Search results for ""Author Nthikeng Mohlele""

Storyteller-in-chief, Nthikeng Mohlele, spins another glorious tale: a former high-flying politician who now sleeps under a bridge in Johannesburg's city centre and washes dishes to survive.

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In this haunting tale of love and learning, the existential chaos of a life ravaged by circumstance takes on a rhythm of its own, one bound by loss and loneliness, but also an intelligent awareness of self. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes brutal, occasionally funny and infuriating, a journalist-comrade-lover caught up in the shade and shadow of politics and social injustice faces treachery and betrayal on every level. Set against the backdrop of a cityscape that taunts and tantalises, this is where love fails and passion wanes, “where suffering has no meaning”, where an individual escapes death only to find himself confronted with choices wrought by remorse and retribution, by conscience and character. And yet, with all trauma, there is a distinct musicality to the lyrical unpacking that follows a string of small things …

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The Discovery of Love, Nthikeng Mohlele’s debut short fiction collection, set the scene for a treatment of a multiplicity of themes while maintaining the stylistic registers of his novels. The intensity and range of the earlier stories is transplanted and further developed in A Little Light, stories that explore the complexities and contradictions of human consciousness. There is in A Little Light more overt focus on contemporary global historical events and personalities, the nature of the human heart, politics, human mortality and the afterlife. From the dusty streets of Tembisa township of the 1980s to Osama bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Mohlele is cerebral, playful, speculative, incisive and, most of all, of a penetrating narrative gaze.

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The Discovery of Love, explores and heightens one of the dominant themes in Nthikeng Mohlele’s literary oeuvre, that of love. In this collection, love is reflected upon in expansive and unexpected dimensions. It becomes the backdrop against which Mohlele delves into the intricacies of human agency with profound and often unexpected effects. These stories dazzle; they are wide-ranging in scope, yet particular in their authorial intent.

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“I wrestled with life and lost.” So begins the story of Michael, a corporate lawyer known to his colleagues and associates as Sir Marvin, who picks his way – sometimes delicately, but more often in his own blundering way – through the unfathomable intricacies that make up a life: love and anger, humility and ambition, trust and distrust, selfishness and selflessness. A flawed individual with an acute understanding of the roads that must be navigated to achieve even the slightest insight into the human condition. In this study in introspection, embroidered with lyrical prose and astonishing intuition, the hero, meditative and melancholic, is at once both tragic and comic.

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