A book is a book is a book?
Imagine my joy the day my publisher shared the news that the precursor to this book, Where the Heart is, was at number two on the South African bestseller list for books in all languages. Right below (quite far below, I should add in all modesty) the international hit The Da Vinci Code. But while I was still trying to decide whether this was a valid excuse to open a bottle of real French Champagne, I noticed it was the bestseller list for fiction. And Where the Heart is, just like A Fountain in France, was non-fiction. Or was it? By now I was also starting to wonder. Back when my Dutch translator sent me a reader report, it described the book as ‘an autobiographical novel’. No, I wrote to her, it wasn’t a novel. Yes, she wrote back, but it read like a novel. And, printed in front in the original Afrikaans edition, was a list of ‘other novels by Marita van der Vyver’. Other ‘novels’, note. The list that followed included my earlier adult novels – but not my youth novels.
Most readers must find all this literary fencing-off quite confusing. Fiction or non-fiction. Adult or youth fiction. Memoir or travelogue. Personally I have always believed that it didn’t matter which fence marketers or retailers chose to place around my books. What mattered was that the book was read. But for the compilers of the lists, those lists that rank books according to sales, this is a matter of grave importance. After all, if a non-fiction book accidentally ends up in second place on a fiction list, then that book is robbing another book of its rightful place on the list. Then that sneaky book becomes a cheat, an imposter, Hamlet’s presumptuous uncle usurping the throne! With such guilty thoughts at the back of my mind, in the end I didn’t open that tempting bottle of Champagne. Decided it was more important to make sure that the book ended up on the ‘right’ list. Whispered some words into people’s ears – and lo and behold, a few days later an email arrived from a friendly gentleman who helped compile these lists. The South African index of book sales or something. A certain Anthony (if I remember correctly) enquired in beautifully clear layman’s terms if my book was about people and places and things I had made up, or about real people and real places and things that had really happened. And I replied, just as clearly, that it was about me and my family (who really exist) and our lives in a French village (which really exists) and that everything I wrote about had really happened to us. (Believe it or not.) Well of course not everything had happened exactly the way I described it. Any writer nows that a little exaggeration can only make a juicy story juicier. (Even journalists know that.) So sometimes you exaggerate, sometimes you omit a few facts to protect the privacy of your nearest and dearest, sometimes you change the ending of a story to make it funnier or sadder.
But, I wrote to a certain Anthony, this book was not a story I had ‘made up’. Basically I regarded it as non-fiction. Thinking nothing could be clearer than that. But then another email arrived from a certain Anthony. He was the scientific type, he wrote, not the literary type, so he just wanted to be absolutely sure that he understood me correctly. Was I saying that all the characters in my book were real people? Yes, I answered right away. Well, not quite all of them. But almost all …
And at this point I also started having doubts. About the fine line between fiction and non-fiction. There are two characters in Where the Heart is, and at least two in A Fountain in France, that I had to ‘disguise’ – change their names, their addresses or their appearance – or there would’ve been trouble with the neighbours. In the end I disguised them so thoroughly that they really became different people altogether. In other words, I ‘made them up’. As in fiction. And even the ‘real’ people I write about – the American neighbour, the Moroccan Hakima, the mayor and his secretary and my children’s teachers, above all my relatives and my household – they have all become ‘characters’ too. Just by virtue
of being described between the pages of a book. As in fiction. For example, my French husband is not unaccustomed to seeing his name in newspapers or magazines. I talk about him readily in interviews (out of the full heart the mouth sings and so on), but because he still doesn’t know more than a few endearments and a few swear words in Afrikaans, he had to wait patiently for the English translation of Die hart van ons huis before he could read most of what I say about him for the first time. And then he remarked half ponderingly: ‘It is a strange experience becoming a character in a book. It’s me, but it also isn’t me. I am reading about myself as if I’m reading about someone else.’
Nevertheless, I wrote to the scientific Anthony, I regarded the book as non-fiction. For the most part. Generally speaking. Rather unscientific that sounded, even to me. But let us assume, for argument’s sake, that most readers will regard A Fountain in France, like Where the Heart is, as nonfiction. Then that is still not the end of my dilemma. Because the next thing the booksellers and librarians want to know is what kind of non-fiction. In other words, on which shelf should the book be displayed? Under autobiographies or under travel or under humour?
Tell them under thrillers, Alain suggests. With all the catastrophes and calamities that have been visited on our household, we could be something out of Stephen King’s imagination. No, fantasy, rather, my son reckons. ‘The Addams Family. That’s how you make us seem, Mom.’
If I must be completely honest, I have no idea either on which shelf A Fountain in France belongs. Not in DIY, that much is certain, even if the title may suggest a book about homes and gardens. But nor is it an autobiography. Readers who are hoping to find sensational secrets from my dark past will be profoundly disappointed. Good autobiographical writing demands absolute honesty – something that just happens to be easier if most of the people you are writing about are already dead. Put another way, I am not yet old enough for an honest autobiography. And nor is it a travelogue. Granted it is set in a region that to most South African readers must seem exotically distant and alluring, but I am not a traveller in this region. I have lived in Provençe for close to two decades; it’s where my daughter was born and where my son went to school.
A travel writer isn’t accountable to the people she writes about. By the time her book is published, she is already in another place, on the next journey. While I continue to live among the people I write about. I buy my daily bread from them. My children visit their homes and their children visit mine. It makes a huge difference, believe me.
Even though the residents of my tiny village don’t read Afrikaans, mostly not English either (and sometimes not even French), when I write I must tread carefully so I don’t tread on feelings. I can make fun of them, the same way I make fun of myself, but I may not wound them unnecessarily. For me it’s about something as simple as respecting my neighbour. And in a tiny village like this one everyone is your neighbour – the baker, the butcher, the banker. We all row the same boat.
Can’t we market it as a ‘humour book’, someone asks. It is indeed true that if in the second half of your life you unexpectedly find yourself having to adapt to a new country, acquire a new language and culture, and embrace strange habits and traditions, you will need a sense of humour to survive. Every single day. So of course there is a strong dose of humour in this book. But the same is probably also true of all my previous books. Entertaining Angels was crammed with pitch-black humour – and yet no one suggested marketing it as a ‘humour book’.
No, I’m afraid I honestly don’t know on which shelf A Fountain in France belongs. If I was forced to summarise it in a single (very unscientific) phrase, I would say that it was a light-hearted account of my unidyllic life in an idyllic setting. Or a further attempt to undermine the Provençal legend of lavender and pastis. Or a story about moving house with numerous French twists, because at the start of the book we are living in an old stone house with blue shutters and a plane tree on the sidewalk, and at the end we are living in another old house, with white shutters and a fountain outside the front door, and in between everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Put another way, dear reader, Griet no longer has time for entertaining angels. ‘Real’ life has become a demanding, exhausting, ever surprising, never boring saga.
Decide for yourself on which shelf you’d expect to find that.
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