Triangulum. Masande Ntshanga

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      Praise for MASANDE NTSHANGA’S The Reactive

      “[The Reactive is] a searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa. With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government’s fatal policies on HIV & AIDS.”

       —Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers

      “Woozy, touching… a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory.”

       —Marian Ryan, Slate

      “With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts.”

       —VICE

      “[The Reactive] is an affecting, slow-burning novel that gives a fantastic sense of a particular place and time, and of the haunted inner life of its protagonist.”

       —Tobias Carroll, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

      “The Reactive is not only a beautiful novel, as fierce and formally innovative as it is lyrical and moving, but also a call to inhabit as well as to critique the symbolic structures of our world that can both empower and betray us.”

       —Nathan Goldman, Full Stop

      “Ntshanga deftly illustrates the growing pains of a new country through three friends who seem intent on obliterating their minds, but who nevertheless cling to their dreams.”

       —Dmitry Samarov, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

      “Gritty and revealing, Ntshanga’s debut novel offers a brazen portrait of present-day South Africa. This is an eye-opening, ambitious novel.”

       —Publishers Weekly

      “Ntshanga offers a devastating story yet tells it with noteworthy glow and flow that keeps pages turning until the glimmer-of-hope ending.”

       —Library Journal

      “Electrifying… [Ntshanga] succeeds at exploring major themes—illness, family, and, most effectively, class—while keeping readers in suspense. Ntshanga’s promising debut is both moving and satisfyingly complex.”

       —Kirkus Reviews

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      Printed in Canada

      All Rights Reserved COPYRIGHT→ © 2019 BY MASANDE NTSHANGA ISBN→ 9781937512774 Library of Congress Control Number available upon request. Also available as an Ebook. E-ISBN→ 9781937512781 Book Club & Reader Guide of questions and topics for discussion is available at twodollarradio.com

      SOME RECOMMENDED LOCATIONS FOR READING TRIANGULUM: Pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology!

      ANYTHING ELSE? Yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the prior written permission from the copyright holder and publisher. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means.

      WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

       for my parents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

       1. Foreword

       2. Triangulum

       I.The Machine

       II.Five Weeks in the Plague

       Part A

       Part B

       III.Triangulum

      “Memory itself is an internal rumour.”

      —George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Human Understanding

      “The future is forever a projection of the present.”

      —Kōbō Abe, Inter Ice Age 4

      “some like to imagine

      a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars”

      —Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars

      “To administer the laws of apartheid, the bureaucracy grew enormously. By 1977, about 540,000 Whites were employed in the public sector […] and Afrikaners occupied more than 90 percent of the top positions. The vast majority of the white