What I’m Reading

AUTHOR of the recently released The Keiskamma Project: Restoring Hope

and Livelihoods (published by Print Matters Heritage, www.printmatters.co.za), Brenda Schmahmann is a professor and the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. She has published extensively on women artists, including those in community projects, and on contemporary South African art. Editor of Material Matters (2000) and co-editor of Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910-1994 (2005), she is author of Through the Looking Glass: Representations of Self by South African Women Artists (2004), Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld (2006) and Picturing Change: Curating Visual Culture at PostApartheid Universities (2013).

MOST of my reading is of scholarly non-fiction, but I relish opportunities to engage with fiction. Long-distance flights have the undoubted benefit of providing opportunities for recreational reading.

On a recent flight, I read Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Nutshell. Remarkably funny in a dark way, it is told from the perspective of a foetus about his mother and uncle’s plan to kill his father.

This take on Hamlet (its title refers to the passage “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space” in Shakespeare’s tragedy) is, like all of McEwan’s novels, totally unputdownable.

I have long wanted to read Craig Higginson’s work. One of his undergraduate art history lecturers, I take an erroneous pride in his formidable literary achievements even though I exerted no influence at all on his creative writing. The Landscape Painter was my companion for the return flight to Johannesburg.

Chapters narrating events involving Arthur, a painter, in South Africa in the late 1890s (written in the third person) are juxtaposed with those in which the central character (speaking in the first person) talks of his experiences in London in the late 1940s.

In looking back to what may seem to have been another lifetime, we as readers begin to understand the long-term impact of obsession and betrayal.