Review: Green as the Sky is Blue by Eben Venter

Simon can be impulsive. A South African expat living in Australia, he has a love for travel to destinations beyond his means, and volunteering when he should be earning a salary. Though he lives beyond his means, he endeavours to wring out every experience life has to offer. Between travels and intimate rendezvous, however, linger his thoughts of home, family, and history. Bound to his birthplace of the Eastern Cape through blood, joy and suffering, Simon cannot deny the pull which his past exerts on his life, and the memories which shape his character.

Analyzing his thoughts and experiences with Dr Spiteri through philosophy and her distractingly insistent love of ancient Greeks, the heart of Venter’s narrative transpires the two minds in a single room, rather than through the continental expanse of Simon’s adventures and travels. As Simon slowly picks apart and stitches together his various thoughts and feelings, he moulds them into a shape which best represents his intentions and his heart.

Green as the Sky is Blue is a tender rather than trashy exploration of sexuality, in which nostalgia and unvoiced expectations mingle with sweat and intoxicating lust. Simon’s sexuality is both the catalyst and end point of the majority of his persona, and yet by dissecting it, he is able to travel within his own mind.

Venter has presented a beautiful story with a strange balance between the melancholic and blissful. As Simon strives to find himself in a world of tangled bodies and mixed messages, he revisits his past, and attempts to escape his present through travel and introspection. His is a journey of the soul, and the body, regardless of material anchors like bank balances and jobs.

The narrative flows easily, with a pleasing amount of choice Afrikaans expressions interspersed delicately, and not with the forceful hand of many South African writers. Venter marries the Afrikaner identity of Simon’s past with a multicultural, worldly present in which both the language and country are lacking; awaiting Simon’s unique insertion.

Green as the Sky is Blue by Eben Venter is published by Penguin Random House South Africa.