Axelrad still searching for his thumbprint

WHEN I pick up a book, I'm looking for fresh insight into real life rather than displacement to a fantasy world. Yet I know the fantasy genre is incredibly popular, and I understand why.

Part of its charm is that while everyday human issues and experiences are addressed and portrayed, the world in which they unfold functions as a kind of buffer. Things happen — serious things — but readers can emotionally place themselves safely outside the action. Because it doesn't happen in the real world.

It's the difference between a rape scene in Game of Thrones and Disgrace, for example. War in Middle Earth versus war in Palestine. The realities of our world are harsh and full of pain, and we all sometimes just want to escape. After the pandemic, for instance, sales of fantasy books rose by 45% in the US and 23% in Britain — more than any other genre. Reasons for this are easy to figure out.

And that brings me to the fantasy world of Sven Axelrad's debut novel Buried Treasure and its sequel, God's Pocket.

The Durban novelist's world is the city of Vivo, and both books are set there. In Buried Treasure, the reader discovers a dark town, an impoverished place. The main characters must survive in extreme poverty, and there's something threatening that lingers on the edge of consciousness, a spectre or ghost, something that heralds danger.

The centre of this world is a cemetery known as The Treasury. This is where the main character, Novo, arrives at the beginning of the book to become caretaker Mateus's apprentice. She is a street child, until recently accompanied by her father, Alto. But now he is missing and she is alone.

Mateus has a loyal and terrifying dog — she bites deeply and willingly — called Dog. Except Mateus has dyslexia, so the pet's name tag reads “God". His condition means that over the years Mateus has made mistakes with the bodies in his care, accidentally laying them to rest in the wrong graves. The names don't match the bones, and as a result the spirits are awake, and furious.

God's Pocket is set on the outskirts of Vivo. A young man wants to escape pressure from his parents to become an accountant, and with the help of friends he hides himself in a concealed abandoned house, a “pocket" by a deserted quarry. Here he is visited by characters such as Henry David Thoreau, deceased since 1862.

Axelrad's fantasy Vivo is strongly connected to a Spanish-speaking world, or at least one with Latin roots: Buried Treasure has names such as Novo and Alto (borrowed from the Latin for “new" and “old"), and in God's Pocket the main characters are Filipe, Arcadio and Joaquin. “Vivo" stems from the old Italian for “life". It seems to me that this use of Spanish indicates an intertextual relationship with the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño; in fact, his 1998 novel The Savage Detectives is revealed early on as an important supporting player in Buried Treasure; young Novo uses it as a pillow and later it plays a role in a beautiful sex scene in the library. A reader familiar with Bolaño's work can't help noticing pieces of homage to this writer throughout. The writing style is also strongly reminiscent of Bolaño and other Latin-American writers such as Javier Marías and Jorge Luis Borges.

The main characters in The Savage Detectives are strongly connected to the “visceral realists" — a fictitious group who aim to create a “temporary break with reality" through their poetry. “Visceral realism" can be linked to surrealism: a movement away from logic and generally accepted ideas, that which is considered “reasonable" by the mainstream world.

By writing about a fantasy world, Axelrad also creates a break with reality. Yet there are enough recognisable elements to make the social commentary meaningful and powerful. Similar to Bolaño's work, the stories wander on without a clear plan or linear flow; the conversational tone and the loose, meandering structure of Buried Treasure and God's Pocket are recognisably inspired by Bolaño's style. Axelrad, like Bolaño, comments on the dark truths of our daily world that are often obscured.

The two authors also use the same conversational tone and accessible colloquial language to describe something innocuous — like making a cup of coffee. In God's Pocket, describing the dog chewing off and swallowing the deceased Mateus's ear, the tone is light and cheerful even though the content is threatening. Like The Savage Detectives, Axelrad's novels have a dark undercurrent, something menacing just below the surface of the supposedly safe, functioning world.

Buried Treasure was well received in South Africa in 2023, and although fantasy is not my thing I can understand why. Axelrad's voice is fresh, his ideas original. For me, the intertextuality enhances the reading experience, but it's probably not necessary to be a fan of Bolaño to appreciate Axelrad.

I do find a fairly large gap between Buried Treasure and God's Pocket. The former has an energy, a sparkle that's missing in the second novel. Perhaps because the writing style in the second book feels too formulaic. In the debut novel, I could form a connection with the characters but the sequel's protagonists didn't have the same impact on me.

Nevertheless, Axelrad is an interesting new player on the South African literary stage. I hope he's given the opportunity to make the third excursion to Vivo as strong as the first encounter.

God's Pocket by Sven Axelrad was published by Penguin Random House SA and costs R330 at Exclusive Books.

♦ VWB ♦

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