Crooked Seeds will leave you reeling
Crooked Seeds Karen Jennings Hogarth
The opening episode of Crooked Seeds quickly separates the resilient from the squeamish: Deidre, a white South African woman in Cape Town, wakes up to pee into a mixing bowl by her bed. The smell of her three-dayold underwear is pungent. She's so dry-mouthed she can't slide in her false teeth. With no water in her dilapidated apartment, she drinks a jar of pickle brine and eats some dangerously old Vienna sausages. Jennings gives us no break from Deidre's filthy room, her dirty clothes, her sweaty armpits and fetid crotch.
Fifty-three-year-old Deidre is putrefying in self-pity. Limping out onto the street, she immediately starts begging for cigarettes and cuts to the front of the water line. Marked by her amputated leg, she's clearly a well-known figure in this poor section of town. A few people kind enough to help her are subjected only to more requests that quickly escalate from wheedling to fury.
Deidre is hypnotically repellent. And her unhappiness is not without cause, even if the responsibility for her situation is complicated by family sins and national politics. “Eighteen and I lost everything,” she whines.
There's no denying that she endured unspeakable physical harm, and she's been removed from home and denied promised compensation. But in a country deeply scarred by the legacy of institutionalized racial discrimination, what do the concepts “home” and “compensation” really mean for an aggrieved white woman?
Jennings has summoned a rotting wraith of South Africa's discarded apartheid culture. Bereft of her racial privilege, Deidre is an open sore of self-absorbed resentment.
The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings's ability to make this story feel so propulsive. In the novel's present tense, nothing particularly momentous happens, but that's essential to its terrifying theme: Everything left to happen must come from disinterring the past. And once that digging begins, it unleashes an accelerating series of horrors.
Early in the story, Deidre is contacted by a police officer. Investigators examining the site of her old family home found the remains of three infant bodies. “Look, you've made a mistake,” Deidre insists with rising panic. “You need to find the family that lived here before us ... “
Deidre may not be responsible for these atrocities — whatever they are or mean — but with no one else left to take responsibility, on whom should the burden fall? Her dread's reflected in the wider world that's drying out and going up in flames. Does Deidre ever become sympathetic? Could any person's suffering expiate the sins of South Africa?
Writer Claire Messud came close to the true function of literature when she told Publishers Weekly, “We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”
Crooked Seeds leaves us reeling, trying to get Deidre's voice out of our heads: “I'm the one that needs help,” she screams. “Me. Look at me. I'm the one!”