Beautiful South Africa

South Africa, larger than Holland, Belgium, Italy, France and western Germany combined, and a country of immense natural resources, is a regional superpower, the engine room of the subcontinent´s economy. It is also rich in beauty, stunning in its myriad contrasts, though in the broadest terms it has just two physical divisions: the vast interior plateau, and the narrow coastal belt that fringes it. Between them is the conspicuous, and continuous, necklace of mountains known as the Great Escarpment, which reaches its grandest heights in the towering Drakensberg range to the east.

JOHANNESBURG

Johannesburg is South Africa´s largest city and the industrial and financial hub of a country that is emerging, painfully but with bright promise, from the darkness of the apartheid era. This is a nation of some 40 million people and of bewildering human diversity, the contrasts vividly evident in the mix of race and language , creed, colour, culture and economic status. Variety is there, too, in the physical nature of the land: in its widely differing climates, its regions of high mountain peaks and broad grassland plains, its rugged coasts and the semi-arid flatlands of the great interior, its game-rich bushveld and the lovely hills and valleys of the south, each of the many parts displaying its own, highly distinctive characters.

PRETORIA

Pretoria, 60 km to the north of Johannesburg, is a beautiful city, famed for its feathery, lilac-coloured jacaranda trees which put on a resplendent display in spring, and its stately buildings, among them the Union Buildings with the famous statue of Louis Botha, first prime minister of the Union of South Africa. Tradition of a wholly different kind can be seen in Ndebele villages near Middleburg, some distance to the east of Pretoria.

THE KRUGER NATIONAL PARK

The Kruger National Park occupies nearly 20,000 square kilometres of Lowveld bush country to the east of the northern Drakensberg, and is haven to more varieties of wildlife than any other game sanctuary in Africa. Among its 148 mammal species are lion, warthog and the lordly giraffe.

Thanks a lot, Abdu!

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

(La elegancia del erizo)

The hedgehog of the title is Renée Michel, a 54-year-old widow who is concierge of a swanky Parisian apartment block. To all outward appearances, she conforms to the stereotype of the concierge, dumpy, plain and slow-witted. But secretly, she is a passionate aesthete and autodidact. When she isn't spending time with her beloved Tolstoy or weeping over her favourite Ozu film, she is mastering Kantian idealism.

Coincidentally, another of the block's inhabitants, 12-year-old Paloma Josse, is also a secret intellectual: alienated from her bourgeois family and precociously alert to the futility of life, she has decided to commit suicide on her 13th birthday. In the meantime, she keeps a diary of "profound thoughts" in which she jots down haiku and tanka. Both lives are transformed by a new tenant, a retired Japanese businessman called Mr Ozu. He quickly discerns Renée and Paloma's intelligence and taste; he and Renée begin a sentimental friendship based on a shared love of beauty. The slight plot is punctuated by meditations on the beauty of nature and language, and by Renée's philosophical musings.

Though Barbery adopts the hedgehog as her governing metaphor, the book is a hedgehog turned inside out – superficially warm and cuddly, but with some nasty barbs within. Renée worships Tolstoy, but there is no sign that either she or her creator has learnt complexity or humanity from him. The supporting characters are, by and large, drawn with barely inflected contempt.
Despite the name-checking of philosophers, composers and novelists, the mood is subtly anti-intellectual: people who seem clever are just showing off. The book flatters the reader, offering reassurance that untutored instinct is truer than the opinions of so-called experts.

But what is most impressive about this novel -- and why it will stay with its readers long after they've closed the book -- is that Barbery succeeds in creating an imaginary world whose beauty and message transcends to the real world. Just as the lives of Renee, Paloma, and Kakuro are enhanced by their engagement with art and with each other, this novel is a portal through which a reader can walk and find something better within themselves: hope that the people in our lives can still surprise and delight us.

My delicious

Stretching eyes west

Over the sea,

Wind foul or fair,

Always stood she

Prospect-impressed;

Solely out there

Did her gaze rest,

Never elsewhere

Seemed charmed to be.

Thomas Hardy, "The Riddle".

Tendidos los ojos al oeste,

por encima del mar,

con mal viento y buen viento,

alli estaba ella siempre

incrustada en el paisaje;

sólo en el infinito descansaba su mirada,

nunca en otro lugar.

Parecía hechizada.

Thomas Hardy, "El enigma".

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