Sunnyside Sal Reviewed by Mick Raubenheimer

[Deep South Publishing]

Teenhood is a strange place, twilit and melancholy, filled with slow mists of lament, nightmares in the mirror, and the heady whiff of future sex. It is an awkward space in which we begin to invent our future selves. It is also intrinsically mythic, with more than a touch of magic in the air. This, perhaps, is why pop music is so obsessed with the place, why it haunts literature and above all poetry. It is a space of giant romance and infinite kitsch, cliche’ as big as the sky and every bit as subtle and touching.

Highly respected playwright, musician and all-round man of words, Anton Krueger, has written an ode to a friend, and to a friendship which which took shape in this peculiar, rambling kingdom of teenhood. Sunnyside Sal perfectly captures the mystical innocence and arbitrary mythologies, the silly and immensely important codes and secret languages of the best of teenage friendships. Beginning in South Africa’s eighties, the crude giant of Apartheid approaching its fall, it is also a bazaar of loud cultural clashes - above all that between the sensitively personal and the mass-produced social. Dope and khaki, bright freedom and obtuse suppression, the disrupting gift which is the discovery of girls.

A slim, elegantly written thing, Sunnyside Sal is a labour of love honed by fine craftsmanship. It is also, in a more distant way, a study of how relationships and lives ebb, how people sometimes lose themselves in themselves, never to return - roughly two-thirds along, Mr. Krueger becomes more explicit in his gaze, and for a disruptive period seeks to analyse his friend, and uneasily drags brute life into the supplety of his fiction. His reasons for doing so are deserved, and, indeed, his own, but it does detract from an otherwise gracefully woven fiction. Time well spent between pages.

[originally published in Muse magazine]