[1]: viii [2]: 44 The first edition of Thirteen Cents outside South Africa was published by Ohio University Press in 2013 as part of the Modern African Writing series with an introduction by Professor Shaun Viljoen.
[3]: 37 As a crime novel and bildungsroman, it follows the 12-year-old orphan Azure and his efforts to survive on the streets of Cape Town amidst an underworld of gangsters, drug use, violence, and prostitution.
In the moment, Azure uses the remainder of his money to purchase a bomber jacket with an orange lining despite Gerald's warning that only he is allowed to wear this colour.
Azure's physical appearance is unique due to his blue eyes and dark skin, making it difficult to racially categorize him.
He is a nine-year-old boy whom Azure thinks is naughty because Bafana has a home to go back to but chooses to roam the streets and do drugs including sniffing glue and smoking buttons.
Richard – Another of Gerald's minions, takes Azure to the hospital after being beat up by Sealy and then locks him in a room inside a brothel for three days.
Some characterize Azure's homosexual acts as nothing more than a survival tactic and means of making money while others consider them as a part of his sexual growth and exploration.
In his introduction, Shaun Viljoen presents his reading of the narrative as "a bildungsroman of the boy's sexuality in formation" with the exploration of homosexuality as a possible subtext.
Although Azure condemns Bafana for doing hard drugs, he himself smokes marijuana several times throughout the novel in order to cope with his circumstances.
[1]: x Duiker continuously alternates between realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist narration as his protagonist experiences different realms of consciousness.
His sober depiction of Azure's lived reality as a street kid in Cape Town is interwoven with the character's hyperrrealist dream sequences.
The supernatural is also present through the supposed ability of other street kids to take the shape of rats or pigeons and of Gerald to transform into the T-rex.
[1]: xi Duiker's other novels feature similar supernatural and mythical elements which contribute to the author's critique of South African society.
Azure's voice and perspective is not metonymic of the black South African racial community but exists as an exceptional individual who is not easily categorized.
[1]: xi Thirteen Cents is set in Cape Town, South Africa, following the 1994 democratic election of Nelson Mandela, which formally marked the end of apartheid.
While Duiker does not comment on government affairs directly, the social and political context of post-apartheid South Africa as it applies to the individual constitutes a major part of the novel.
Shaun Viljoen contests that much of the book deals with Azure's "interrogation and exploration of the temporal and spatial dimensions of his urban world".
[1]: xv Azure must navigate the dangers presented by Cape Town's underworld of drugs and gangs and overcome the dehumanizing forces that "engulf and consume him on the streets"[1]: xvi His desperate attempt to escape these violent conditions requires him to physically remove himself from the city by climbing Table Mountain.
[1]: xxiii The use of untranslated words and code-switching by alternating between English and Afrikaans in the novel has become a common method of representing the coexistence of multiple languages in South African culture.
Shaun Viljoen views the "absence of authorial mediation between the language of the story and readers" as suggesting Duiker's "desire to construct an uncompromising, true to life account of a harsh reality".
[1]: xxv Contrarily, Kazeem Adebiyi asserts that these linguistic strategies celebrate the "hybridity which has come to be associated with postcolonial culture” and that they point to the "incipient rapprochement between hitherto adversarial codes in the country".
[5]: 54 Duiker's use of code-switching follows in the tradition of other South African novelists including Peter Abrahams, Nadine Gordimer, and Richard Rive.
Viljoen identifies three conventional boundaries of fictional representation which Duiker crosses in Thirteen Cents - "he graphically depicts sex between child and adult, he does so specifically in relation to homosexual acts, and he uses expletives and the language of insult in a sustained manner that goes beyond inflecting the prose with local color.
"[1]: xxv Thirteen Cents has been classified as a modern South African crime novel within the post-apartheid literary world.
[6]: 32 In 1998, K. Sello Duiker spent three and a half weeks living with street children in Cape Town after being asked to help find a boy who had gone missing.
In interviews, Duiker has identified Bessie Head, Ben Okri, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Dambudzo Marechera as his literary influences.
The genre moves away from a strict focus on racial binaries and political themes to more contemporary and intimate issues including violence, crime, poverty, and homosexuality.
[1]: xx In Thirteen Cents, Duiker transgresses the binary categories of black and white to explore broader themes of crime and corruption and homosexuality as experienced by Azure.
[1]: xxii Racial identity and hierarchy comes to the forefront of the novel when Gerald believes that Azure likened him to a kaffir and when Vincent attributes Allen's unhinged violence to his inability to conceal his coloured blood.
[2]: 44 The world depicted by Duiker through the detailed descriptions of Azure's struggle to survive on the streets is one of rampant violence and sexual exploitation.