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1 week ago | 
mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Rodney Ghobril
When I was a young man, I was given a priceless gift by someone — a lens through which I could understand my own interactions with the world. The person in question, a mental health professional and a good friend, did tell me that he had cribbed it off of one of his clients but it was so good that he had added it to his bag of treatment tools. The lens was as such … The people of the world can be very loosely divided into two groups: Those who have an “ethnic” background and those who don’t.
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2 months ago | 
mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Rodney Ghobril
You ever want to tell someone about a book or a movie, but run into the problem that, in relating the best parts, the very crux of the work, you’re going to spoil it for them? I, personally, hate spoilers for other people — but love them for myself. What I mean is, I myself love knowing how things end, because I am often too riddled with anxiety, or too tied up in solving the ending before it happens, to actually enjoy the experience of ending up there.
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Dec 1, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Rodney Ghobril
In 1996, now-deceased American horror author Richard Laymon published the rather cheesily excellent book Body Rides. It was more of Laymon’s usual fare — shlock horror dressed up with pretty language, gratuitous violence, a little tawdriness and more than a little sexuality. But the truly interesting part of the story was its central premise.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Rodney Ghobril
Before we proceed with discussing Nickolaus Bauer’s insightful and interesting new book Great Johannesburg, there is something I must unequivocally declare before church and state: I fucking love Johannesburg!Well, that’s not entirely true — I have a love-hate relationship with Joburg. Well, that’s not quite true, either … Let’s peg it at 80/20. Okay, unequivocally re-declared: I have a four-parts-love, one-part-hate relationship with Joburg.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Umamah Bakharia |Rodney Ghobril
‘Writing is the slow, recursive process in which words are laid down, then reordered and revised, tested and retested against memory in the attempt to produce something halfway dignified, somewhere between a sentimental fiction and a truth that can seem too harsh, or too self-satisfied in its harshness.”This quote, taken from the fourth of the nine essays which comprise Hedley Twidle’s incredible new collection Show Me the Place, reflects the author’s stance on writing.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Rodney Ghobril
Let me start with a spoiler alert — this was meant to be a review of the really good biography of Abba, recently written by Giles Smith. But what it has ended up being is an opinion piece on the Swedish musical legends and their place in the musical pantheon of people of a certain age and demographic. This was not intentional or unintentional, it just happened, and for a simple reason.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Kabelo Maziya |Rodney Ghobril
Ask any male of my generation (40-something-ish) what the best TV series he’s ever watched was, and I bet the vast majority of them would answer The Sopranos. Like many other TV shows in its vaunted stratum, The Sopranos — broadcast from 1999 to 2007 — succeeded because it was a soap opera/family drama cunningly disguised as something else. For example: Breaking Bad leans heavily on the ersatz father-son relationship between Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Rodney Ghobril
Adolf Hitler was, to put it in the words of my kindly mother, not a very nice man. In other words, he was a brutal monster. The reason I feel the need to state this brain-numbingly obvious fact is because some of the things I’m about to say about Hitler’s army out on the battlefield may be perceived as not entirely oppositional to the man and his lunatic cause. But with a sort of grudging respect, one must admit the Nazi war machine was as effective as it was ruthless.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Nompumelelo Vumazonke |Rodney Ghobril
We human beings thrive on expectation. Since our distant ancestors chose to forego the uncertainty and danger of a hunter-gatherer society and transition to agriculture, our entire world has functioned on expectation. The ability to predict, with any kind of certainty, the seasons, the behaviour of our domesticated animals and, to whatever extent, our own behaviour, became key to our survival. Over time, this gave rise to almost all of our scientific disciplines.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Rodney Ghobril
The thing about reviewing books for a newspaper is that you’re going to be reviewing current books. Authors and their publishers want people to know about the “new hotness”, not the “timeworn old warhorse” that either got made into a movie or disappeared from public consciousness other than popping up on reading lists for undergrad literature students. But what about those old, reliable, well-thumbed masterpieces that lie in the back of the metaphorical bookshelf in every avid reader’s mind?
