In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Lauren Francis-Sharma to talk about the intense nature of covering hearings on apartheid practices in South Africa and translating those experiences to her new book Casualties of Truth.
This week we put Albert Camus’s The Stranger to the test. In this installment of Canon or Can It?, we’ll discuss the French author’s writing style and philosophy and decide if it should live on as a canonical text, or be kicked to the curb forever.
Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah, You Will Be Safe Here by Damien Barr, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.
Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.
The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
All titles mentioned:
Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis Sharma
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
Doll Seed by Michele Tracy Berger
Consumed by Greg Buchanan
After Death by Dean Koontz
Real Tigers by Mick Herron
Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
You Will Be Safe Here by Damien Barr
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
The Stranger Albert Camus
Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, this week, Lauren Francis-Sharma joins the show to talk about writing her third novel, Casualties of Truth.
Lauren explains the intense nature of covering hearings on apartheid practices in South Africa and the process of communicating those learnings through her novel. Join us now as we discuss the origins of her book.
BP: So Lauren, I am really delighted to be here with you and you have got Casualties of Truth, your new novel, your third novel, correct? Very exciting. It is coming out, and it is about a woman who lives in Washington D. C. with her family, well Bethesda, Maryland, with her family. And she in the past, in the 1990s, spent some time in South Africa. She's an attorney. And the novel, starts out in the present day in Washington, and someone her husband has hired for his company turns out to be someone who was very important to her in that past in South Africa. So, what I want to talk with you about today is your time in South Africa, since I know you had that, and the question of what it's like to write about a place that was very formative for you as a person and as a writer. So maybe we could start with what it was like to write Prue and to start hearing her memories. Do you remember when that came up?
LFS: Yeah, I think so. You know, I started thinking about this book in, while we were in quarantine during COVID. It's an interesting thing that happened to me while we were sort of stuck in our homes was this flooding of memories, reaching for places. And part of this was, I think I needed to do it for my own sort of mental health was just going back to the places that I felt were very, like you said, formative, but also really important to sort of who I'd become. So in my memory, I kept going back. to Johannesburg in 1996 when I was there and I couldn't figure out why I kept going back to like certain places and certain things, but it was just a repetitive memory. And before I knew it, I started to think, well, maybe this is the budding of a story. So in some respects, you know, Prue came up through that moment, or those moments where I was just stuck on that time in my life.
BP: Tell us about that time. Why did you go to South Africa in 1996? What were the circumstances? How long were you there?
LFS: Yeah, it was a semester. Well, a little longer than a semester, actually. But it was my third year of law school. I was at the University of Michigan, and one of the professors thought it would be an incredible opportunity, given that they just had, you know, two years earlier, their first democratic elections. He thought it'd be wonderful to sort of have a group of students go to South Africa and work on things. And there was just, it was a small group of us and we were all assigned to different. jobs. And my job was at a small law firm in Johannesburg, and they were supporting the ANC, particularly helping, you know, ANC members who wanted to apply for amnesty. As you well know, you know, there was a lot of activism, you know, in the decades before Mandela was released and before the elections. And so a lot of people committed what would be considered crimes and they wanted to, wanted to sort of have the government overlook those, those transgressions that they've made. And it was a very long application process. So I was helping people with the applications.
And, you know, it just so happened that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's amnesty hearings were being held in Johannesburg while I was there. It moved around the country quite a bit. I just got lucky that a couple of weeks happened to coincide at the same time that I was in Johannesburg, and so I attended those hearings.
BP: Specifically, what you felt you learned, and what you did learn that came to you as you started this writing process?
LFS: How much time do we have? So, you know, I think the first thing that I'd like to say about that question is that I believe and I believe I've always been this way. And I know that I write for people who are this way, which is the sense for those people who are, who feel connected, feel globally connected, who feel like the world is important to them. I'm someone who I read everything from everywhere in the world and I write for people to be able to see themselves in whether it's a small village in Trinidad, which was, you know, my first book, whether, you know, it's a, you know, a Black woman from America in South Africa bringing the pieces together who, by the way, is also of West Indian heritage. So there's, you know, there's this real sense that she's you know, bringing in all the pieces of her into this story. So I think that being in South Africa at that time made me realize just how close we are. But on a practical level, you know, the national party, they were looking to the Nazis. The national party, they were looking at Jim Crow laws in America. And as we see now, you know, here in our country, we have people who are looking at the Nazis. And what they did. We have people who are looking back at apartheid South Africa. It's all connected. If we do not understand what happened in South Africa, we cannot know what could happen here. If we don't understand what happened in Nazi Germany, we cannot understand what can happen here. If there's anything that I'd like for someone, and obviously I wrote a book. For entertainment. Yes. And I wrote about, you know, a woman who's, you know, sort of living a very contemporary 2018 life and kind of grappling with motherhood and, you know, and marriage and all those things. But ultimately, it's about community and remembering that, like, South Africa would not be free of apartheid if it were not for community centric, community action people. And I, you know, and I think we lose sight of that so much. We lose sight of how important it is, how serious it is to care, to experience and to be with other people in their pain, to act on behalf of other people. We can get really caught up. I mean, this is what they want. They want us to be individualistic. They want us to think only of ourselves. We cannot dismantle anything thinking only of ourselves. And my character does this, by the way, she is very self centered.
BP: What was the hardest thing for you to bring back, to make come alive?
LFS: Bethanne, when you're sitting in a place and you're hearing about the murder of eight children, I don't know how you convey that, you know, I, and I did my best and you know, the story that I heard, one of the stories that I heard was about eight boys who and when I say boys, I mean, literally, they were boys, and they like many Black young South Africans wanted to fight against the apartheid system and wanted to be part of the ANC activism and, they were tripped by a South African police operative told that he was going to take them to another country to do training, to be soldiers of, for the ANC. And their parents didn't know. And they snuck off with this man. And they were tortured and they were murdered and during those hearings is when their parents when I was listening to it is when their parents learned what happened to their children. The weeping in that room. How do you, how do you convey that? I did my best. You know, I did my best without sort of you know, numbing the reader. But just trying to convey sort of the everyday horribleness of living under that regime. So that was the most difficult part, was trying to do just enough and not to overwhelm the sensory, the sensory experience of, you know, of a reader,
BP: It reminds me of Hannah Arendt's ‘Banality of Evil,’ but it is very difficult because of the banality of evil to bring across what it does to the parents, as you said, to the people in this courtroom, who have to hear about these facts for the first time, these brutal, brutal facts. And so I imagine this book that you began during the pandemic has been really, really tough for you. It hasn't been an easy book to write.
LFS: I did not know how to tell this story, and when I figured it out during COVID, it felt like such joy, from right from one writer to another, it just felt like such joy to be able to figure out how I was going to do it so that you wouldn't put it down. I hope you don't put it down so that you feel like you can't put it down. So I'm not a suspense writer, but certainly there were suspenseful elements, and if there was any hard part of it, it was actually just trying to maintain the very sort of fast pace that I began with and ensuring that sort of you would get the, you would get the entertainment while also really learning about the history, learning about this moment. But, you know, if I can say anything, which I sort of alluded to before, which is that, you know, apartheid policies, the National Party won in 1948 and you know, they won on a platform of apartheid. Believe it or not, no one thought they were going to win. It was a huge shock to South Africans. Now, mind you, most South Africans couldn't vote, but even the white people in South Africa were surprised when this very far right party won. And you know, you kind of want to start the story of South Africa in 1948 in terms of apartheid policies, but in truth, there were regulations in place since the 1920s since the 1800s. There was a slow drip drip, a slow taking away of rights that began long before the National Party won that election. And I just like to sort of make people aware of how small and slow these things begin to happen.
BP: Thank you, Lauren, for joining us this week. You can find all of Lauren Francis-Sharma's books wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday Reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week.
Welcome back to another week's Friday Reads from all around the socials. This season, as you've heard before, we're highlighting fewer posts and digging a little bit deeper into the titles that people are sharing. So, let us know if you like the new format. Who knows, you might show up in it. As always, my engineer Jordan is here to help.
So, what is our first book share this week?
JA: All right, first up, we've got from Rob Bedford, my hashtag Friday Reads, Dead Tree Edition is The Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. And Bethanne, I think this is an early copy?
BP: It is, and actually, and I'm kind of glad that I get the chance to Correct you on the title because it is the Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. It's two hunters, two in one. And so it's a kind of an, it's an amazing title, but Jones is a member of the Blackfeet Indian tribe. I don't know if they're actually a nation and I did try to check that and wasn't able to find it. So please, if I am in error and it is the Blackfeet Indian Nation, I stand corrected, but Jones is one of the most interesting horror writers out there. If you've never read his work before, I highly recommend My Heart is a Chainsaw. Love that title. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is his newest, actually he's Dr. Jones, he has a PhD in English. It's the newest of his nearly two dozen novels, and it's about a Lutheran minister, a vampire and an Indian reservation in 1912. Just fantastic horror. It is for fans of Paul Tremblay, Amakatsu, and Oyinkan Braithwaite. So, I think that was a really fun one, Rob Bedford. Glad you put it up. Thank you. Next.
JA: Next up, we've got from Lisa Eckstein, who just started the story collection, Doll Seed, by Michele Tracy Berger. What she bought after hearing the author on our opinions.
BP: I love this because Michele Tracy Berger is a highly credentialed and respected academic with a PhD in religious studies and all kinds of fabulous, you know, affiliations and publications, but she's now also a speculative fiction author. And this collection of short stories is, according to one blurb, black mirror with the emphasis on black. It's about stories focusing on women and often these stories do include dolls or other sort of, I don't know what you would call them fictional creatures or figures, but it came out in paperback last year and I haven't read it yet. I'm really looking forward to it. Love Lisa Eckstein, The Psychedelic Book Jacket, that is on Doll Seed, and this is a great read if you like Alyssa Cole, Zakiya Dalila Harris, or N.K. Jameson. So, I have a feeling it's going to pick up a lot of readers. How about our third and last today, Jordan?
JA: All right, we've got, to close things out, from Matthew Craig, who's cross posting from the other place, his Friday reads this week are Consumed by Greg Buchanan, After Death by Dean Koontz, and Real Tigers by Mick Herron.
BP: Now, I chose this one, Matthew Craig, because I love the fact that number one, you chose three different books in three different formats. But number two, there's no image. You're kicking it old school with Friday reads. So you're reading Buchanan in the paper format, the Koontz as an electronic book, a digital book, and Real Tigers you're listening to in audio. And all three of these authors are really different, but really terrific. And I just want to put a little shout out in here for Mick Herron. I am a huge Slow Horses fan, the series that Mick Herron writes. And I have not read all of them. I really need to read more of them and I want to recommend them to other people because from what I understand from friends who have read the books, it's so rare, Jordan, that I'm the one who has seen the adaptation but not read the books. So anyway, I want to give Mick Herron a big shout out here. So that's our Friday Reads Roundup. Jordan, thank you so much. What's your Friday Reads?
JA: My Friday Reads is David Byrne's book, Bicycle Diaries, about his stories from biking. in different cities.
BP: I love it. I love it. That is a great one. Stop making sense, Jordan. We'll see you next week.
Lauren Francis-Sharma's novel, Casualties of Truth, looks to motivate readers to take action for justice. It's a galvanizing call, one much different than some philosophical approaches of eras gone by. Today, we're going to take a look at Albert Camus’ classic work of philosophical fiction, The Stranger.
Let's decide if we should adhere to his protagonist Monsieur Meursault's passivity to society that Camus depicts, or can this novel forever?
An indifferent, evasive yes man, this literary f boy is every woman's nightmare. Not even the death of his mother elicits emotion from him. His M. O.? Say yes, because why not? This gets him engaged and into trouble. After agreeing to write a letter that catalyzes a friend's domestic dispute, Monsieur Meursault's life spirals into murder, trial, capital punishment.
Oh, spare me from male callousness. Must everything be an apathy battle? Why must caring be so uncool? This constant individual versus society. Life has no real meaning. Every man for himself BS. Please, let's just can it. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't go. I know I upset a few of you with my catcher can it. And here we go again with another unreliable male lead.
I promise it's not just personal preference. I actually love problematic men. Wait, you know what I mean. Just hear me out. Originally written in French and published in 1942, Albert Camus’ The Stranger is a novella in two halves. Equally as valuable as the protagonist's final monologue is Camus' careful language.
The first half is written in first person. Staccato, masculine sentences, in the American tradition trendy at the time. Think Hemingway. Think Faulkner. When Marceau meets the director of Maman's Old Folks Home, he describes him thusly.
He was a little old man with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. He looked at me with his clear eyes. Then he shook my hand and held it so long, I didn't know how to get it loose.
A tonal shift occurs in the second half. Now closed from society, Meursault opens his eyes. When he meets the magistrate, Meursault observes,
After our conversation, though, I looked at him and saw a tall, fine featured man with deep set blue eyes, a long gray mustache, and lots of thick, almost white hair. He struck me as being very reasonable, and overall quite pleasant, despite a nervous tick which made his mouth twitch now and then. On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but just in time, I remembered that I had killed a man.
In the moments before Meursault kills the Arab, he calls the action stupid. Some readers will call it random. But in these moments, Meursault also recalls the death of his mother by comparing the present, unrelenting son to the son on the day of her burial. Camus doesn't list Meursault's emotions. He gestures to them through the physical.
The sun burns and blinds him. He has a gun and a target. Camus' prose requires sustained, attentive reading and critical thinking skills. My copy is only 123 pages long, but to breeze through this novel is to miss the point. For that, I will canon Camus.
In his 1955 afterword, Camus writes that Meursault is condemned from the start because he refuses to play life's games. He says The Stranger could be seen as a story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. Merceau's truth, he does not mourn the way he's supposed to mourn. He does not repent the way he's supposed to repent.
For Camus, Merceau is a man in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Merceau's internal moral compass leaves no room for gray area. It's not that he's careless, it's that he's plagued by that stubborn kind of idealism. His execution frees him from decisions like end of life care, funerals, how to mourn, engagement and marriage, affairs and revenge, and hope that he will ever return to this world that he never fully opted into to begin with.
Here is the hard truth. We live in a world with administrative fees, PTO that expires. University bureaucracies, and the seven circles of email hell. Our sun does cast shadows. I am not anti idealism, but maybe I am pro acceptance. Maybe we have to brighten our own spaces. Maybe, if you want, find your own small room with a sky view and endeavor to keep the lights on.
Whether it was South Africa in the 80s, France in the 40s, or America right now, literature has long reflected shifts in thought and society. While Lauren Francis-Sharma and Albert Camus have differing ideas on how individuals should approach their roles in a world that seems beyond their control, I believe fiction helps guide readers through tumultuous times.
Here are six recs for books that deal with seismic change.
Welcome to this week's six recs, and I'm really excited about this one. I'm calling it Six Recommendations for Seismic Change because Lauren Francis-Sharma's Casualties of Truth is about apartheid in South Africa. and its repercussions, you know, all the way to the present day. So I wanted to find some titles that would give different kinds of perspectives on apartheid, and not just South African ones, but also some books that help us understand what's been going on in the Western world with people of color for a long, too long a time.
So as usual, I have my producer Jordan here with me, and he's going to time me to give you six recs in three minutes or less. Otherwise, You know what happens, the bookcase falls. Jordan, how are you this evening?
JA: I'm doing well.
BP: Great. So are we ready to start the stopwatch?
JA: We are rolling.
BP: All right. First up, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. He is the founder of Mother Jones Magazine, and that's all about social justice, right? But he himself as an author and a journalist is also all about social justice narratives, historical and contemporary. And his book focuses on British enslavement, that trade in Jamaica and the Caribbean, but it's relevant to South African racial injustice as well. One thing I found really interesting about this book is that climate change activists are inspired by it because the people he is talking about who actually affected change were a very small group. So check that one out.
Isabel Wilkerson's Caste. Well, if you haven't read this one already, you're in arrears and you're in error. It's one of the most important recent books about the origins of cruelty ever written. And is it any wonder Ava DuVernay called her adaptation, Origin? So, Wilkerson shows how three groups, Jews in Nazi Germany, Blacks in Jim Crow America, and Dalits in modern India are systematically dehumanized by political, cultural, and societal means, and the epilogue itself is worth the trip.
So, next up, we've got Wake: the Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez. This is a graphic memoir, or graphic history as well by Dr. Hall and it's riveting. Don't take my word for it, take Angela Davis's. She blurbed it, okay. This one is about Rebecca Hall's enslaved grandparents and how her research into women led slave revolts led her to make a book that's historical and personal. She actually created two characters for the middle passage so that she could, you know, sit, you know, show you what it really must have been like. And I am going to say about the illustrations, cause I love a graphic memoir, one of my favorite words, chiaroscuro, which is the interplay of light and dark, Martinez and Hall together have really made a compelling book.
The Unseen Truth by Dr. Sarah Lewis, who is a Harvard art historian. lays bare how, why, and when U. S. popular culture embraced the idea of whiteness as a marker of status. Hint, it comes much later than you might think and it involves the Caucasus. So the white gaze was really effective in an era where still photography and moving pictures were starting to take over. But it's an historian's book. It's not polemic, it's not invective, it's very carefully researched and documented evidence that white supremacy was nurtured in the U. S. long before any of us went online.
Born a Crime, Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. We all know he was the Daily Show host. For many years on Comedy Central, he was born in 1984 in South Africa to a white father and a black mother. And since those relationships were not decriminalized until 1985, he really was technically born a crime. Unfortunately, his family was not a happily ever after kind. He details a lot of his mother's trauma and he really talks about how he had to come to the United States to be safe from a very dangerous man. I hope his next memoir will tell of happier times.
Finally, Damian Barr's You'll Be Safe Here is my novel on this week's list. Damian Barr is the host of the Big Scottish Book Club. He based this haunting novel on a real life incident in which a young boy sent to an Afrikaans paramilitary camp in South Africa died. It is an illuminating look at the historical trauma of the Boers, the Dutch Boers, who were forced by the English at one point in the 19th century to live in concentration camps for resettling, but it also shows that their descendants went on to torment black fellow citizens and their own kind. It is a really chilling book. One of the lines that I'll never forget is we're all sons and daughters of the same soil. It's a great read. That's it for this week. I have a feeling Jordan. I went way over.
JA: We did go quite a bit over at four minutes and 37 seconds. But I think we could leave the bookshelf up this week. I think you know, these, these titles were due their time.
BP: Thank you. Thank you. Look, there we go. Friday Reads, always agile. Thank you, Jordan.
Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, A Literary Revue. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, A Literary Revue is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.
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