Exploring and revealing the randomness of today’s world

Kara Gnodde is a former advertising creative, and like good copywriters she has connected seemingly unrelated ideas to create a new one. The crux of her debut novel is that life is both inordinately complex and beautifully simple. Even maths proves this — and closer to the heart, so does love.

Millennial brother and sister Art and Mimi are close, but it’s a passive-aggressive, love-hate relationship. Both feel betrayed, by their parents’ suicide pact some years earlier, which has left Art with a distorted sense of protectiveness towards his sister, and Mimi with the onerous burden of care towards her autistic-savant brother, a mathematics genius who may be about to crack the great, unsolved problem in theoretical computer science, “P versus NP”. The answer, if P = NP, may unlock enormous technological capabilities, proving that there is a solution — “for everything”.

This, and other formulae, thread the trajectory of the plot. Fortunately, readers require no mathematics expertise, nor are the formulae a diversion because, unlike, for example, Madeleine Thien’s award-winning 2016 book Do Not Say We Have Nothing, so richly themed around classical music that it encourages readers to learn about music theory and classical composers, we would be less keen to pause the novel to swot algebra and algorithms.

For Mimi, if there is any logic to life, it lies elsewhere. But she, too, longs to find it, and the siblings’ interpersonal power dynamic becomes more strategic when Mimi tells him she wants to start dating. Art insists on creating an algorithm to capitalise on dating game data, but is infuriated when Mimi falls in love in contravention of the algorithm’s prediction.

On the surface the plot may seem thin, but Gnodde draws us along towards a discovery that juxtaposes intimacy and rectitude, hope and unresolved confusion, bottled-up fury and forgiveness.    

A millennial generation novel, it captures the undercurrents of global crises together with ennui, based on feelings of helplessness and the realisation that systems and structures, can neither explain nor control the randomness of the world.

With many of the world’s leading computer scientists now urging a pause in further developments in artificial intelligence, this book reminds us that feelings are weird but wonderful, chance counts, and often our instincts must be allowed to prevail.

Experimental, fantastical writing

Durban accountant Sven Axelrad’s Buried Treasure navigates a more spiritual plane, searching for souls in a tenuous world, and exploring death, dying and a possible afterlife.

Set in a cemetery in a small city called Vivo, there are hints of decaying SA — electricity shortages, a dysfunctional municipality, street people and a lack of safety. But it could be anywhere; the amorphousness is appropriate to the surreal atmosphere and the author’s roaming imagination.    

The story itself is ephemeral; the narrator seems more intent on observing than telling, on inviting us to ponder the human condition rather than pushing a plot, in a technique reminiscent of Damon Galgut’s 2021 Booker Prize winning The Promise.

So the characters of Vivo and its cemetery are woven together in roundabout ways, often connected through animals. A brutish dog, we learn, was adopted as a puppy by the cemetery keeper, Mateus. Dyslexic and with appalling vision, Mateus diligently intends accuracy when instructing the engraver to write simply “Dog” on its collar. The engraver, so instructed, instead writes the name  “God”. And so the beast comes to symbolise what a deity may mean to many: dogmatic, powerful, but also loyal and loving — and Dog’s/God’s benevolence comes to the fore as trust expands. The form and the ways of God are truly mysterious, Axelrad implies.

“Faith misplaced is still faith,” says another character, Augustine, named after the saint, who sees the hues and varieties of flowers framing the faces of everyone. He has a window to their souls, without understanding where this power comes from.

The gentleness and pathos, peppered with hilarity, have a counterpoint. An ominous, fearful presence pervades Vivo. The Stabber-Shadow is surely the Devil — primal, predatory, merciless — but also represents a miasma of all our fears, pessimisms, self-doubts and self-loathing. As it stalks the cast of downtrodden characters, alive and in the afterlife, passages in the novel mutate into the territory of a psychological thriller.

Part parable, part love story and a pastiche of other genres, Axelrad’s debut is a textured, literary work. Behind the veil of a quirky patchwork of yarns is a complex exploration of the moral universe. The spirits in the cemetery commune in the afterlife, but in the real world, today, do societies cohere, and do people really care for one another?

The book ends with a brilliant twist. We can work to create meaning in our lives, and leave behind something of worth after we die, says Axelrad. But — like The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything — unpredictability reigns. The universe is simply too random to know with certainty.