Victor Dlamini

Reading Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson, one is reminded that the divisions between prose and poetry are not natural – that these words, “prose” and “poetry”, mostly serve external, classificatory purposes. Death, a very slow death, is the subject of this novel, and Anne brings to her subject a language that is highly charged, as Betsy Klein contemplates the impending loss of her father. It is a language at once of prose and poetry – of loss, memory, imagination, belonging and grief. Harold Klein and his daughter engage in vigorous conversation through Betsy’s rememberings even though Harold lies comatose in a Cape Town hospital bed – and we believe it.

Join me on The Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast as I chat to Anne about her extraordinary book, which is quite clearly intended as an elegy. This is the second conversation I have had with Anne. The first took place during the Franschhoek Literary Festival, when Anne shared the platform with the writers Richard Ford, Siphiwo Mahala and Kgebetli Moele. For this conversation, Anne very kindly invited me to her house in New York, where she revealed how her book interplays with her own sense of loss. Unlike Betsy, she was not able to go to South Africa to be by her father’s side when he died.

After finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town, Anne went to Columbia University in New York where she graduated with an M.F.A. in screenwriting and directing. She then published The Devil’s Chimney, her first novel, which she later adapted for the screen. Apart from her two novels, Anne has published numerous essays, reviews and interviews. Find a list of some of these below.

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Anne Landsman notes

Essays, reviews, interviews
The Baby in the anthology, An Uncertain Inheritance, Harper Collins, November 2006.
White Knight in the anthology, The Honeymoon’s Over, Warner Books, 2007.
Interview with Breyten Breytenbach, The Believer magazine, November 2006.
The Quagga, The Believer magazine, October 2005.
The Auk, Great and Little, The Believer magazine, March 2005.
What Writers are Reading, Poets and Writers magazine, Jan/Feb issue, 2002.
Review of Arthur Japin’s novel, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, The Washington Post, 2001.

Screenplays
Adaptation of The Devil’s Chinney for Arena Pictures and Africa Media Entertainment, 1999-2001.
Honest Arrogance, about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, written with the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, 1985/6.
Workshopped at the Sundance Institute’s annual June Lab, 1987.

 

 Anne Landsman on the Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast [29:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download