Nineveh

Easy to say I loved this book, more difficult to explain quite why. It is certainly unusual. It comes down to the overwhelming sense of futility of trying to control wild things - landscape (and its teeming wildlife) and people. Solid, engaging characters and relationships for sure, but the 5 stars are on account of the quite brilliant setting and atmosphere.

With thanks to Gallic Books/Aardvark and NetGalley for my copy. I'm so glad her work is being published in the UK - I'm impatient to get my hands on her next book.

Katya is a humane pest relocator, the opposite of her father who had no trouble killing all manner of bugs, etc. who is hired to investigate "gogga" that plague a new housing development.

This story takes place in South Africa which provides an unusual setting for those of us readers in the US. Not only vocabulary and slang are different to us but so is the landscape. I really enjoyed Katya's story and was immediately drawn in from the first passionate descriptions of her job. I also loved that she was a bit prickly as a main character.

Thanks to Netgalley for the arc to review.

The strangest, most metaphorical insect infestation since Kafka's Metamorphosis. Excellent build-up of creepiness and strangeness, but it's the poetic language and flashes of humour which really shone.

Strange, beautiful, and unusual this book makes for quite an engaging read.

Katya is a humane pest controller in South Africa. She learnt her craft from her father. They have a difficult relationship and are currently estranged but when she is asked to perform a difficult assignment on a luxury development, Nineveh, she senses his influence at play.

The thread that runs through Nineveh is the search for ‘home’. Katya’s unstable father kept his family constantly on the move and she has struggled to settle. Her sister escaped his influence early and has immersed herself in suburban family life. The developer of Nineveh strives to create perfection, insulated from the poverty that surrounds his development.

The plot is slightly jagged and unresolved, but that’s okay in what is an offbeat story. My difficulty with this book is the sheer amount of description. The author writes beautifully, giving a fresh perspective on everyday experiences. But just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. Not all the time.

When Katya visits a high-powered client at his office we accompany her through the lobby, up in the lift, along the corridor…We find out how it feels to have a bath and to walk to the mall. We’re never teleported from one place to another but always have to plod there in real time, like the unedited footage from a headcam.

Despite these reservations, this book does stay with you. The pest metaphor is a powerful one. Who decides who gets to live within the walls, and who must be kept out, distanced, even destroyed? How does the outsider, despite everything, find a niche and survive?

Nineveh is definitely worth a read, but you might want to skim a bit.

I never read Hal Herzog’s Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, but the title has always stuck with me as an excellent way to sum up humans’ relationship to the other species on this planet. Nineveh, by Henrietta Rose-Innes, is very much about the “some we hate” category. The critters in this category—rodents, insects, reptiles, etc.—have done nothing to earn our enmity. They just gross us out or scare us for being what they are: low level predators, occasional disease vectors, destroyers of the wooden frames of our houses. The protagonist of Nineveh, Katya Grubbs, doesn’t hate any animals. She runs Painless Pest Relocation. Instead of trapping or poisoning pests, she collects them and moves them into the remaining wild areas around Cape Town. She is the Sisyphus of pest removal.

When we meet her, Katya is working with her nephew to remove a swarm of caterpillars from the garden of a rich Cape Towner. She has a method for tricking the caterpillars to swarm into collection boxes. It takes time, much to the annoyance of her client. One of the client’s guests, however, notices the care Katya takes for the fuzzy little guys and offers her a new job, a big one that could put her at the top of the list for pest removal in the city. All she has to do is figure out a way to clear a massive apartment complex, called Nineveh, of an infestation of some kind of biting beetles.

There is an added complication to the job. Katya’s estranged father—a rough, difficult, duplicitous man—previously had the job to get rid of the beetles. Now he’s disappeared. Taking the job would mean walking in his footsteps once again, something Katya has promised herself never to do. Still, she takes the job because her fledgling company needs the money. When she arrives at Nineveh to evaluate the situation, it’s like stepping into another world. Cape Town is a modern city. Nineveh feels like it was built smack in the middle of a wild jungle. It’s isolated. It’s run down. And it’s more than a little haunted by white men who aren’t quite right in the head.

On the face of things, this book sounds straightforward, possibly a little dull. (And gross, if you’re not good with creepy crawlies.) But I found Nineveh to be a meditative book about a daughter coming to terms with her childhood and her father. Life was rough with Grubbs Senior. He wasn’t bad, as such, but he was neglectful and expected his children to be as tough as he was when they broke bones or went hungry between jobs. He was casually cruel to animals and insects, often using them as tools to get jobs by deliberately causing infestations or leaving a few critters behind so that he would have to be called back.

When Katya temporarily occupies a caretaker flat at Nineveh, she finds her father once more up to his old tricks. When she left him before to strike out on her own, it was more a matter of opportunity than choice. In Nineveh, she has to face the choice at last. Who does she want to be? Can she be her best self if she is still somehow attached to her father? So, even though there are a lot of bugs, this book is a fascinating journey of self-discovery set in a place I’ve never read about before.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 15 November 2016.

Between her and the walls of Nineveh, the mud is alive. It whispers and it clicks. She feels the touch on top of her bare foot, the tentative brush of a feeler. Things scuttle over her toes. The whole surface is alive with tiny creatures, stirring.

Katya walks out among them. The lamps flicker on, off, on and stay steady.

She hadn’t expected the beauty.

Not every woman is terrified of creepy crawlies. Katya has a soft spot for the unlovely, the unloved. Unlike her father, who had raised her as an exterminator- she runs her service as humane pest removal with much respect for any creature that can survive. Where her father wouldn’t ‘bend to the world’ nor nature, with his hardened, impatient nature Katya comes off as fragile in his perception, but she is anything but. Early on she, alongside her sister, suffered knocks and bruises to the body and soul. “He never could respect the fragility of bones.” Much like the ‘pests’ she handles, Katya herself was relocated many times, never finding solid ground and permanence in her early life with her father. Len’s pride was often the cause of much difficulty for his daughters, and it’s no wonder the family is split, the daughters estranged from their father. Yet, it was her father who taught her what she knows.

Nineveh is a property development for the wealthy, meant to tame it’s surroundings, a perfect dwelling in South Africa, one that is escape from the wilds, and certainly not welcoming to ‘unlovely’ creatures, human or otherwise. But is Mr. Brand’s visions for such a great, safe, sterile place doomed? What are the goggas, and can they be conquered? What part does Katya’s father play in it all? What does it mean to have ‘insurance’ as her father does with the places he ‘helps?’ Katya lives in the beautiful home, not unlike a insect herself. Katya with her life experience, her scars internal and external, is much like the unwelcome critters. It’s a study in nature, human, insects… everything we occupy and flee, nothing is really in our control.

The bugs themselves, through Katya’s eyes, are beautiful creatures. The comparison between the human body and Nineveh towards the end rang true, and I would quote it but I’d rather not give anything away. As she grapples with the creatures her past bites harder than any critters that scar her body, and nothing is lost on a perceptive reader. Henrietta Rose-Innes had me hearing the bugs, smelling the murk and yet seeing the beauty too. Katya is a character that may seem gruff to those with soft hands who distance themselves from the reality of nature, but I loved every bit of grit in her. I have lived around bugs my entire life, from Florida to the Island of Okinawa and yet I think South Africa has me beat. Unique read that takes it’s time with you.

USA release date November 15, 2016

Gallic Books

Aardvark Bureau

I enjoyed the descriptions depicting South Africa. It is hard to place yourself in another countries lifestyle but this book put me right into the story. I could picture her sucked into the mire of the environment as well as the poverty divides. I enjoyed how so fought with herself to come to terms with the relationship of her family and most importantly her father.

I felt this book was a bit different and in a strange way rather compelling

Katya Grubb, like her father is a pest controller although unlike her father who exterminated pests, Katya relocates them into the wild.

She's quite a strange character. She seems very accepting of things. She and her sister had been brought up by their father Len who was sometimes physically abusive. They had never really had a permanent home and travelled from place to place with their father. Their mother had disappeared when Katya was three and she never could ask Len what had happened to her mother. She hasn't seen her father for years.

Katya rents a furnished house in an area that is being ripped up and cracks are appearing everywhere. She's changed nothing in the house since she moved in but it's home. She has her own pest removal business and was quite happy working alone although when her nephew came asking for a job she couldn't turn him down and he now works alongside her.

Katya doesn't say a lot but is very observant and through her eyes (thanks to the author's brilliant writing) bugs and creepy crawlies become beautiful.

She's hired by a businessman to take a look at a new exclusive residential development he has built on reclaimed land in the Cape Town area of South Africa . Nineveh lies empty. He can't move anyone in because of infestations of swarming insects and other creepy crawlies, (goggas). Apparently her father had been hired previously to get rid of them but hadn't finished the job. Katya moves in to one of the apartments on her own to wait for the 'goggas' and to write her report.

The complex is surrounded by wetlands and is teeming with life: Katya can hear frogs, toads, worms, nightbirds. She also hears other sounds – the sounds of human life and when she looks closer she can see a group of shacks standing close together in the bush between the marshy ground and the road. Nineveh apparently is not quite so exclusive as the brochures would make out. Can a person prevent nature from taking back what is rightfully hers?

I really like the writing. The descriptions of the sights and sounds surrounding Nineveh are wonderful. I felt as if I was there although I have never been to Cape Town nor indeed South Africa. The characters in the story are good, some more likeable than others and we do learn a bit about them and how they relate to the others.

It's not a difficult read but there is certainly enough going on to keep it interesting. My biggest surprise was still the fact that the unloved creepy crawlies could appear so beautiful by the clever use of words.

Katya Grubbs is the owner of Painless Pest Relocations, a humane pest control company. A successful pest removal at the home of property developer Martin Brand earns her the opportunity to tackle the pest problems at Nineveh, Brand's residential sanctuary for the wealthy in the middle of bustling Cape Town, South Africa. The mysterious "gogga" has invaded the gated paradise, making it uninhabitable. The job is more challenging than expected because there are no obvious signs of an infestation. As Katya searches for any clue related to the hidden bug problem, she also has to address the past that she's attempted to distance herself from.

Katya is a complex and irritable character. She got her start in the pest control industry by working for her father's extermination business, but they are now estranged. She eschews attachments and hates change. Her relationship with her sister Alma is difficult because of their unconventional childhood. Their undependable, dishonest father never gave them the opportunity to put roots down anywhere and both sisters are marked with scars from the past. The sisters live completely opposite lives as adults. Alma has settled down into a manicured community with her perfect family, while Katya lives alone in controlled chaos. It's in her family where Katya begins to search for signs of her father escaping his boundaries, as she seeks hints of the Grubbs' bloodline in their features.

Katya's living space seems to be falling apart around her, in large part because of a new development being constructed across the street. The job at Nineveh requires Katya to stay on the premises and she is immediately attracted to the sterile and controlled environment. She feels as if “these volumes of coolly defined space” were "dreamed up out of her own cluttered mind." But as a pest control expert, she knows there is always something lurking under the surface. Despite the aggressive attempts to create a gated-off haven in Nineveh, the outside world keeps creeping in. Katya begins to pay attention to the many different worlds that exist on top of each other in South Africa. Her experience at Nineveh also causes her to reassess instances of childhood neglect that she had always viewed as accidents. She realizes the world in in a constant state of flux and questions the futility of keeping everything in its proper place. She begins to accept the inevitability of change and stops forcing herself fit into a specific mold.

This short book will be interesting for anyone who likes strange, character-driven stories with atmospheric settings that are an integral part of the story. The descriptions of nature and architecture give us insight into Katya’s state of mind. Her family issues, professional struggles, personal growth, and the world around her are all intertwined. I usually prefer more human interaction, so the abundance of descriptive settings and inner reflection were sometimes a little too much for me. A scene at the end was so descriptive and almost unreal that I lost my ability to visualize. Even so, I loved the strangeness and the complexity of Katya’s story. The author is brilliant! All the interwoven layers would reward a reread and a discussion. This isn't science fiction, but I think fans of Lauren Beukes (Slipping) and Helen Phillips will appreciate the uniqueness of this author's work.

"Nineveh' is a somewhat unusual novel, as the main character is a pest relocator. I have never read anything on the subject before, and I'm ashamed to say, I've never read anything written by a South-African author.

I enjoyed learning about the pest control/relocation aspects. Our main heroine, Katie Grubbs (fantastic name!) is a bit of a loner, probably because of her unusual upbringing by a father who was a pest controller.
When she's asked to relocate some insidious pests at the newly built housing development, Nineveh, she takes on the job with gusto, as it's potentially very lucrative. Some strange things occur.

There's a strong environmental undercurrent in this novel, which I greatly enjoyed. I would have liked that to be even more apparent, but at just over 200 pages, I guess it was clear enough. Also, the South-African socio-economic situation is apparent.

Look, I didn't love it, but I thought the writing was competent and I enjoyed the setting, colloquialisms and the unusual premise.

Katya, owner of a humane pest control company is challenged to clear the new development of Nineveh from invading goggas (insects). There is more to it than that, though, and she is challenged emotionally as well as professionally. Interesting location (South Africa) and a well-driven plot.

Anything but Nineveh!

Katya Grubbs learnt at a very early age how to rid gardens of goggas (an Afrikaans word meaning; covering all types of insects and bugs) from her father; Len, who had roamed through South Africa killing everything from cockroaches to rats for houses or gardens infested with the creatures. However, Katya is, with the help of her nephew Toby, is trying a more humane way of ridding gardens of these pests. She captures the king or queen of the bugs and by doing this, manages to get the rest of the group to leave. Once she’s collected them all, she and Toby then release them back into their true environment, either the forests surrounding Cape Town or the vleis, (wet conservation areas).


Katya and Toby have just finished trapping rather nasty orange spikey caterpillars that have taken up residence in the otherwise immaculate garden of the Mr and Mrs Brand. As they are leaving Martin Brand asks Tanya to visit the new estate that he’s busy building called Nineveh. They are dealing with a huge “gogga” problem, which was supposed to have been solved by her father, but he’s been up to his old tricks; he’s taken the money (for the work) and run!

Katya is determined not to be like her father. She and her sister Alma had a very dysfunctional life with Len after her mother disappeared. She has insisted that she and Toby wear a professional uniform and instead of travelling around the country, she’s set up home in Cape Town.

But has she really changed that much? Has she really shaken off her past with her father?

Henrietta Rose-Innes has used the vibrant Cape Town surrounds as a backdrop for this very stark and somewhat bizarre tale of Katya’s attempt to put right the wrongs of her father as she tries to overcome her past. The characters are beautifully portrayed, Katya and Alma two very brave girls trying to finally live their lives away from their father. Len, the father is a very flawed individual and yet, his pull on the girls is still there making you ask the question; “Why is it so hard for children to break free from disrupted and dysfunctional parents?”

Treebeard

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

This is a strange, evocative novel about an exterminator who doesn't exterminate - instead, she relocates the pests, returning them to the wilderness. When she is asked to get rid of an infestation in an abandoned gated community, and live there alone in the meantime, things get even stranger. I feel like there are more metaphorical layers happening here than I realize, and while it was an interesting concept, I'm not sure I have it all figured out. Still a short, intriguing read.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was invited to read an advance copy of this novel by the publisher, which was furnished to me via NetGalley. I have read several recent publications by Gallic Books and I recommend their catalog whole-heartedly. Many of their writers are new to me. I will be eternally grateful because they introduced me to the dark noir stories of Pascal Garnier, which I have collected and am currently reading slowly so as to not run out too quickly. Sort of like eating all the chocolates in a box one per day just to make them last.

The Biblical city of Nineveh is famous for both its disobedience to God as well as its repentance—a study in contrasts. Rose-Innes’ fascinating novel is as well. Katya and her sister grew up basically homeless, carted around by their alternatively abusive and engaging father, who was a pest exterminator, and who has since left their lives. The two sisters have responded differently to their chaotic upbringing. While her sister has rebelled by embracing order and family unity, Katya, who follows in her father’s profession and perhaps more, remains adrift, without relationships, without much in terms of possessions, living in a chaotic hovel that threatens to fall down about her. She resists, at times violently, any attempt to order her world.

Then she gets a chance, through her work, to live in the modern Nineveh, in this case a new housing development in South Africa that is a study in perfection and order on the edge of wild and unruly nature. It offers all things to all people. But all is not right here. There are the bugs. Sheets of them. Oceans of them. Biblical plague quantities of them. Katya must clean out Nineveh or leave, a failure.

She is torn. She rejects attachment to people or things, but she is drawn to Nineveh and the promise of a clean, luxurious place to live, even if temporarily, because it stills a chaos inside her. And strangely enough, she can’t find any bugs—although she knows they are there, somewhere beneath the surface. Actually there is more beneath the surface, both in Nineveh and in herself, that needs finding, and it is only when she breaks through the thin veneer, both in the buildings and in herself, that the past in the form of her dark and dangerous father—and the bugs--invade in waves.

This novel would be ideal for a group discussion. Seldom has a writer taken me so far into a protagonist’s thoughts, motives, and fears. Rose-Innes’ character are masterfully drawn and their development is both realistic as well as enlightening. The layers of metaphor and symbolism in this novel would provide fuel for a group reading or a literature class even as it provides a wonderful and entertaining story. The South-African voice and setting made this novel even more interesting to me, although the themes are certainly universal—siblings, coming to grips with a parent’s neglect and even violence, and processing all of this to develop our own world view and perspective.

The bugs were wicked cool too…

I would like to thank Gallic books for allowing me to read and review this very fine novel.

5 stars.

Amazing!
Well written and intriguing, this tale makes you see a world beyond our perception. There is more than we can see and we are just a part of a complex ecosystem where cracks an creepy crawlers are just the beginning.

I loved the premise of this book – relocating rather than exterminating insects – and all the ideas that sparks about who/what has a right to live where.
It’s very descriptive, which didn’t give this reader a problem, even though I’m not a huge fan of insects!
But…I find books written in the present tense very difficult to get through. I think authors do it for immediacy, but I find it monotonous after a while. This was a stumbling-block for me. However, I shall look at the author’s other novels in case the tone is more varied, as overall this had a very original narrative.