anyone involved in writing or wanting to write a novel.

There are several autobiographical pieces that illuminate Swift’s development as a novelist as well as vivid portraits of encounters with writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and that irreplaceable genius – Ted Hughes.

I then tried to read Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, which felt completely interminable and I finally gave up about halfway through. This is in spite of loving other books of hers, including her brilliant parable about post-colonial Africa, The Poisonwood Bible. I have now valiantly started Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, which starts vividly and lyrically and I hope will continue to grip me for the next 850 pages!

The four novels were envisaged as one collective whole, with the first three offering different perspectives on the same sequence of events – much as I aimed to do in my new novel, The Dream House. Apparently Durrell was trying to capture a new kind of reality in the wake of Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freud’s conception of personality as an amalgamation of colliding forces.

Two of the novels coming out this year that I’m especially excited to read include Rehana Rossouw’s What Will People Say? – a family saga set on the Cape Flats that promises to be moving, funny and refreshing – and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion, which is set in a slightly alternative-universe Cape Town, where Table Mountain has been fenced off as a park to preserve endangered species.