Pieter van der Lugt is a freelance writer based in Cape Town. He's available for work in Afrikaans or English and his specialist fields are entertainment, pop culture and literature. See about me for a full CV and contact details.

LUCKY DAY!

YOURS. OR MINE.

RECOMMENDED

• andrea camilleri
  Montalbano in order:
  The Shape of Water
  The Terracotta Dog
  The Snack Thief
  The Voice of the Violin
  Excursion to Tindari
  The Scent of the Night
  Rounding the Mark
  The Patience of the Spider
  The Paper Moon
  August Heat
  The Sphinx's Wings

• kenzaburo oe
  Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
  Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
  The Silent Cry
  Rise up, Oh Young Men of the New Age!

• haruki murakami
  Norwegian Wood
  The Elephant Vanishes
  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
  After Dark

 

• andrea camilleri

  Take a slice of fresh farm bread, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with coarse salt and ground pepper. Go outside, sit against the side of a house like a kid and take a bite. Savour it. A crime story by Andrea Camilleri is a simple, sensational pleasure much like that. Especially if you can imagine sitting in blazing sun against a crumbling farm house wall on the island of Sicily.
    Camilleri's beloved detective, Salvo Montalbano, visits family in one of the books and has some bread the way he used to as a child. He's still a food lover who will dodge appointments and turn off on dusty roads to try a good restaurant. Sea food is his passion and when a storm keeps the fishing fleet stranded in the harbour, he despairs at the prospect of eating something from the freezer.
    Montalbano has a temper, maybe a national trait, and a few colleagues he simply can't stand, one of them a grumpy pathologist who handles all his cases. His police team is a colourful bunch who have to accept that he'll always keeps them one step behind in his investigations. Murders in his part of the world often have sinister connections to organised crime or corrupt officials and sometimes your standard "body of a naked girl found..." can turn into a political nightmare.
    Montalbano's lover lives on the mainland. Her visits often end in disaster because Salvo is preoccupied or called out for a new case. That's enough to convince her marriage won't work, though both are in their fifties already. Even when tempted to within an inch of his moral life, Montalbano doesn't cheat on Livia - at least not until the eight or ninth book in the series and then feelings of guilt nearly kill him.
    Montalbano gets older, thinks about it, feels it, dreads it. Not that he books are guy lit for middle-aged men. They're bright, light and funny, with often gob-smacking twists and always a few subtle comments on modern Italy.
    Camilleri was born in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, in 1925. As a kid he often saw his mom's cousin Luigi Pirandello, but the great man's presence didn't seem to make an impression on him. He studied literature and then film-making in Rome and spent his working life there as a highly rated TV producer and theatre director. His other career as a best-selling crime writer started fifteen years after his first book and twelve years after the second. The print of 100 000 copies was sold out in two days and the next batch lasted only three more. That was in 1992 and now Montalbano is known around the world in nine languages, as well as on Italian TV. So far eleven have been translated in English, starting with The Shape of Water, and it seems four more are lying in his award-winning translator's in-tray.
    It's hard to believe a man in his eighties can write a book as dramatic and gripping as August Heat, one of the latest translated Montalbano novels. But there it is - and no mystery fan should pass it by.
    The BBC started showing the subtitled Montalbano TV movies in December 2009. Hopefully we'll get them as well. The picture shows Luca Zingaretti (right on the pic) in the title role.

• KENZABURO OE

  He was the first member of his family to leave their village in a forest on one of Japan's main islands. The women in his family were the local story tellers, gradually turning facts and historical events into something more like legends. His father died in the Second World War and his mother took over his education, giving him books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Strange Adventures of Nils Holgersson which he says left an impression he'll carry to the grave.
    While studying French literature in Tokyo, he started writing. A later influence on his work was life with his first son, Hikari, born with a cranial defect which left him mentally challenged. The boy eventually turned into a successful young classical composer.
    Kenzaburo writes with something closer to fury than to passion. Consider a title like Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, and you know this will be a fierce ride. He doesn't so much delve into the human psyche, he drills into it. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1994.
    There are Japanese critics who feel Yasunari Kawabata with his dreamy stories presented a romanticised view of their culture. They consider Kenzaburo the real thing. It's probably fairer to say both writers offer a perspective which is both uniquely Japanese and universal.

• HARUKI MURAKAMI

  By now everybody and his dog has read a man who is so terminally hip, fans mob him when he gets off a plane in Japan - one reason why he spends most of his time in southern Europe and America. Because he sells by the truck-load, the literary crowd in Japan turn their nose at him even as a new generation, tagged "Murakami's children", imitate his style.
    He's also never allowed a film version of his work, which probably is sensible since nearly all the novels include an element of fantasy. Fear not, this isn't magical realism - more like real-world fables. He says as a writer he's like the programmer and the player of a video game at the same time, with his mind divided in half.
    The story goes that Murakami got the idea for his award-winning first novel while watching a baseball game. It was published in Japan in 1979 and translated into English soon after. His first job was in a record shop. Later Haruki and his wife opened a coffee shop which became a jazz bar - his passion for all kinds of music pops up in all of his books.
    His international breakthrough came in 1987 with the translation of Norwegian Wood. Funnily enough this one is more realistic than the other novels and not really typical of what he has to offer.
    After Dark, the most recently translated, has a leading couple that will leave geeks and emos swooning. It's cool, modern and profound. But mostly cool.
    By the way: the white inset on the pic is Haruki's intriguing signature.

 Site built and maintained by Pieter van der Lugt, a freelance writer based in Cape Town. He's available for work in Afrikaans or English and his specialist fields are entertainment, pop culture and literature. See about me for a full CV and contact details.