Book within a book executed with pizzazz

Stranded writer pieces together fragments of grandfather’s affair

CJ Wasserman is an author, or rather, he was a somewhat acclaimed author until a tragedy dried up the ink in his pen.

We meet him as his highpowered wife has left him by walking out of the house. Sasha has dealt with the couple’s pain by throwing herself into her job as a banker.

She wants nothing more to do with her husband. He gets to keep the house, the valuable art in the house, and a stipend that will keep him going, and possibly even save him from having to write asinine copy for websites. But she has left behind something that causes Wasserman to start making moves back towards writing. It’s an old box of letters and telegrams between his wife’s grandfather and his lover Flora.

Wasserman starts to catalogue the letters on the dining room table, covered with a sheet, almost shrouded as he battles with ennui linked to the writing process.

And so a story begins.

Each chapter belongs either to Wasserman or Flora and Theo, each word is a masterpiece of considered writing.

The reality behind the letters is that Mark Winkler’s father-in-law, Norman, did in fact give a box of letters declaring a love story. And so this book becomes both a brilliant novel and love story, and a story about how we may or may not appropriate stories and retell them.

It’s in many ways a book about how to write a book, or perhaps more elegantly a book about how writing can save a life – if it needs saving. He also conjures up from fewer than 100 letters and telegrams a narrative structure for Theo and Flora and their love story.

The use of telegrams and the frustration of not knowing what might have been said in person between the pair gives a sense of miscommunication, and yet the characters are realised as being fully human.

Theo is dyspeptic and given to physical ailments, his inability to gain what he wants from his wife mirrors or counter-mirrors what has happened to Wasserman who has lost his wife, while Theo doesn’t seem able to shrug his off.

There is also a wonderful sense of a particular part of history being retold in this story.

Much of it is told through references to well-known South African artists. Theo and Flora refer very little to politics.

There are scant mentions of petrol rationing, but apart from that this is a closed caption love story. The narrative of each of the strands of stories of love or falling out of love are brilliantly achieved.