"Crooked Seeds" by Karen Jennings review
Mohan Gulrajani
Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings review – a perfectly realised fictional creation
A South African woman’s woes are slowly illuminated in a stark, darkly humorous novel by the author of the Booker-longlisted An Island
There’s nothing quite like a writer setting out their stall from the first page of a book, so you know what you’re getting. When Karen Jennings – the South African author whose last novel, An Island, was deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize in 2021 – opens her new novel with a woman crouching over a mixing bowl to expel urine as “dark as cough syrup”, we know it will not be a feelgood comedy.
The woman is 53-year-old Deidre van Deventer, and she is in a bad way – but then so is the world. It’s the late 2020s and Cape Town is living under drought conditions (presumably inspired by the city’s Day Zero water crisis of 2018). The drought is not intrinsic to the story, but it affords an intensification of Deidre’s character traits: her laziness in not washing, her selfishness in using money sent by her estranged daughter not for water but for “takeaways and booze”.
Deidre is a world-class grump. “Ag, you know how it is. Everything’s shit and then we die.” She fishes cigarette butts out of the gutter and smokes them. Surrounded by the pain of others, her cry is: “What about me?” And when challenged on her behaviour – “It’s just the way I am” – and asked why she doesn’t help others, her response is: “Why would I help anyone else? I’m the one that needs help. Me. Look at me. I’m the one!”
Jennings is an expert at releasing information, keeping the reader hungry and satisfied at the same time
In a sense she is right. Deidre is, in her own words, a “cripple”, having lost one leg in an explosion when she was 18. How that happened will be revealed, and Jennings is an expert at releasing information, keeping the reader hungry and satisfied at the same time. The plotting goes forward as well as back: it asks why Deidre is like this – and says, “This is why” – while also setting up an urgent subplot about a disturbing discovery the police have made in her old family home. To get through all this we switch occasionally to the viewpoint of Deidre’s mother, Trudy, who observes a patriarchal South African tradition by worshipping Ross, the prodigal son of the family, and “a dickhead” in Deidre’s estimation.
There’s a stark quality to Jennings’s prose that is
reminiscent of other South African writers: Gordimer, Galgut, Coetzee.
But she has many qualities of her own, not least a very dark humour that
surfaces with perfect timing: the bathos of Deidre’s uncle’s death; her awful
flirtation with a security guard at the water queue. But Deidre also seems to
represent an archetype: the white South African who resents the changes and
land reforms of the past 30 years. “You people came and forced us out,” she
tells a black police officer. “Is that all you do, force people out?” Later,
she offers, hopelessly: “I don’t know, how does it work now? Who’s black and
who isn’t?”
So, no, this is not a “feelgood” book, but it did make me feel good – feel joy,
in fact, at its precise pursuit of its vision, at its grownup complexity and at
the way Deidre is such a perfectly realised fictional creation. Crooked
Seeds is not a “book
that feels like a warm hug” but more what Kafka called “an axe for the
frozen sea within us”. When Deidre says something isn’t “my kind of thing,” and
she’s asked: “What is your kind of thing?”, she replies: “I don’t know. Nothing
really.” She is afraid of what is inside her coming out. But in this
outstandingly good novel it does come out, it must come out, and the reader is
the beneficiary.
When a Family’s Dysfunction Mirrors a Nation’s
“Crooked Seeds,” by Karen Jennings, is set in a drought-stricken South Africa where its fraught history is ever-present.
By Wadzanai Mhute
When Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, after 27 years of incarceration, there was hope in the air. He and his wife, Winnie, raised clenched fists in triumph as they emerged from the prison gates, surrounded by supporters of different races. His release heralded a South Africa on the verge of transformation. The promise of a new rainbow nation drove masses in 1994 to the first inclusive general elections, but 30 years on, South Africa is floundering with power cuts, a tanking economy and xenophobia.
Karen Jennings’s compelling, meditative novel “Crooked Seeds” is set in Cape Town in the near future, when an extended drought has worsened already bleak living conditions for many South Africans. Deidre van Deventer must navigate her new life after the government reclaimed her family home to secure aquifers beneath her neighbourhood. Her father is long dead, and her mother is struggling with mental illness at a care centre across the street.
Deidre herself is struggling to survive; she moves through her crisis-stricken world on crutches, having lost a leg years ago. Indifferent to the plight of those around her, Deidre is a perpetual victim, lamenting her situation and taking advantage of everyone. In one scene, she cuts the line of people waiting at a truck for their daily allotment of water:
A dull sunrise held back beyond the streetlamps and she crutched toward it, into the road, ignoring the cone markers so that cars had to stop for her, three in a row. She kept her eyes on the water truck, did not acknowledge the cars, did not look at the queue.
After she receives her water ahead of the hordes, the rest of her day involves begging for help, cigarettes and drinks from her neighbours. In Deidre’s mind, her whiteness and disability entitle her to demand what she thinks is her due, and it is no coincidence that those she abuses are people of colour.
Deidre’s life takes an abrupt turn when the police summon her to her family home, now a rubble-filled excavation site. Human bones have been found here, she is told. Might she know anything about them? We soon learn that Deidre’s brother, Ross, was believed to have belonged to a pro-apartheid group that sought to disrupt the 1994 elections by blowing up voting centres. He disappeared after one of his bombs exploded at their home, costing Deidre her leg.
Initially, this plot and its aftermath seem to be the centre of the novel, but Jennings cleverly uses it as a device to reveal the dysfunction of a family and of a nation. The storytelling is strongest when the narrative introduces bits of Deidre’s past, so that we can piece together a clearer, if not complete, story, which includes the revelation of a daughter, tucked away in England.
In the background, a mountain burns, reshaping the landscape and destroying lives. The country’s fraught history is ever-present and the sins of the past revisit Deirdre as she tries to suppress the truth, even from herself. There is no redemption arc here, though there is some resolution when Deidre finally seeks answers from her ailing mother. Intergenerational trauma presents itself in socioeconomic inequality and in abuse passed from parent to child to neighbours, across races and cultures. But there is still hope in the burning, the novel proposes, and it begins with confronting the past so new growth can emerge.
Wadzanai Mhute
Wadzanai Mhute is a former books editor at Oprah Daily. Her work has appeared in People magazine, The Guardian and Essence, among others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/review/karen-jennings-crooked-seeds.html
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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