Karen Jennings’ novel Crooked Seeds is both powerful and propulsive as it delves into South Africa’s troubled past through its near-future apocalyptic storyline.
The Washington Post wrote of the book:
“Jennings has summoned a rotting wraith of South Africa’s discarded apartheid culture. . . . This is a novel that dares to push us beyond disgust, beyond pity, to a point where we’re forced to touch the swollen tumor of another person’s deepest humiliation. The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings’s ability to make this story feel so propulsive. In a sense, Jennings has created a South African version of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Could any person’s suffering expiate the sins of South Africa? These are questions this urgent novel forces upon us. Crooked Seeds leaves us reeling.”
In her own words, here is Karen Jennings’ Book Notes music playlist for her novel Crooked Seeds:
In a letter to her longtime lover and friend, Vita Sackville-West, dated 16 March 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote: “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.”
What this translates to, at least in my experience with writing, is that the first thing that comes is the emotion, then the rhythm, and only then (and usually after much pain and difficulty) the words.
I am not someone who listens to much music, but I do always listen when I am working on a new book. Each book that I write has its own emotions, its own rhythms, requiring its own playlist. I normally delete this playlist once the book is finished, because I know that I will never be able to listen to it again, since those emotions and rhythms have been written out of me and space must be made for new ones. However, here is (a shortened version of) the playlist I listened to while writing my latest novel, Crooked Seeds.
Crooked Seeds takes place in a parched corner of Cape Town during an endless drought. The protagonist, Deidre van Deventer, receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become a crime scene. The remains of several small bodies have been discovered in their garden after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with questions: Was your brother a member of a pro-Apartheid group in the 90s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?
Deidre does not know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied the life she should have had: overshadowed and maimed by her brother, abandoned by her daughter, left to watch over her ageing mother. She ekes out a life on government aid and the fading generosity of neighbours. But as alarming evidence from the police investigation continues to surface and detectives pressure her to share what she knows from her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains.
I always listen to my writing playlists on shuffle, but here I will organise the pieces according to composer.
Arvo Pärt
Pärt is an Estonian composer in the minimalist style. While he has composed an extraordinary number of works over the decades, he has also had several periods in which he produced nothing, periods of silence which his biographer, Paul Hillier, describes as coming to a point “of complete despair in which the composition of music appeared to be the most futile of gestures, and he lacked the musical faith and willpower to write even a single note.” In my own life I have experienced such moments of despair, and have even given up on writing at times, feeling that it was impossible to convey what I wanted to. Each book I write feels like a failure to me, and I have to hold on to the hope that the next one might get just a little bit closer to conveying emotions and experiences as they should be. Pärt’s music is said to translate something very human into sound, something that transcends the limits between people, and it is my hope to be able to achieve that with words.
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer, also associated with minimalism. Indeed, minimalism is a theme in the playlists I create, because I write sparse prose, often dealing with dark, emotionally complex subjects, which require space to be expressed. Glass composes music with repetitive structures, building up repetitive phrases and shifting layers, a technique which is well suited to my writing of Deidre. She has certain experiences, fears, emotions which arise again and again, haunting her, and filling her life.
Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman is an English composer, and is, in fact, the person who coined the term minimalism in a review he wrote in 1968. Yet Nyman’s music is often an exciting or disturbing combination of minimalism with high-octane energy, creating rhythms that can be very full, sweeping, assisting in creating a sense of overpowering emotion, of being overwhelmed in the most extreme way, or of tension building up to a bursting crescendo.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
These two are Australian composers and musicians who play together in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. They have also collaborated on several film scores, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Proposition. Both of these films are “westerns”, and the music emulates the dry, dusty terrain, the slow clopping of horses’ hooves, which feels right for Deidre’s movement around her drought-stricken neighbourhood, always accompanied by the sluggish rhythm of her crutches hitting the ground.
Karen Jennings is a South African author currently living in Brazil with her Brazilian husband. She holds Masters degrees in both English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. She has published a short story collection Away from the Dead and a poetry collection, Space Inhabited by Echoes, as well as a memoir, Travels with my Father. In 2019 she published the historical mining novel Upturned Earth. Her most recent novel, An Island, was written with support from the Miles Morland Foundation and was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.