A Soirée

My friends and I started what we call, after long deliberation of two months, a soiree. It turned out we could not call it a book club because there was too much beer sousing involved instead of reading and discussing books. So we came up with soirée, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a party with conversations that have intellectual pretensions, depending on the degree of alcohol consumed of course. Naturally we aim at flattering our intellectual pretensions and specious political suave.

The idea was simple. To encourage Bildung, a belief formed by engagement with art, philosophy and learning. To cultivate ourselves into Bildungsbürgertum-the cultivated middle class who regarded culture and learning as the core of an ethical and useful life, both private and public. Before you accuse us of too much pretensions, be advised that this thing is a normal among our coevals in Europe, especially in Germany.

We were each to write every month on small pieces of paper books we would like to see discussed; throw the pieces on a hat. Then we were supposed to go alphabetically, retrieving a single paper at a time. The appointed person buys and hosts the book of discussion, introduce it on the next meeting before passing it to another. At some stage everyone would have read it, then at that meeting the book would be discussed. It is with frank dissatisfaction, and a little glee, to report that we truly made a miserable job of the whole thing. Since we began, in the beginning of the year, we’ve not kept to a single schedule.

We wanted to make the discussions informal, so we chose to accompany them with braai and drinks. That was the first error. People tend to be more enthusiastic about soccer results, gossip and, as I found out when the discussion was on my house, Chris Rock, around braai fire than books. I suggested to one of my friends that perhaps we should do away with alcoholic drinks before discussions. He categorically told me we might as well dissolve the discussions, because ‘the beer drinking is the reason why they tolerate this thing.’

Perhaps we should revisit the ban on women, I suggested, thinking . . . I don’t know what was thinking. ‘That would be a recipe for disaster,' said my friend categorically. 'They come here largely to get away from their women, and be guys for a while, male bonding and all. If you throw that away they'll go with it.’ I threw my hands up. ‘We don’t need ideas, we just to need to make them interested on reading the books they chose, my friend.' My friend told me. 'How do we do that?' I asked. ‘By allowing them to chose the books they really wanna read without making them feel guilty about it, which must include sport heroes and comic books.’

Two weeks ago we held an emergency meeting to discuss the perilous state of our group affair. It turned out my friend was right, the first problem came with the first scheduled books for discussion, Agaat by . . . I can't remember the Afrikaner woman now who wrote that boring book that was taken up by the reading fraternity of SA. People came out with legion reasons for not reading it: ‘It was too expensive.’ ‘The story line is passé.’ ‘The author is culturally callow.’ And so on and so on. I didn’t have the heart to admit I was the one who had chosen the book, and gave thanks to the anonymous process of our hat trick.

The following week the book of choice was OR Tambo: Teacher, Lawyer & Freedom Fighter by Sandi Baai. ‘Personally I’m tired of incwadi zomzabalazo [political struggle books],’ one of my friends summed the mood against it.

JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Micheal K that I was hosting (having bought and read), was dismissed as too Kafkaesque; okay maybe that’s true, but I had spent the whole Friday evening preparing the report dammit. Where will I ever get the chance again to show my acumen for belles-lettres, I thought to myself feeling let down. Suffer me to indulge my ego dear reader, I already have the note anyway. J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Micheal is vaguely based on Kafka’s Joseph K of The Castle, with all the original ingredients included: Traveling into one’s foreign home with radical internal displacement in tightening concentric circles and haphazard, frustrating journeys. Facing up to sterile civil bureaucracy, state sponsored terrorism, and desire for mother’s changeless village, which the Freudians say it’s the desire for returning to the safety of one’s mother’s womb; and fantasy of escape. The book is mimetic; actually most of JM’s books are like that; it's his style, and betrays a certain lack of imagination on the author. I coined a phrase to sum it all up: The book is generally ‘unsatisfying, carefully contrived, and depthlessness.’ Where will I ever use that ersatz learnership now?

Coconut by Kupano Motlwa was deemed too Model C by my group. Anything by Chuna Achebe was too quaint. I can’t wait to here what will be the excuse for Xolela Mangcu’s To The Brink, though I’m already, secretly playing with phrases like; ‘I’m suffering from Mbeki bashing fatigue.’ The only book that had any semblance of real discussion was The Capitalist Nigger by Dr Chika Onyeani. I had not read the book so I was at sixes and sevens in the discussion most of the time, but understood the gist of the discussion in the end.

The truth of the matter is that our soirée is bleeding into becoming just another braaing sessions, and personally I’ve ran out of ideas of how to rescue it. What’s worse now is that decent titles are drying up from the hat. We keep coming up with self-help-how-to-books like; The Power of Positive Thinking, or How to Get Rich In less than a Year; and so on. I know I’m prejudiced against that sort of thing, but, to paraphrase Mark Twain; I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.

When I look around our soirée these days, I find people to be reasonably content with these new titles, which begs the question that, perhaps, though the idea was mine, I don’t really own or belong to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days I should develop headache just when I have to attend the soirée. The cure for my headache would, of course, involve relaxing with music of Iron & Wine singing softly, and an enjoyable book at hand. Who knows, that way I just might get to read more.