Nic Mhlongo’s latest short stories simply steal your heart
By Jojokhala Mei
If you doubt the redoubtable Nic Mhlongo’s penchant for storytelling, then his latest short story collection For You, I’d Steal A Goat, will purge such thoughts. The South African writer based in Germany is known for novels like After Tears; Dog Eat Dog; Way Back Home, or Paradise in Gaza. Years back I critically reviewed the collection of social essays he edited: Black Taxi – Burden, Or Ubuntu. It is thus not surprising these short stories are realist fiction on matters of conscience.
This 2022 collection of 10 short stories include titles The Stalker, Woman to Woman, My Lover’s Secret, and Ghost Story, which are a clear indication of their subject matter. Whether told in the omniscient third person, or narrated by the main character, plots and language are carefully observant of manners and settings. In fact the stories are exposes of the ordinariness of our social lives in South Africa, to paraphrase the eloquent academic fictional writer Prof. Njabulo Ndebele.
The narrative style is never didactic prose of short sentences, without being terse. At times cheerful and satirical, but never trite. A story or two could benefit by being sinister. Mhlongo’s short stories are uncannily reminiscent of acclaimed adult short stories and children’s writer of Nordic descent, Roald Dahl, to expect this of him. Pity that in most stories Mhlongo solely relies on pulling off a breathtaking plot twist or sting at the very end.
For instance, My Lover’s Secret is a studied ordinary lesbian love affair that still manages a cruel real plot twist at the end,
In The Displaced the township plot twist of stolen love at the very end is sad, yet ironically satisfying, by confronting us with our preference for ‘easy’ solutions.
Unfortunately, the result is to neglect developing characters, story after story. Even if the changes or developments are only shades of grey. Even hinting decisively at the accent and speech patterns of different characters would be the saving grace.
Even when the predictable plot of Ghost Story in the mortuary sets out to upturn the slice of ordinariness of xenophobic violence and township zombies, the reader feels shortchanged of intrigue, although the story ‘predicted’ the food poisoning tragedy of township children.
The publisher has the last laugh on Mhlongo’s trademark twists by ironically placing the best and title story at the very end .It is the story of an outsider in Germany just like the author. So I take seriously the gravity of the protagonist’s cultural dilemma with his White German girlfriend and her family, because of Mhlongo’s first-hand experience living so long in Germany.
As usual the prose is disarmingly direct, leisurely-paced, and charming. Yet, never flat. When the Berlin [Covid-19] lockdown is announced in March 2020. Zwai and I find ourselves trapped in the city. The flights back to South Africa are canceled immediately and indefinitely. We arrived just over three months ago. Most of the performances of our play, Nailed, at the English theatre Berlin Kreuzberg, were sold out
.For You, I’d Steal A Goat, by Nic Mhlongo, 2022, is published by Khwela Books, an imprint of NB Publishers, Cape Town.