Herman Lategan has spent decades moving between worlds, from Clifton's champagne set to a homeless man's supper under a bridge. He walks Kloof Street, Sea Point, Salt River, Ysterplaat, Ndabeni, Maitland Cemetery, then gets on a train or a bus and goes further afield, to Johannesburg, Namaqualand, the small towns of the Free State.
What he finds are people who ended up somewhere they never planned to be: the man in Sea Point who could pass for Rod Stewart, a video-shop owner who went to jail, a newsreader's widow nobody can forget. He never tidies a life into a lesson and steers clear of nostalgia.
Some characters re-emerge in different stories, forming a thread that binds them all together. In the tradition of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Lawrence Green's A Taste of the South Easter, Lategan writes with an eye for the telling detail: the odd gesture, the faded shopfront, the unlikely friendship. A single life reveals a district; a neighbourhood reveals a country.
These short, vivid pieces move between memoir, portraiture, pen sketches and creative non-fiction. By the last page, the distance between the champagne set and the man under the bridge has closed to almost nothing. This book belongs to the twilight people and the forgotten places that mainstream history avoids. Cheers to them!
