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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor enjoyed a positive reception from reviewers as an incisive, if bleak, portrait of post-apartheid South Africa and its failure to realize the idealistic promises of \"rainbow nationalism.\" It also drew criticism from some scholars who argued that it attracted prestige and recognition precisely by pandering to the neocolonial values of a conservative metropolitan readership and its predilection for works which portend the demise of the former British colony. In this article, I offer a close reading of The Good Doctor that contests its reception as an opportunistic disseminator of post-apartheid disillusionment, and argue instead that it offers a scrupulous interrogation of the forms of vocalization and self-fashioning available to white South Africans in the aftermath of apartheid. In accounting for the emphasis Galgut places on the ongoing labour of self-interpretation in this context, I turn to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur whose work on narrative identity, I demonstrate, strongly resonates with the value The Good Doctor finds in a hermeneutically examined life.

Different tastes and sensibilities make for varied offerings in all the arts. If we all liked the same things, the world would be a uniform and dull place. Given that, I must counter the largely negative review of Ken Barris's latest novel, Life Underwater (Cape Times, June 15). Barris's work of fiction sets us squarely in the midst of a family whose inability to manage conflict is superbly depicted.

I don't have a favourite author, because as I've grown older, different works have met my changing needs and tastes in different ways. I've loved EL Doctorow, Thomas Wolfe, Michail Sholokhov (in that wonderful translation by Stephen Garry), Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Potok, Hemingway, Viginia Woolf, CP Snow, Kazantsakis, Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Hardy - the poetry of CP Cafavy, Pound, Eliot, Hughes, Ferlinghetti- the list is too long to fit into this space.

I'm also dipping into all the sequences which have to do with food in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying, The Madonna of Excelsior and The Whale Caller, for a paper I'll be presenting in Toronto at a conference on food and the arts.

IN THE letter by Ken Barris, (\"Spell it out\", May 20), he maintains that he Googled Kris Kristian and could...

In his latest offering, \"None so blind\" (Letters, January 30), [Tim Richman] mentions the \"average reader\" and \"popular titles\". He seems to feel the Cape Times books page is shirking its duty by not catering for these groups.

Sierra Leone's Olufemi Terry this week won the e10 000 (R116 000) 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing for Stickfighting Days from Chimurenga vol 12/13, CapeTown. The prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English. An \"African writer\" is taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African, and whose work has reflected that cultural background. Two local writers, Ken Barris and Alex Smith, were shortlisted for the Prize. Barris for The Life of Worm from New Writing from Africa 2009, and Smith for Soulmates also from New Writing from Africa 2009. Random House Struik has added Fernwood Press to its list of imprints. Managing Director Stephen Johnson said: \"Fernwood Press authors and their books are a highly valued addition to our company's existing range of titles and imprints, not least because they bring into our fold a quality of book production, design and content that is second to none in the South African market.\"

Tolstoy once said about his work that he feared that people would love his descriptions of social and personal mannerisms without understanding their significance. Contrariwise, in Life Underwater the descriptions of the Eastern Cape's environment and the Machabeuses' Jewish practices seem to have little direct relevance. How does [Eli, Simon] find life in the army in Pretoria in the 1970s? And what is it about the Port Elizabeth's \"hard light\" and \"monotonous sea\" that reflect and forge the nature of the dysfunctional [Archie Machabeus] family unit. Simply put, Jude's almost pathological selfishness, Simon's restlessness, Eli's mommy's boy passivity and [Rose]'s frustrations with her socially alcoholic husband are never successfully woven into the stated social and environmental backdrop.