FRENCH LETTER: All I Know… Thoughts on travel, book tours and school visits

Oh, how I admire and envy those writers who have the discipline to keep writing, no matter where they are or what happens to them. Come rain or sunshine, travel or turbulence, they cling to their daily habit of producing a few paragraphs or a few hundred words.

They used to make me feel terribly guilty and inadequate because I can’t write while I travel. And I travel a lot. Think of all those wasted days of writing! That’s what I used to think. Now I’m old enough, fortunately, not to be bothered by unnecessary feelings of guilt and inadequacy. I know that when I travel I become a sponge, soaking up everything – people, places, conversations, feelings. And when I get back home – or at least to a place where I can spend a month sleeping in the same bed each night – I wring out that sponge. All those experiences on the road, on the move, become the stuff from which I form my stories.

Well, that’s my excuse, anyway, for being all quiet on the Substack front. Although I also started writing on Substack to force some discipline into my sometimes too lazy writing life – which is why I’m creating this post in a guesthouse in the northern suburbs of Cape Town after three weeks of constant travel during a book tour. The tour is not over, but it is time to start wringing out that sponge, even if only to wave to my subscribers – please note I’m waving not drowning – and to thank you for sticking with me.

This book tour is more gruelling than usual, because I’m wearing two hats, balancing on two chairs, sometimes feeling like an acrobat juggling more balls than I can handle. I have to talk to adult readers about my adult book, My jaar van vrees en vryheid (available in English as My Year of Fear and Freedom), shortlisted for two Afrikaans literary awards in the non-fiction category – but I also have to talk to teenagers in schools about not one but two YA novels. Al wat ek weet (available in English as All I Know and in French as Tout ce que je sais) was published 10 years ago but has now been reprinted because a movie based on the book will hit the big screens at the end of October. And Twee halwes maak ’n hele, not yet translated or turned into a movie (please note the hopeful yet I can’t resist adding), is published this month as the winner of Tafelberg’s Youth Book Prize.

And let me tell you, talking to adult readers is a leisurely picnic compared to talking to huge groups of school kids. Talking to adults is basically preaching to the converted. They come to listen to me eagerly, they’re even willing to pay to listen to me, because they already know my books. Whereas talking to school kids is a missionary task. Some of them know and love my books, but many of them never read any book, never mind my books. They are simply there because the teachers tell them some writer is coming to talk to them, whether they like it or not, and they don’t have a choice, do they?

That’s when my missionary zeal bursts out. I can immediately spot the interested ones; the sparkle in their eyes, the intense way they listen and nod, their whole body language shows their enthusiasm. I am deeply grateful for these kids, I wish I could hug each one of them, but they are already partly or totally converted. The challenge I set myself, each time I enter a school hall or a classroom, is to convert a few of those uninterested slouchers, usually in the back seats, more often boys than girls, who make it clear that they could think of better things to do than listening to a writer they’ve never heard of.

When these kids shift forward and start listening, when they reluctantly smile or laugh to show appreciation, when their eyes begin to shine as if a light deep inside has been lit, maybe for the first time ever, that’s when I become convinced, time and again, that school visits are the most exhausting but also the most rewarding part of my life as a writer.

Because if one kid buys a book for the first time in their life, or the librarian tells me how surprised she was when an unlikely candidate came to the school library to take out my book after I’ve been chatting to them, I want to sing glory hallelujah. I am a secular missionary spreading the good word, not the one word with a capital letter but the many words you find in good books and unforgettable fiction. These words have saved my life, and if I can pass on the torch and help light up other lives, what more could I ask for?

But let me curb my enthusiasm before I start speaking in tongues, and give you my usual highlights of the week. Or weeks, plural, since I’m now looking at the highlights of three weeks of travelling in my birth country.

Best tastes: Just about anything I can’t taste in my daily life in France can drive me to tears of gratitude in South Africa. An exceptionally long and sweet koeksister from a service station in Sea Point. Snoek and patats (sweet potatoes) and home-baked bread with apricot jam for a Sunday family lunch. Spicy samoosas in a breathtakingly beautiful setting among the Stellenbosch mountains. Bobotie spring rolls and ostrich carpaccio at Oude Werf in Stellenbosch. Slow-cooked heerenbone from the Sandveld (apparently called The Lord’s Bean in English, and when you taste it, you’ll know why), lovingly prepared by a friend for lunch with four other women in Hermanus. One of those chatty lunches that stretched out until long after dark. Or a simple breakfast of orange juice and coffee and crunchy cereals with full-cream yoghurt, something I could easily have in France too, but on my first morning in South Africa, with a view of the Atlantic Ocean from Camps Bay, it tasted like heaven. Or like home. Or maybe home tastes like heaven.

Best drinks: I was fortunate to be invited to an elite wine-tasting event at the Norval Foundation Art Museum in Cape Town. In one afternoon I learned more about the best South African wines than in the previous 30 years of living in France. I fell in love with a chenin blanc called Huilkrans (actually I fell in love with the name, which means “crying cliff”, before I even tasted the wine), which was chosen as the wine of the year later that same day by British Master of Wine Tim Atkin in his influential annual report. Huilkrans is produced by Alheit Vineyards on, wait for this, Hemelrand Farm (which can be translated as “farm on the edge of heaven”) in the Hermanus district. I would probably have found it irresistible even if it was a mediocre wine.

A week later I fell in love with a name again (I can’t help myself), this time an aperitif called Spook van Blomfontein (Ghost of Flower Fountain) from the Strandveld Vineyards, which I tasted during another fabulous lunch with female friends, enjoying another fabulous view of the sea in Pearly Beach.

Best sights: It is whale season in Hermanus, and the sight of a massive whale lifting its whole body from the water always seems like a miracle to me. You could watch the sea for hours and see whales waving their tails and spouting water, without seeing one breaching like that – or you could walk along the cliff path thinking other thoughts and suddenly the miracle happens, unexpected, awe-inspiring, utterly thrilling.

Almost as awesome was watching a fat yellow full moon rising over the Stellenbosch mountains, close to a dam I used to swim in as a student. And all the arum lilies in full bloom in fields everywhere in the Western Cape – still the most exquisite wild flower I can think of. Oh, and those flaming orange strelitzias, as South African as koeksisters, which always make me feel at home. The strelitzias and the koeksisters.

Best surprise: The movie Al wat ek weet, based on my YA novel, had its premiere at the Silwerskerm Festival in Camps Bay and promptly won a few awards. What pleased me most, was that it was chosen as audience favourite by the discerning festival goers. Another well-deserved feather in the cap of the two young directors, Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, as well as the whole talented cast and crew. If you’re in South Africa, do go and watch it on the big screen from 30 October. You haven’t seen anything like this in Afrikaans – and it has English subtitles, so even my French partner could watch it on a small screen in France.

It-never-gets-old moment: My first book was a YA novel published in 1982, and although I’ve published dozens of books in the next (almost) 45 years (I’ve just made that sum and frankly I’m a little stunned), I still get a terrific kick each time I see my latest book in a shop for the first time. Since I live in France, I sometimes have to wait a long time for this kick, but last week it happened barely a day after the publication date, in Exclusive Books in the domestic departures hall at the Cape Town Airport. I got kicked so high I didn’t even need a plane to fly. DM

Republished from Marita van der Vyver’s Substack. Read more of her Substack pieces here.