Homing

Review by Kelvin Odoobo Henrietta’s new short collection, Homing, might have been a well deserved homecoming from her global literary exploits. The south African writer who In 2008 won the Caine Prize for African Writing, for which she was shortlisted in 2007 and Also in 2007, awarded the 2007 South African PEN award for her short story, ‘Poison’ has come up with a very comforting and satisfying collection. Henrietta Rose-Innes gives us an extraordinary glimpse into a selection not of well executed short stories but also of ordinary lives. A teenager learning to be a boyfriend, an ageing copywriter, a girl on the brink of womanhood – are animated in sparse, sparkling prose. A wife lies to her husband, seeking refuge from her dowdy life in the plush hotel that overlooks their home. A man ascends the glass-topped dome of a mall in search of a lost childhood memory. History comes to life for a young boy trapped in the city library. An elderly woman nurses a football star back to health. The Cape Town they mostly inhabit is both a playground and an obstacle course, filled with menace and delight. Through this landscape, like the pigeons in the title story, they find new paths home – and are themselves transformed by the journey. “Homing” the first story in the collection is another that will not leave me alone. It is about an elderly couple and how a new fancy hotel built next to their modest home upsets their lives. Rose-Innes builds the tension by showing us the couple’s vulnerability created by this intrusion into their settled, safe life. In “Promenade” a middle aged man who takes his evening exercise walking along the edge of the ocean in Cape Town. Each day he passes a certain man, he later decides is a boxer, and they develop an odd connection for the few seconds each time they meet. It is a haunting story about our connections to our species-mates and how our actions impact on everything around us. Besides her confident and competent way of approaching short stories, Rose-Innes does not try to dazzle the reader with bells and whistles which is highly appreciated by this reader. She tells her story plain and simple and then pops the reader with the human truth laid bare. This is an excellent collection I read in nearly one sitting, and will definitely be pulling down off my shelf to read again. Henrietta has published a collection of short stories, Homing, and two novels, Shark’s Egg and The Rock Alphabet. Ends

Lifestyle

Homing