Entertaining Angels

Entertaining Angels / Marita Van der Vyver
trans. from the Afrikaans by Catherine Knox
NY: Penguin, 1995, c1992.
224 p.

This was a random find at a second hand bookshop -- one of my favourite kind of reads! This delightful, colourful cover, and the short blurb on the back had me convinced, so I bought it. I think it is also one of the only books I've ever read translated from Afrikaans. 

Griet is in her early 30s. She's just suffered a miscarriage & the grief has led to the breakdown of her marriage. She's living out of a suitcase, in a small apartment, and considers suicide. But a cockroach stops her. 

She's an expert on fairy tales, and these narrative structures carry her through her experience living beyond the loss of everything she thought she was going to have. She begins to look at her own life in terms of a story, telling it to her therapist, and finding patterns for herself. The folk stories passed down to her by her Afrikaner grandparents also help her. 

And Adam, a young, chill surfer who appears at her door, sent by a friend, also helps - he's unapologetically erotic and has a brief encounter with Griet while he stays with her. He is the angel she is entertaining unaware, as she sees it in the end (this part of the story does get quite explicit). 

I liked this book; Griet was a complicated main character, with issues around her family of origin, her marriage, her academic studies, her future -- but also bleakly funny. The use of fairy tales and literary theory as a narrative thread was something I appreciated, it added another layer to Griet's character. And there was a bookishness to Griet as well, with some great quoteable bits. 

This story focuses on women finding their own way in life outside of marriage and social expectations - it definitely feels like a book from the 90s, but I found it fascinating that these themes were coming up in novels from around the world.