The One That Got Away

by Zoë Wicomb

The appearance of Zoë Wicomb’s first set of short stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, precipitated the founding of a fan club that has come to include Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and writers at the New York Times, the London Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Christian Science Monitor. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim.

Set mostly in Cape Town and Glasgow, Wicomb’s new collection of short stories straddles dual worlds. An array of characters drawn with extraordinary acuity inhabits a complexly interconnected, twenty-first-century universe. The fourteen stories in this collection explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family ties, and relations with those who serve us. Wicomb’s fluid, shifting technique questions conventional certainties and makes for exhilarating reading, full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight.

Long awaited, The One That Got Away showcases this established, award-winning author at the height of her powers.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, South Africa, African Literature

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Zoë Wicomb attended the University of the Western Cape, and after graduating left South Africa for England in 1970, where she continued her studies at Reading University. She lived in Nottingham and Glasgow and returned to South Africa in 1990, where she taught for three years in the department of English at the University of the Western Cape She gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first work, a collection of short stories , You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), which takes place during the apartheid era. Her second novel, David's Story (2002), takes place in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and uses the ambiguous classification of coloureds to explore racial identity. Playing in the Light, her third novel, released in 2006, covers similar terrain conceptually, though this time set in contemporary South Africa and centering around a white woman who learns that her parents were actually coloured. She published her second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away. The stories, set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow, explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties or relations with servants.

She was a winner of the 2013 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.

Zoe Wicomb resides in Glasgow where she teaches creative writing and post-colonial literature at the University of Strathclyde.

Reviews

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The One That Got Away by Zoë Wicomb is a collection of twelve short stories set in South Africa and Glasgow. The stories depict characters at crossroads either because of a change in circumstances or because they have a choice to make while straddling two cultures.

Confronting questions of identity, the characters explore where they came from and their contentious relationship with the past. They delve into the nature of their connections with spouses, friends, and family, as well as their social and cultural environment. The stories include a man who feels at a loose end; a woman who abandons her responsibilities as wife and mother by refusing to leave her bed; a pair of former high school friends discovering they now have little in common; a young girl navigating her life in Glasgow; a cleaning lady who steals a scarf; and a man returning a library book. A character in one story may turn up as related to or connected with a character in another story.

Several of the stories rely on the stream of consciousness technique, so it can be confusing to distinguish between a person’s thoughts and what is actually happening. The stories are uneven, some being stronger than others. All explore questions of identity and cultural belonging. Wicomb shows identity as a fluid construct. How and where we locate ourselves is in constant flux in an ever-changing world. Her stories capture a moment in time in which her characters discover something new about themselves, about their relationships, and about the world around them. They seem to be in a liminal or in-between phase in which the old ways of thinking and doing have lost relevance, but new ways have yet to materialize. The conclusions to her stories are open-ended, and, just as in real life, resolution remain elusive.

A thought-provoking collection of short stories.

My book reviews are also available at www.tamaraaghajaffar.com

[Julia Benassi]

Al ser muchos relatos que voy a ir leyendo de a poco, el libro va a quedar en Want to read hasta que lea el último relato. Mientras tanto, voy a anotar los relatos leídos con sus respectivas fechas de lectura y puntajes 🧡

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Contemporary Postcolonial Writing.
Having loved Wicomb's 'David's Story', I was really keen to read her collection of short stories. Having not read a collection of short stories for a long time, I didn't know what I'd think of it but I was pleasantly surprised. I liked the way a linked narrative moved through the stories, and her writing style worked really well within these little snapshot stories. I really enjoyed this one!

[Ruthmarie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the short stories were interesting, others less so. The Scotland/South Africa connection is one that few Americans readers might know about, so for that reason it has some historical interest. I'm glad I had a chance to read this writer, whose reputation is increasing.

[Nicholas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Shittiest read ever. So boring and pointless. Your time would honestly be better spent getting repeatedly punched in the throat.