Nthikeng Mohlele comes up short with ‘The Discovery of Love’: The talented novelist Nthikeng Mohlele’s debut short-story collection lacks the vitality that makes short stories magical
struck me as a lucid, racy and provocative piece of work. It tackled identity, race and class by invoking sensual themes in their historical South African political precarity.
Mohlele is at his finest when he delves into difficult existential realms such as the excesses of living in a fast-paced material world. As a storyteller, he is concerned about the fact that even good people can screw up, big time. Truly postmodernist but from the South African condition, Mohlele draws on voices, experiences and longings that belong to people who are not hankering after a lost golden past, nor those confined to the narrow and staid material and mental geographies. , is strong.
The narrator is excited when his teenage son, a promising music composer, falls in love. Melody is “very pretty in fact, with smoky brown eyes, a dimple and kissable mouth”. Although the narrator’s male voice comes out clearly in the story, offering a well-rounded, delicate yet balanced view of his world, without dialogue, its latent fire dies rather quickly.
, a 46-year-old black man killed by a white police officer in the US in 2020. “There are other searching and often bewildering questions: If white people oppressed black people for over four hundred years, how come black people are so nice to them, including in America where police seem to kill them for sport? A policeman kneed a grown man to death, ignored his pained pleading until he took his last breath — how can humans be that heartless?”reads like a long letter from a distant lover.
At the end, Mohlele, who may be gesturing towards Anton Chekov, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, who defy narrow technical demands of narrative form and setting, could have done better in creating more rounded settings for his work. Sadly, Mohlele only succeeds in offering a series of tantalising lectures on love and the black condition, but fails to deliver on compelling narratives.
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