The South African Karel Schoeman is the author of fifteen novels, but the man was also a historian, biographer and translator. Seven of his novels have been translated into French, including The Celestial Garden which has just been published by Actes Sud. A learning story, this opus, from the pen of one of the most talented South African authors, shows its readers a twilight universe, with nods to the turbulence of South African history.
” Even in the street, even in the crowd, he would have recognized her: by the way, seated at her desk, she had very quickly raised her eyes when he entered, by her dark eyes, by her willful chin.
“Nick!” she gets up to greet him. “Finally, after all these years!”
The handshake was firm, the warmth of the voice sincere. Prudence was such that he remembered in his white dress on the station platform, dazzling in the sunlight; the young girl on a bicycle whose braids flew in the wind, the young girl quibbling at the breakfast table. She had grown, aged, and yet she had remained undeniably the same, so much so that, as he stood there, planted in the middle of the room, her presence stirred countless memories within him and made him smile… »
So begins The Celestial Garden, one of the latest novels from the pen of South African Karel Schoeman, published in French last fall. Novelist, historian, biographer, Schoeman – who died in 2017 at the age of 78 – was a contemporary of Andre Brinkof the Coetzee and Gordimer, who put South African fiction on the literary map of the world. Just as talented as his famous contemporaries, with his trademark poetic and meditative writing that tirelessly returns to the mysteries of inner life, the author of celestial garden however, is little known to the general public.
A quasi-monastic life
According to Georges Lory, a specialist in South African letters, who has just published this exceptional novel in the literary collection he directs at Actes Sud, the lack of knowledge of Schoeman’s work is explained by the almost monastic life that this author led, holding himself furiously away from any form of political or literary militancy. He was a special figure in the South African constellation, recalls Georges Lory. And to add, Karel Schoeman is not part of the movement of stems which was the great movement where we know the names of Brink or Breytenbach, for example. He did not mix with other writers. He is special, because he had an almost misanthropic behavior. He spent a good part of his life abroad. He then returned to be a librarian at the National Library in Cape Town, before retiring to his native village. I think it was mainly his general attitude in life that made him a bit on the sidelines. Nevertheless, he is a great Afrikaans language writer, no doubt. »
Born in 1939, in the Orange Free State province founded by the Boers following the Great Trek in the 19th century, Karel Schoeman was passionately attached to his Afrikaaner identity. He also wrote most of his fiction in the Afrikaans language, the language of his Boer ancestors and currently spoken by around 13% of the South African population, including the half-breeds. The man believed that it is not in English but through Afrikaans that the South African soul and personality are best expressed, forged by the turbulence of history and the harsh and brutal landscape of these southern regions of Africa, known as the veld.
Schoeman’s stories are odes to those vast expanses of grass and dust, which surround the towns of the hinterland South African, and whom the author considered to be the vibrant source of the creative imagination of his people. His attachment to his culture of origin will not, however, prevent the writer from staging in a premonitory way the excesses of white supremacy and the injustices inherent in the apartheid system established by Afrikaner ideologues. The unfailing solidarity with the cause of blacks during the apartheid years earned him in 1999 the highest South African distinction, ” Order of Merit from the hands of President Mandela himself.
Between questions and quest
A prolific writer, Karel Schoeman was the author of fifteen novels, short stories, plays and fifty non-fiction works, devoted in particular to South African history. His wanderings during his youthful years in Great Britain and the Netherlands had exposed him to European modernist fiction, notably that of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, Forster or even DH Lawrence, the author of the scandalous Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There is something very Proustian in Schoeman’s fiction with, at the center, a hero who is often solitary and outside his society, evolving in an interior universe of questioning and quest.
This is the case of the South African protagonist of the celestial garden, engaged in a nostalgic quest for his past. We are in London, in 1977, when the novel opens. Forty good years have elapsed since the first passage of the hero, Nikolaas, in England, where he had come to study at university. His reunion with Prudence Chalmers, the sister of one of his classmates at Oxford, is part of the character’s desperate attempt to reconnect with the ghosts of the past. It was in 1937, while going to spend a memorable summer in the family mansion of his friend and classmate, in the middle of the English countryside, that he had made the acquaintance of Prudence. She has since become an important personality in the humanitarian field. Still a young girl in 1937, mats flying in the wind, she was already on fire for the victims of the war in Spain, remembers the narrator.
The rest of the plot is told by Georges Lory: ” Unlike Schoeman’s other books, it takes place abroad, in England, in 1937, when part of Europe is already in flames in Spain, and we can feel the war coming. It is the narrator who is South African. He is invited for a summer to the fellow students of the upper middle class, in the center of England. He is treated very well. There is a garden, as the English know how to do, both neat and free. And South Africa intervenes through the eyes of this narrator who tells how he perceives this rich and somewhat futile society despite everything. »
English society at the end of the 1930s appeared all the more futile as a world war was brewing. The coming devastation is embodied in the narrative by a certain Gerda, a German but anti-Hitler friend of the Chalmers, with whom Nikolaas befriends. While her family is hunted down by the Nazis, the young woman makes the courageous choice to go and join her family in Germany to fight against the rising barbarism in her country. It is easy to imagine the fate that fate has in store for him without the novel explicitly alluding to it. Through his writing, all in elegance and discretion, Karel Schoeman is content simply to suggest a possible rapprochement between Nazi Germany in 1937 and South Africa in 1977, plunged into the darkness of apartheid and racism where Nikolaas is in turn forced to return to live his life. Nazism Hitler and apartheid, same fight, one could write.
Told with a consummate sense of poetry and urgency, The Celestial Garden is a poignant and powerful story, which strikes by the accuracy of its words, its narrative intelligence and the elegant beauty of its language.
The celestial garden, by Karel Schoeman. Translated from Afrikaans by Pierre-Marie Finkelstein. Editions Actes Sud, 230 pages, 22.50 euros.