December 4, 2017
Early in South African author Winkler’s disturbing U.S. debut, 31-year-old Nathan Lucius, an ad salesman for a Cape Town newspaper, admits, “I don’t dislike women. I just don’t like what they can do to me.” He adds, “I liked the taste of the dead lady who may or may not have been properly dead.” Nathan’s pervasive creepiness will make it impossible for most readers to identify with him, and that challenge only becomes more pronounced when his friend Madge Cartwright, an antique store owner with terminal cancer, asks him to end her life. After taking steps to concoct an alibi and frame an innocent store customer of hers, he strangles Madge with her scarf. Nathan is so emotionally dead that it’s hard to accept that he was acting out of misguided empathy for Madge, and further violence only makes him more repulsive. If Winkler’s goal was to present an unsympathetic woman-hater, he succeeded, but the unpleasantness of the plot and lead are overpowering. Only those with a taste for the darkest of noir will be gratified.
December 1, 2017
A loner's psychopathic tendencies gradually come to the fore in this South African novelist's U.S. debut.Nathan Lucius works selling advertising space for a Cape Town newspaper. His only friend appears to be the old woman who runs a ramshackle antiques shop near his apartment. His boss, Sonia, is an occasional drinking buddy, though Nathan seems more focused on the length of her nipples than anything having to do with her personality. Told in the first person, the novel spends a great deal of time detailing the aimlessness of Nathan's day-to-day routine, which also includes an affair with the middle-aged divorcee who lives in the apartment next to him. What drama there is begins with the elderly antiques dealer asking Nathan to assist her in a mercy killing to escape the pain of the cancer that's ravaging her body. The second half of the novel switches between the interior monologue of a now-institutionalized Nathan and his childhood memories that may or may not have been formative. What this all adds up to or why we are supposed to care about Nathan is anybody's guess. He's a squirrelly narrator without the cunning or depth or torment that might engage you in a borderline personality. He's also obsessed with bodily fluids and has a particularly off-putting penchant for disgusted descriptions of women's breasts and genitalia. It all seems intended to be dark and daring, but it's just tediously unpleasant.His name is Nathan Lucius. And that's nothing to brag about.
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January 1, 2018
The eponymous narrator begins as an enigma. A 31-year-old newspaper-advertising salesman in Cape Town, he joins his coworkers for after-work drinks at the pub but reeks of body odor, misses social cues, and responds to people by telling himself to put on whichever facelaughing, serious, contritehe thinks the situation demands. He begins a strange affair with the older, lonely widow next door. Alone in his apartment, he constructs elaborate family trees with photographs of strangers. It's a vivid portrait of life on the margins, but where is it going? Then Nathan's one real friend, the cancer-stricken antiques dealer Madge, asks him to euthanize her. Revealing more would ruin the ending, but several left turns later, we learn about the trauma that shaped him and what he's truly capable of. Is he a criminal? Insane? Justified? Or certifiable? My Name Is Nathan Lucius (originally published in South Africa as Wasted, 2015) is bleak, ambitious, and thought provoking, and it will find fans among lovers of both darkest noir and transgressive literary fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
September 15, 2017
South African writer Winkler makes his North American debut with this second novel, which was long-listed for the 2016 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The title character is a disillusioned, hard-drinking ad salesman at a Cape Town newspaper whose best (and maybe only) friend Madge makes a seemingly impossible request. She's dying of cancer and wants Nathan to end her pain fast.
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