It is probably better to think of ‘A Mouthful of Glass’ as more of a biography than a novel, and in all fairness the British publisher – Granta – has classed it in non-fiction.
In reality, however, it is a clever mix of fact, speculation and fiction, documenting the unusual life of Greek-Mozambican Demitrios Tsafendas from his birth on 14th January 1918 in colonial Mozambique until his death in October 1999.
He became infamous in 1966 when he assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the Prime Minister of South Africa and the ‘Architect of Apartheid’ by stabbing him multiple times during a parliamentary session.
The book is by no means one you should read as a form of entertainment, I actually found it quite depressing. It is a woeful tale of a mixed race man trying to find his place in the world against state persecution, familial rejection and society-based support failures.
Don’t get me wrong, the book is thoroughly engrossing and exceptionally interesting and if you are looking for an informative, short(ish) book, it’s definitely a contender.
Tsafendas’ life takes him from Mozambique to Egypt, onto South Africa, Canada, the USA, Germany, Portugal, Turkey and Greece, where he picks up languages and differing cultural understandings. This multi-ethnic, multi-cultural background, according to Van Woerden, is the reason for his mental breakdown and results in the highly controversial assassination of South Africa’s racist Prime Minister.
Van Woerden does not attempt to make any direct judgement about the actions of Tsafendas, and for many it is still a controversial act. One the one hand he brutally murdered another human being and ultimately failed to bring down the apartheid system. On the other, Verwoerd and was the founder of a regime which not only actively discriminated against non-European South African citizens but dispossessed an entire nation and led to decades of suffering.
However, the book does ask quite in-depth questions about Tsafendas, South Africa (both before and after apartheid) as well as human nature.
NEXT TIME I will be looking at Manituana by Wu Ming. Set during the American War of Independence as rebels and loyalists compete for the backing of the Six Nations of Iroquois (the most powerful Indian Confederation) it follows Joseph Brant, the Mohawk war chief travel from New York to London in an attempt to save his world. Manituana is written by Wu Ming (AKA Wu Ming Foundation), a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 in Bologna. The name means ‘Anonymous’, or ‘five people’ in Chinese depending on where the stress is placed in the pronunciation. It is a pun in that the members are typically known only by numbers and there were originally five of them.
Owen Jack Williams 