A Series of Undesirable Events
deon-simphiwe skade

ISBN : 978-0-620-49145-7

blog : deonsimphiweskade.blogspot.com

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“The moon watched us caress. It lit over the perfect world of perfect persons, a man and a beautiful woman under its unwinking stare and the stars who winked as if celebrating our glorious kiss. Table Mountain could have peeked over that balcony to witness us under the conspiratorial luminescence of the moon.”

In Deon’s first book, nothing is as it seems. Dreams aren’t dreams and the vivid happenings are as real as the ghosts that the six friends face. The line between reality and fiction is as jaded as the start and end to each chapter. The reader is forced to read first person accounts from six points of view. At times you are confounded as to whose eyes you are looking through.

But the turn of each page delivers more than the reader can imagine.

Moshe’s story reads much like a surrealist painting. “An Old Flame That Went Out” sets the stage for all the characters the author introduces. Deon’s writing is like the ice-cold water that the protagonist uses to bring life back to his vocal chords in the haunting hours of the night. It is fluid and strikes a stark picture in the mind’s eye.

The dialogue in Tumi’s story leads the reader down a path most of us have been down before. The morning after a night with a stranger whom we are convinced is the ultimate realization of our other. But there’s no pretence here, though the air is punctuated with words spoken only with the eyes. This story is the embodiment of a tragic comedy. Deon raises questions about our sexuality; the phobias that run silently under our skin, pulling it taut one moment and giving us goose pimples the next.
He explores the qualities we look for in others and how deceptive our judgments are, as well as what these say about us, the beholder.

Page after page, Deon jabs the reader with the blunt stick of possibilities that lurk behind the uncertainty of the futures we fear, and cannot imagine as tangible. The ghosts of each character await them on the turn of each page.

Each plot weaves its own thread deep into the story and by the end of the book you are left with meter upon meter of detail. A moment of reflection, to digest Deon’s first book of fiction, is needed so that you may see the greater story in all its intricate and colourful detail.