Physics for Poets
Set in Durban, South Africa, Charl is a Goth in the last year of 80’s high school. Apartheid is in death-throes and like his country he finds himself the pariah of society at large.
He and his girlfriend, Belinda, two middle-class teenagers, spend the remainder of their disintegrating relationship drinking, smoking and groping their way through the summer holidays.
Pensive, rash and ultimately lazy, Charl has little going for him. When Belinda dumps him, finally tiring of his self-absorbed emptiness, Charl finds the unsolved ghost truth of his father keeps pushing him further down.
Charl cuts his own path through to the new South Africa, from school suspensions; staggering through a disaster-inducing relationship with the girl of his dreams; dropping acid in a club filled with lava; selling APLA T-shirts; and meeting Nelson Mandela after toilet sex, without seeming to make many any choices at all.
