Monday, 24 September 2018
Text messages | Eleven short trips to Chatsworth, by Darryl Accone
Readers of Pravasan Pillay’s Chatsworth who know the place and its people say: “That’s the way they talk” or “I recognise that”. Having read the 11 short stories in this Dye Hard Press collection, I feel tempted to claim that now I know it too. Of course, I don’t really; rather, what I do is recognise it.
But for this debut collection of short fiction to achieve that is considerable. Read more.
Austere beauty of Chatsworth by Niren Tolsi
His prose is spare yet precise in detail and minutiae. It captures not merely the lives of people living in the eponym of his collection, the former Indians-only township south of Durban, but the claustrophobia and gloom that accompanies class and caste disdain, racial oppression and the fatalism of a dead-end —set to a dead-beat — imposed on individuals and a community.
His stories are the mise en scène of melancholia.
“I have always felt that there is a deep vein of melancholia that runs through Chatsworth and which touches the lives of some of its residents,” says Pillay. Read more.
Tuesday, 11 September 2018
Opening up Soweto and Chatsworth with stories: a glowing review of Chatsworth in Business Day
Pravasan Pillay writes about another township, Chatsworth, in Durban. Seldom have I come across similar writing in which I can hardly wait for the next sentence. His collection could yet be remembered as the harbinger of a major authorship, up there with the very best in short SA fiction: Ivan Vladislavic, Nadine Gordimer and Hennie Aucamp. Read more.
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