Tongues

Antjie Krog is doing strange things to my humours* - in the Olde and Middle English sense of the word. I am currently reading A Change of Tongue (I know, I know - please don't huk me - it's only been on my bookshelf since 2005!) and I'm finding it quite a challenge not to behave like the nutter that everyone moves away from on public transport. (Oh-oh, is this another metro story in disguise?!)

It's the kind of book that has me laugh out loud - it tickles my sense of humour to the point where the only way to enjoy it is to guffaw and erupt in face-creasing laughter.

Yet not three pages later, while still sitting in the same seat on the same metro line surrounded by roughly the same passengers, Antjie has me in floods of tears. And by floods I mean cartoon-style teardrops popping out of eyes at high speed. They connect with the face under the cheekbone and then hurtle off the edge of the jaw. They drip onto chest and dissolve, exchanging bright colours for darker shades of wet, into clothing. And they keep coming. Until two pages later, through sniffles, Antjie allows me to giggle and grunt again.

I'm only on page 29. I don't know if my lungs, eyeballs and clothes are going to be able to sustain this for the remaining 338 pages =giggle=sniff=LOL



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*also spelled Humor (from Latin “liquid,” or “fluid”), in early Western physiological theory, one of the four fluids of the body that were thought to determine a person's temperament and features. In the ancient physiological theory still current in the European Middle Ages and later, the four cardinal humours were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile); the variant mixtures…