S.J. Naudé’s novel Fathers and Fugitives is one of the most moving books I have read all year, a book as surprising as it is unsettling.
Damon Galgut wrote of the book:
“Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.”
In his own words, here is S.J. Naudé’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Fathers and Fugitives:
Fathers and Fugitives (Europa Editions, September 10, 2024), my new novel and US debut, tells the story of Daniel, a South African journalist living in London. His father’s will compels him to visit his long-lost cousin on the old family farm in the Free State, deep in the South African hinterland. Daniel and his cousin then travel with a seriously ill boy to Japan for an experimental cure and a voyage that will change their lives forever.
I sometimes envy modes of art-making other than writing – the immediacy of visual art, for instance, or the tools available to filmmakers. Also, the way music envelops the listener and can reshape their emotions so swiftly. My writing is often preoccupied with such forms of art. It occasionally tries, through text, to get close to being art or film or music. My previous novel The Third Reel featured a (fictional) 1930s German-Jewish film and was deeply preoccupied with film-making. A story in my debut collection The Alphabet of Birds tried to imagine a contemporary dancer’s body from within. Another featured the sounds of a (fictional) band fusing African and avant garde Western music.
I tend to write in complete silence. But occasionally I may hear a song or a piece of music that is so startlingly evocative, and to which I respond so instantly and intensely, that it can spawn an entire story. Or a cascade of images or phrases or sentences. I will then listen to that song or piece of music obsessively while I write, that fleeting initial feeling having become the driving force. I would then write in a frenzy, racing against it slipping away. There are also times when I reach an impasse and listen to new music in the hope that it will provide an aural map, showing me alternative paths towards the light.
Fathers and Fugitives is not primarily about music or film or art. This time round, though, I constantly listened to music while writing. Never on earphones, though, which make me feel alone and claustrophobic. It is necessarily hard to formulate what happens in the space between the notes and the words being written down. There is no clear thread that binds the songs that formed the soundtrack to this novel to each other, or to the text itself. One may, of course, intentionally or unconsciously capture something of the feelings the music arouses – sensations that often seem to exist in-between nameable emotions. But sometimes you resist the music, writing against the sound. The different songs each connects to, or disconnects from, the text in a singular way.
This is what insisted on being played as I was writing this book:
Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, “Funny Time of Year”
Gibbons was the vocalist for Portishead. Rustin Man is Paul Webb, formerly the bassist of Talk Talk. From a quiet, unassuming sonic beginning – tentative, delicate, full of dread and anxiously, yearningly claustrophobic – this song slowly and relentlessly opens up and escalates into something compulsive and overwhelming, before fading away like a gust of wind. It is form-defying. This refusal to follow the conventional structures of a pop song mirrors the insistence of my material on shattering some traditional form constraints. My novel is constantly seeking out a new frame in an attempt to capture some of the contesting truths that make up South African political and emotional realities. It ends up being something of a hybrid, form-wise – a novel in five parts, four of which could also be read as stand-alone stories, the fifth being an epilogue pulling the rest together.
John Grant, “Pale Green Ghosts”
Grant, the queer American polyglot musician who lives in Iceland, makes music as tight as a drum in this song – minimalist and expansive at the same time. Never boring or predictable, which a novel shouldn’t ever be either. When I was writing the first part of Fathers and Fugitives, in which Daniel strikes up a relationship with two manipulative Serbian guys whose intentions remain hard to read, this song played several times. The tone in this part of the novel is indeterminately, quietly menacing, and it feels as if things could go in any direction at any time. The song is a little different in atmosphere – overtly ominous and clearly going nowhere good. But the music and the book are certainly in conversation.
The Irrepressibles, “In this shirt”
There are thousands of songs about mourning a lost relationship. But it takes an experimental queer pop band like The Irrepressibles (British musician Jamie McDermott working in collaborations with various artists) to convey the helplessness of that state in such a manner that you can physically feel it. One of the most intensely emotion-provoking pop songs ever. Over the top, yes, but you cannot resist it. I listened to this when I was working out the shifting sands of the complex relationship between my protagonist Daniel and his cousin Theon, and especially when I wrote about their rather forlorn exploration of the gay nightlife of Tokyo while the young boy they are in charge of is in hospital. Even though this has little to do with reflecting on an ended relationship, the emotional force of this song can somehow help to evoke the nuances of an awkward, nascent relationship too.
Woodkid, “The Land of All” and “The Golden Age” (version featuring Max Richter’s “Embers”)
This French singer-songwriter and film director writes songs and directs videos for mainstream US pop artists, but is more adventurous and interesting when he does his own thing. In both of the above songs, the music is animated by a gentle but defiant queer spirit, in the same way that I hope my novel is. The short film accompanying the above collaboration with composer Max Richter on Youtube is extraordinary, especially the sensitivity with which it evokes the responses of young children to the wounds and balms of family life. The song and film are ten minutes long, but feels spacious, even epic. This novel is my shortest book, but encompasses an entire life, and takes in disparate corners of the world. I hope it disorients readers similarly by feeling expansive, despite being quite short.
Talk Talk, “Happiness is Easy” and “The Rainbow”
One can swim in the albums Colour of Spring and Spirit of Eden, from which these songs originate, like in a light-drenched sea. These masterpieces represent the pinnacle of Mark Hollis’s soundscapes. With its unnerving moments of dissonant children’s voices and its lonely saxophone, “Happiness is Easy” first unsettles, then lets the mind float to some distant, transparent place. In “The Rainbow” the lacunae – the brief, perfectly framed moments of silence – and the fleeting ghosts of notes capture something of the process, when you write, of trying to capture the instructions of the unconscious in sentences, before they dissolve into thin air. Like the notes, the words are barely there, and you often only have moments to seize them.
Górecki, “Symphony no 3 (Final Movement)’’ – played by the Polish national Radio Symphony with vocals by Beth Gibbons
Gibbons’s voice in this (for her) unusual context is barely controlled: quivering, dagger-like. One can always trust Gibbons to insert the scalpel and expose the finest grains of hard-to-name emotions and start haunting her listener indelibly, imprinting chords and musical phrases into their mind. Exactly the sort of thing you are trying to do when you write. Like Gibbons, the writer should also know how to hold back, though. Never give anything away unnecessarily; focus relentlessly on the accuracy and purity of voice.
Anohni and the Johnsons, “Hope There’s Someone”
This song captures the essential state of human aloneness better than most. It focuses the mind on this short stint between being born alone and dying alone, on how human relationships can illuminate or deform life by bringing joy, consolation, pain, loneliness. My protagonist Daniel and his cousin Theon attempt to be fathers in a country where the brutality of our history, and the impact it has had on their lives, make it barely possible to be a good father. Yet they try. Isn’t the flickering but inextinguishable flame of hope for – and the tireless attempts to achieve – meaningful connection within the brief blinding arc of a human life not what this book, and indeed every book, is ultimately about?
S.J. Naudé is a writer from South Africa. He is the author of two collections of short stories and two novels. Fathers and Fugitives is his first novel to appear in the United States. Naudé is the winner of the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, and the kykNet-Rapport prize, and is the only writer to win the Hertzog Prize twice consecutively in its 100-year history. His first novel, The Third Reel, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times prize. His work has been published in Granta and other journals in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and Italy.