FICTION CAN AND should be a slippery beast where recognisable fact is conjoined with a stack of other things to create a whole that is at once compelling and unstoppable, nonsensical and mythical, but one that speaks a truth which is deeper than fact. In her debut novel of 2023, Megan Choritz achieves this, but Lost Property is not a tale that takes you easily from A to B. It’s a little like being alive in this world rotten with contradiction and too many options, as it is. Crafted with a candour that will bring goosebumps, it’s an effortless read that presents a whole lot of ghouls with all their embarrassing flaws intact.

And it is here where we meet Laine. She’s the daughter of an average upper-middle class family which characterised the north-eastern suburbs of 1970s Johannesburg. They’re flawed. They’re crass. They’re ambitious and hypocritical. They’re loud and offensive. And they’re ignominiously privileged. Laine is the wife of someone, at some point. For 15 years. She’s the sanctuary of an old Labrador called Arthur, and one given to understanding situations backwards, like most of us are.

It’s also a story about a little girl called Tina, who knows where the safe places in her world are, and understands they’re not necessarily in the space where she lives with three generations of women of her own family. But then there are darlings and starlings and stars and cobwebs that hold everything together, and keep other things veiled.

Rather than offering a chronology that is palatable, Choritz divides her tale into 54 parts, some rooted in whimsy, others in blood. There are parts that are difficult to read because the authorial voice strips herself so naked of filter and says things so overwhelmingly raw in their truth that you, the reader, feel afraid of your own thoughts. And each part, as if you were in a session of therapy with the central character, takes on a wholesome, invasive yet dream-like state, and significance that reeks and haunts into the interstices of Laine’s thinking patterns and her unfolding life.

Do you remember being traumatised by the screech of a primary school teacher’s fingernails on a blackboard? Do you recall throwing a stone at another child with the hope and fear that it would hurt them, after they had hurt you with words? The reality of fiercely believing something even though in your heart, you know it to be false? This is the kind of journey that Choritz’s Lost Property will take you on. And it won’t leave you disconnected from the story itself. Yes, it’s Laine’s tale, but it bleeds into coming-of-age madness that we all go through in one way or another. Thoughts that are almost too huge and violent to put into words.

It’s an essay into apartheid era life that was about complacency and thoughtless discrimination, as it is a paean to the black woman who was employed by Laine’s parents as a domestic worker. Dora, like Nomsa Dhlamini in Steven Cohen’s work, or Christine and Ukhokho in Yael Farber’s Mies Julie, is an inviolable goddess, the spine of the work.

Lost Property is about the secrets one keeps and those that others withhold from you, and the tale unfolds in ways that keeps you turning pages with a dry mouth, because the turns of events are shocking. And yet, you want to hold on to each page because of the beauty of the text. Choritz uses the language of birds and sentences cut with sharp edges to tell a story, muscular in its reach, hard-hitting in its nexus.

It’s an astonishing work which was born of lockdown during Covid and eviscerates an understanding of South African identity in a way that will chill you for a long time.

Lost Property: A Novel is written by Megan Choritz and published by Melinda Ferguson Books (2023), Cape Town. Cover design and typography by Wilna Combrinck.