Finding Soutbek (Karen Jennings)

Abstract

The unique features of the prose of Karen Jennings, so evident in her short stories like Andries Tatane and Making Challah, reemerge in her striking first novel, Finding Soutbek. Jennings' novel, like many of her stories, combines her interest in the way ordinary South Africans exist in the shadow of both their personal pasts and of the long history of colonial conquest and anti-colonial struggle. While her fiction insists on combing this long past with the present, her focus is also on present lives and struggles of the working class and the marginalised. She foregrounds both the poetic and exceptional in these ordinary lives, but does so presenting us with the realities of marginalisation, poverty and struggle for survival that overwhelms these momentary gestures of hope.