Sometimes There Is a Void Zakes MDA and J. M. Coetzee, the two most acclaimed South African novelists of the past 20 years, could be writing about different countries - and, in a way, they are. Coetzee excels at sparsely populated fictions of gnawing interiority. His socially uneasy and anguished solitaries, often academics like himself, wrestle with psychological dilemmas and metaphysical maladies. In contrast, Mda's greatest gift is his Dickensian social range, his ability to generate characters from diverse backgrounds, colluding and colliding across the barriers erected to divide them. Where Coetzee is drawn to existential hinterlands, Mda takes us deep into his country's literal interior, those rural regions that, in most South African writing, are pushed to the margins. Mda's gregarious and transfixing memoir, "Sometimes There Is a Void," chronicles the upheavals that have sharpened his skills as a wide-ranging social observer. Like V. S. Naipaul's, his imagination has been shaped by three societies. At age 15, Mda abruptly fled into exile, following his radical father to Basutoland (now Lesotho), the tiny, impoverished mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa. Thrust into a disorienting new environment, Mda developed an outsider's protective camouflage, inhabiting this alien world with a watchful self-protectiveness that doubled as curiosity. When, in adulthood, he moved back to South Africa and later to teaching posts in America (these days, he migrates annually between Johannesburg and Athens, Ohio), he reaped the artistic payoff of his disrupted beginnings. He has learned to convert the absence of a bedrock sense of social normalcy into a talent for living on the qui vive. In art as in life, Mda has honed his survivor's talent for deft self-reinvention. He began as a cartoonist and painter: during his dissolute Lesotho youth, he sometimes ended up at the Holiday Inn Casino, flogging his work to tourists. Later, during the anti-apartheid tumult of the late 1970s and "80s, he morphed into a playwright of political resistance, becoming one of his country's most celebrated dramatists. But in 1990, as Nelson Mandela's release from prison was inaugurating a new era, an image began to obsess Mda - that of a professional mourner who ekes out a living from township funerals. From that character, his first novel, "Ways of Dying," grew. Now, almost two decades later, he is best known internationally for his fiction. While many South African writers seemed to lose their footing after apartheid's official demise, unable to adjust creatively to the collapse of old certitudes, Mda has flourished, discovering fresh stories. "Sometimes There Is a Void" isn't a typical contemporary memoir, the kind shaped around a trauma and featuring a small cast of mostly nuclear family members. Mda's book reads more like a traditional autobiography; he has given us a chronicle that is, if anything, too expansive, introducing us to more named, real-life characters than many folks have Facebook friends. The swirling crowds are a measure of the wide, worldly life Mda has led, but some thematic selectivity would have sharpened the narrative. Early on, he seems torn between two rival impulses: sticking to the book's most absorbing story line - the making of the artist - and documenting the factional infighting among Lesotho's political parties and the South African exiles who took shelter there. This second impulse derives from an understandable desire to correct the historical record. Mda's father was an influential member of the Pan Africanist Congress, a rival to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Mda seems impelled by filial loyalty to honor the role his father's party played in liberation politics - a role that, with the A.N.C."s rise to power, has largely been suppressed. But at times the level of detail he provides belongs to a different, more specialist book, dragging his dynamic personal story off course. For the most part, though, Mda's autobiographical voice strikes a fine balance between outward engagement and inner exploration. His self-revelations and self-recriminations are intimate and intelligent without shrinking to narrow self-involvement. His writing becomes the most animated when he allows his deepest passions breathing room. As in his novels - from "The Heart of Redness" to "The Whale Caller" - a profound environmental consciousness informs his autobiography, an attentiveness to the vital interplay between rural communities and the ecological forces that sustain them. Mda provides terrific portraits, for example, of his visits to a beekeeping project he devised and has helped sustain among rural women in the mountainous border regions of the Eastern Cape. In such scenes, we feel his passion for his forebears" scenically rich but economically precarious lands. We feel too his community-mindedness, even as he remains alert to the psychological vagaries of rivalry and cooperation. From the honey the women gather, they can garner financial self-sufficiency. Mda delights in their successes, but one also senses a second layer to his delight - the relish he takes in being a gatherer of stories. Rob Nixon's latest book is "Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor."