ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the ways in which two post-Apartheid novels present their readers with unreadable lives, thereby challenging society's norms of recognition, which necessarily inflect the act of reading itself. It also concern with the ways in which Ken Barris's What Kind of Child and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret, in dealing with the exclusions of the supposedly inclusive "new" South Africa, present their readers with unreadable lives, thereby challenging the "modes of intelligibility" and codes of recognition that inform their reading. If Barris's novel inspires shame in its readers, they will quite involuntarily assume responsibility for the exclusions of home. Mourning what should never be lost is what gives Shukri's The Silent Minaret both its haunting quality and plot. The novel describes a summer in the lives of family members and friends mourning the abrupt disappearance of Issa Shamshuddin from his London flat in 2003.
