Buy it here:
Synopsis:
An inventive and emotionally charged novel about fatherhood and family, loyalty and betrayal, inheritance and belonging.
Daniel is a worldly and urbane journalist living in London. His relationships appear to be sexually fulfilling but sentimentally meager. He has no relationships outside of sexual ones, and can seem at once callow and, at times, cold to the point of cruel with his lovers. Emotionally distant from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Following his father’s death, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man’s will: he will only inherit his half of his father’s considerable estate once he has spent time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn’t seen since they were boys, who lives on the old family farm in the Free State. Once there, Daniel discovers that the young son of the woman Theon lives with is seriously ill. With the conditions bearing on Daniel’s inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel with the boy to Japan for an experimental cure and a voyage that will change their lives forever.
S.J. Naudé’s masterful novel is many things at once: a literary page-turner full of vivid, unexpected characters and surprising twists; a loving and at times shockingly raw portrayal of its protagonist’s complex psyche; and a devastatingly subtle look into South Africa’s fraught recent history.
Review:
Fathers and Fugitives, a novel translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns, is split into five distinct parts, each with their own significant impact on the life of Daniel, a journalist from South Africa living in London. The first section is about a Serbian man whom he meets at an exhibition for an American minimalist painter. He quickly gets entangled with the man and his friend’s financial and legal problems. The second section of the novel is about taking care of his father in the final throes of dementia. The third is about going to South Africa to meet a cousin whom he had only seen once or twice when they were kids. One of his cousin’s staff members has a child that is very sick, and Daniel agrees to help him get medical treatment. The fourth section is Daniel trying to adopt an infant who has lost his mother. The final section has Daniel as an old man, visiting the life and memories that he had lived.
In each section, Daniel encounters people that need his help and generosity, and he generally does not tell them no. The care that he gives to his friends, his father, his cousin, and acquaintances is a burden to him that he shoulders with grace, and in the end, Daniel comes out as a good person, wanting to do the right thing in every encounter.
Fathers and Fugitives is a rich and captivating story that does such an incredible job introducing characters and making them such an impactful part of Daniel’s journey. With each new section and each new set of problems, Daniel navigates these situations with grace. He never gets frustrated, and he does what he needs to do to make sure that he does not let down his family. In the end, Daniel can go through his life and the people that he impacted, and he can be confident that he made the best decisions that he could make with the knowledge that he had at the time. This is a novel that really has makes me think a great deal about life and how atypical it is for someone to do his best in every situation to help people, even when there is little to no motivation besides goodness.
I received this ARC from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.
ghostvillehero 