An Island by Karen Jennings — everyone is talking about this book. There are other reviews but had to add mine! It’s a small gem but also a great masterpiece. Very Coetzeesque. It reminded me of Disgrace. Just brilliant and by one so young. Her observation of human life and behavior is acute. I can’t get it out of my mind. The author wanted to explore certain complexities relating to the history of the African continent and how that history continues to influence the lives of individuals to this day but the island could be anywhere — off Africa, off South or Central America, off the US, off Australia.
… In An Island, specificity is jettisoned, as evidenced by the use of “an” and not “the”. The character is an old man called Samuel who tends to a lighthouse, a colonial remnant, off the coast of an unnamed African country, first clawed at and pawed and squeezed and ravaged by colonial overlords, then sucked dry by the country’s dictatorial “saviour”. Samuel is a nothing, a nobody, uneducated and unheroic, but he has had the one tiny luck of getting a job manning the lighthouse on the island after he is released from decades in a prison for being an enemy of the state (which sounds much grander than his actions were). But even on an island, history and the present catch up: sea creatures, once abundant, dwindle, plastic rubbish dots the landscape…and bodies of refugees wash ashore. There is no escaping the world’s violence, malice, greed and selfishness. And there is no protection from what those do to the self. No man is an island. […]
An Island is bleak and stark, and Jennings writes in plain sentences. I read An Island in what would have been one sitting, had it not been for the interruption of night.
“… Unlike many authors who measure the success of a book based on sales figures, Jennings believes it’s all about how you feel about your work.
‘For me, it depends on how I feel about any manuscript once I have finally finished writing the various drafts. If I get to the end and feel a thrill pass through me, then I am satisfied,’ she said.
‘I enjoy that feeling because it doesn’t last very long. I think many writers, or artists in general, have this sense that their work is never good enough,’ Jennings added.”
“… But having cracked open the slender spine, I found it to be even more unassuming and quiet – no prologue, no fanfare, no arcane dedication, hand-picked lines of poetry – even the acknowledgements are a mere eight grateful lines – but exquisite in its simplicity. ‘The First Day’ announces the opening chapter – and with that you step ashore. Onto Samuel’s island. Where he’s been lighthouse keeper for over two decades. Washing up with you is a body – one of many that have found their way onto the pebbly and unwelcoming beach. You come to know well, if not its exact whereabouts off Africa, the lie of the island, its nooks, crannies, secret spots. As well as Samuel’s sparse, isolated cottage where everything has its place. But you don’t stay there. Because as his memory is jolted by the arrival of this body, this man, Samuel’s reflections take us back into the dark, sometimes troubled past he was marked by on the mainland. Again, Jennings doesn’t pinpoint the exact times and places of this not so long ago time but if you live towards the tip of Africa, you can feel it in your southern bones. Smell it in her carefully chosen words. By ‘The Fourth Day’, I was all but holding my breath. I’m ashamed to have taken so long, but richer for reading such a thoughtful book, with a punch way above its weight.”
This is a book that gives us faith that the Booker prize judges are doing their job, for two reasons. The first is that this is the dark horse of the longlist, released quietly by a micro-publisher, unreviewed in the press until now, so it shows the judges aren’t just guided by big names.
An Island is the third novel by Karen Jennings, a South African novelist living in Brazil. It throws us into the world of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper who has withdrawn from the world and whose main concerns are looking after his chickens and maintaining his toenails. Oh, and occasionally he harvests corpses — refugees, others — who wash up on his shores. Unfortunately for Samuel, the 33rd dead body to arrive in his 23 years on the island turns out, despite his hopes, not to be dead after all.
The South African author struggled to find a publisher for her Booker-nominated novel An Island, which only had a print-run of 500 copies. She talks about rejection, her country and believing in herself
Karen Jennings is still in shock. It has been a few days since the announcement that her novel, An Island, has been longlisted for the Booker prize, and the 38-year-old South African author looks as though she’s reeling. Considering the novel’s difficult route to publication, you can understand why. She doesn’t even have an agent.
“It was incredibly difficult to find a publisher,” she says, via video chat from Brazil, where she has spent the pandemic alongside her Brazilian husband, a scientist. Due to being essentially stranded there, she has yet to hold an actual physical copy of the book in her hands. “I finished the novel in 2017. And no one was interested. When I did finally get a small publisher in the UK and a small publisher in South Africa to co-publish, they couldn’t get anyone to review the book. We couldn’t get people to write endorsement quotes, or blurbs.”
Always a happy moment: the handover of author’s copies to The Author! Yesterday, James Leatt received the first copies of his Conjectures: Living With Questions and signed a copy for the Karavan Press archive.
When I put up two of the above photographs on Instagram yesterday, the post attracted two very moving comments:
“There’s an author who once slept holding … a copy of his first book. He finished a matchbox looking at the book at night since there was no electricity in his rural area. Congratulations James.”
— Sipho Banda
“I love that you publish outsider authors with exceptional talent that other publishers are afraid of. You’re like the originals, publishing words not social media followers. Literature is better for Karavan Press.”
Rachel is the founder of Short Story Day Africa. She and her work – as writer, editor, publisher and curator of Short Story Day Africa – continue to be great inspirations for Karavan Press.
And, like no other, Sipho’s comment captures the pride and joy of the moment of holding your book in your hands for the very first time, especially when the journey up to that point had not been easy. But no matter what the path, the magic of the arrival is extraordinary.
Thank you, Rachel and Sipho! And thank you, James, for travelling with Karavan Press!
Conjectures: Living With Questions tells the story of James’s search for how to live a meaningful life at a time when the socio-historical realities all around forced him to question the mere possibility. The book is now available from all good bookstores (please order, if not in stock), online from Loot, and as ebook.
James Leatt was nine when the Nationalist Party came to power, and eleven when he saw a documentary of the Allied forces liberating Nazi death camps. For most of his life the shadows of apartheid and the Holocaust have dogged his beliefs about faith, the meaning of life and the moral challenges humankind faces.
Conjectures is a philosophical reflection on his life and times as he grapples with the realities of parish work in black communities, teaching ethics in a business school under apartheid, managing a university in the dying days of the Nationalist regime, and eventually working in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa.
Weaving strands of his personal life with the questions of theodicy and modernity as well as drawing upon the Western philosophical tradition and the wisdom of East Asian traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism, he comes to terms with a disenchanted reality which has no need for supernatural or magical thought and practice.
He has learned to live with questions. If you no longer believe in God and a sacred text, what are your sources of meaning? What kind of moral GPS allows you to find your way? Is what might be called a secular spirituality even possible?
Conjectures traces the author’s search for a secular way of being that is meaningful, mindful and reverent.
karavanpress.com 