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Tales Of The Metric System
by Imraan Coovadia
Description:
From a Natal boarding school in the seventies and Soviet spies in London in the eighties to the 1995 Rugby World Cup and intrigue in the Union Buildings, Tales of the Metric System shows how ten days spread across four decades send tidal waves through the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans alike.
An unforgettable cast of characters includes Ann, who is trying to protect her husband and son in 1970, and Victor, whose search for a missing document in 1973 will change his life forever. Rock guitarist Yash takes his boy to the beach on Boxing Day in 1979 to meet his revolutionary cousin, while Shanti, his granddaughter, loses her cellphone and falls in love twice on a lucky afternoon in 2010.
Playwrights, politicians, philosophers, and thieves, all caught in their individual stories, burst from the pages of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System as it measures South Africa’s modern history in its own remarkable units of imagination.
“Simple in concept, complex in construction, a novel which is so much more than the sum of its parts, one which purports to examine the randomness of life while delicately drawing the eye to the butterfly effect of individual acts and exposing the interconnectedness of people. In pristine prose and with a telling eye for detail, Tales of the Metric System leaves the reader with a sense of having undertaken a journey through the familiar only to arrive somewhere completely new.” – Aminatta Forna, author of The Memory of Love – See more at: http://www.randomstruik.co.za/books/t..
About The Author
Imraan Coovadia is a South African novelist, essayist, and academic. He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Cape Town. He has taught 19th Century Studies and Creative Writing at a number of US universities. His debut novel, The Wedding, published simultaneously in the US and SA in 2001 has been translated into Hebrew and Italian. Imraan has travelled and lived widely, as extensively as, London, Melbourne, Boston, New York City, Durban and Cape Town. His writing reflects this in its diverse themes and influences. His early novels were focused more on South African Indian experiences. He was also influenced stylistically by V. S. Naipaul and others. His first novel, The Wedding was published in 2001. The novel was well received, garnering a variety of accolades such as runner-up in the Sunday Times Fiction Award (2002), long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award, a finalist for the first annual Connecticut Book Award, and short-listed for the Ama-Boeke Prize (2003).
His early writing is considered an important addition to Indian-South African literature, in that it deals with the issues of migration, historical concerns, loss of culture and nationality. His style is comedic and thoughtful. His later writing, such as the Institute for Taxi Poetry, is set in Cape Town and explores both the taxi industry and the intricacies of life in Cape Town.
As an academic at UCT, his research interests include: Eighteenth- and nineteenth century English and American literature, philosophy and literature, political and social thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including Adam Smith, Hazlitt, Hume, Edmund Burke, and Swift, and contemporary fiction. Coovadia is also known for his contribution to the controversial debate surrounding JM Coetzee’s biography by J.C Kannemeyer. His writing has been the focus of a 2016 special issue of the scholarly journal Current Writing.
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