Charl-Pierre Naudé chats about his genre-bending new novel, The Equality of Shadows, the importance of titles and how every language has its own personality.

Naudé is a poet and novelist as well as a published philosopher. He has featured on the literary festival and residency circuits in Europe, and his poetry has appeared in translation in literary magazines and anthologies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Norway, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Equality of Shadows is out now from Picador Africa!

About the novel

When an unusual building appeared overnight in a remote northern Cape community in the 1970s, and disappeared a few weeks later, it seemed to point to a series of baffling existential overlaps.

Some individuals claimed that occasionally they found themselves on the other side of a restive civil war divide, in identity embodiments that were highly contrary versions of themselves. In other cases, absurd social situations seemed to mock ‘normal reality’ by alternating with it. When a small-town journalist reported on the events, his quiet life became cruelly disrupted by unwanted attention.

Were these accounts imagined or real? Real enough to the eyewitnesses. Traumatised and adrift, the journalist later wrote up his story in reportage style when a childhood friend invited him to recuperate on her farm. He believed he had narrowly escaped the disappearance of an entire region – a place nobody has ever heard of – and its people, including the love of his life.

As the mystery unfolds, with an aura of retrieved memory, the narrator’s lost love becomes an increasingly evocative presence. The Equality of Shadows is a compelling novel – in some places uproariously funny, in others filled with deep pathos – about the vagaries of identity, love and time.

Read the interview:

The JRB: The title of your novel, The Equality of Shadows, is a glimpse into the duality that is evident throughout the text. Like the title, chapter headings such as ‘A Sack Full of Jackals’ or ‘The Knowledge of Fields’ reflect the thematic depth of the book. Can you share how you landed on these chapter names, and ultimately the title of your novel?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: Duality is an important theme in the book, yes. I like my themes to get woven into the very texture of the writing, such as the images used, and the chapter headings are one of those weavings. I want the chapter names to direct the reader as well as derail them a little. Isn’t this what poetry does? So I hope I can say my chapter headings are ‘poetical’.

I conceived over a hundred title possibilities and then settled on the one we have. A title and chapter headings must try to have resonance, they should carry on humming in a reader’s mind long after they look away.

The JRB: You have published works in both English and Afrikaans. What can you say about the beauty of storytelling that is revealed through the elasticity of language? 

Charl-Pierre Naudé: Choice of language is very important to my style. For this reason I don’t see my novel as a mere translation. Every language has its own personality, its own quirks. So I absolutely loved diving into the new possibilities that English afforded me to tell this story.

The JRB: You are both a novelist and a poet, and these forms of writing have their own structures and formats; inhibitions and freedoms. What has poetry taught you about novel writing, and novel writing about poetry?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: In my poetry I sometimes tend to emphasise a narrative aspect, so switching to novels came naturally. Poetry taught me that truthfulness is a matter of expressing accurately, not only seeing accurately.

The JRB: The concept of the doppelgänger or other selves adds a multi-layered dimension to your narrative. How did you approach including these elements? Did you intend to create a genre-bending story that walks the tightrope between what is real and what isn’t?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: I certainly tried to create that tightrope between what is seemingly real and what isn’t. But I did not expressly try to bend genres. The story started bending genres by itself. It is mainly because of the country I am writing about. It does not easily fit into any pregiven historical molds.

As far as the doppelgänger goes, it is someone who is a double of a living person. The experience of seeing doppelgängers is very bewitching and has for long been part of the mystery of the world. The reader of my book should not try to understand everything immediately, just go with the flow. The beauty of fiction is that it understands itself long before a reader or even the writer sometimes does.

The JRB: You also have a DPhil in philosophy, and have published in that field too, which seeps into the underlying themes of The Equality of Shadows. How have the schools of thought in philosophy influenced the parameters of your writing?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: I was in passing inspired by the philosophical school of modal realism (or the philosophy of possible worlds), which believes that if you can logically conceive of a particular reality it exists, in actual fact, somewhere ‘out there’. At least for some people. It is a contentious school of thought, but mesmerising.

The JRB: Which authors or bodies of work have had a significant impact on your writing style and storytelling approach?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: This is difficult to say. I feel a kinship with Herman Charles Bosman and Eugène Marais, but another type of kinship with a writer like Haruki Murakami.

I recently read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and realised it is historical shock more than anything else that renders conventional realism inadequate. The time in my novel, which is set during apartheid, is also such a time: traumatic in varying degrees, to various people, in different ways. One could argue: wasn’t it conventional realism that created the trauma? So you have to look outside of it for solutions.

The JRB: Is there a character or part of the story that you feel particularly connected to? If so, could you share why?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: I feel close to all of them. I really feel I ‘channeled’ them and should not have favourites.

The JRB: Writing is often seen as a cathartic process – putting thought and feeling to paper. What have your characters taught you about yourself?

Charl-Pierre Naudé: My characters have taught me a little more about common love than I knew before.

Categories Fiction South Africa

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