Queer International Commingling
Book Talk with S.J. Naudé on Fathers and Fugitives, literary translation, gay bars
“Remarkable, he thinks, what boredom—such a sequence of empty, hardly varying days—can do to you. You’d rather introduce some variables, rather confront adventure or risk, than wander around the Tate Modern in your own cloud of silence. Or sit day after day on your own in front of a computer, your hands paralysed on the keyboard. Let what must be, be.”
At turns laconic and lyrical, S.J. Naudé’s fourth book, Fathers and Fugitives, captures the uncertainty that can suddenly surround one’s life circumstances. Written in five parts, the book tells the story of Daniel, a gay South African writer who finds himself at sea. Daniel has built a career as a journalist and spends his life mostly alone. When he meets two enigmatic Serbian men, he’s suddenly thrust into a new narrative, through which his life begins to unfold. Translated from Afrikaans by South African novelist Michiel Heyns, the novel offers luminous insights on a life spent in between.
Naudé is the author of two collections of short stories, The Alphabet of Birds and Mad Honey, and two novels, The Third Reel and Fathers and Fugitives. We spoke about the book, gay bars around the world, and literary translation.
We’re a few months past the release of Fathers and Fugitives. How are you feeling as it’s found its readers?
You know, I'm immediately thinking back of an interview I did with the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst. One of the things he said which really struck me was whenever he publishes a novel, it takes him several interviews to figure out what the novel is about. There's something around that process of talking about the book and waiting to see what the reception will be, and how far those things can be removed from the writing process, which is obviously an activity one does on one’s own––months and years often spent in front of a computer.
I've published a few books before, and my first market is always in South Africa. It's an odd feeling, having sent a book into the world. Another fellow South African novelist once said when people buy the book off the shelves it feels a bit like naked pictures of yourself being handed around. Even though one doesn't necessarily write auto-fiction, I think it is an exposure of the self at some level. All of it's dredged up from one's own subconscious.
It's always interesting in South Africa. It's a smaller world. In some ways, the reception of the book is somewhat predictable, not necessarily in the sense of being positively or negatively reviewed, but you know you'll get reviews in an array of publications, whereas in the United States and the U.K., one has to see whether it's broadly reviewed at all, and books can feel like they disappear. I think I'm tentatively optimistic and wary and apprehensive and happy and uncertain all at the same time.
That's a logically complicated mix of emotions. Where did the novel begin for you?
It's hard for me to say. I think it often takes a whole lifetime for the gestation of a novel in one's mind, and you're not always aware of the origins and points of inspiration.
The book is made up of five sections. It's a novel, but it also has hybrid qualities––the first four parts could be read as short stories. The first part of the book did, in fact, start out as a short story. Oddly and aptly, given the political era we're in in the U.S., I remember during the first presidency of Donald Trump, he at one point referred to African countries as shithole countries. Someone mentioned to me that when that was reported on in a Serbian newspaper, the Serbian word that was used for shithole was “the place where the wolves mate.” That phrase really stayed with me. Also, quite a few years before that, I visited a retrospective of the American artist, Agnes Martin. I'm a huge fan of hers. The Serbian translation of the Donald Trump quote and then this specific exhibition—somehow, around that, that first part of novel started revolving and was built out into something completely different.
The book moves from London to Belgrade to Tokyo to Cape Town. In these different locations, Daniel seeks out gay bars and signs of other gay people. What was on your mind as you thought about the gay community in this international way?
I think, particularly if one comes from a childhood in a country where social, historical conditions didn't make it comfortable to be gay, gay people from the West tend to move around a lot, especially early in their lives. And often, I think there's something about escape.
When people buy the book off the shelves it feels a bit like naked pictures of yourself being handed around. Even though one doesn't necessarily write auto-fiction, I think it is an exposure of the self at some level. All of it's dredged up from one's own subconscious.
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in South Africa, where it was really quite impossible to be queer. I made my own escape as soon as possible. I studied in the U.K. and then in New York and, from there, moved to London. Part of it is just my own experience, and I often find that when a narrative is stuck, it helps moving it to some other place.
A previous novel of mine focused on young queer people in the 80s in London and Berlin. I got interested in that world of queer international commingling. It's a sphere I come back to again and again in my work.
I have to say, I was in Milan earlier this week for work, and one of the first things I did when I had a free moment was look up a gay bar.
Exactly, it’s a way of engaging with a new place. Often, I judge cities by the feeling, the texture, the niceness or not of the gay subculture and the gay areas in those cities. I think of Paris, which is not one of my favorite cities—I find it a quite hostile place in some ways—but then its gay area and subculture seems to be very warm and welcoming. It's quite odd how one can feel about a city, but as you say, it is often a way to connect. And it's exciting as well, of course; the way gay desire plays out on the streets of big western cities is quite nice.
I'd love to hear how you see that gay community from where you sit now in Cape Town. Place is essential to this book; a lot takes place in Cape Town and the Free State. Do you have reflections on the feeling of that community in either or both of those locations?
I think both country and I have changed a lot since I left in my youth. The country, of course, has moved on from the apartheid days to the post-apartheid world. It's still a complicated, and in many ways messy, place with great economic inequalities and a lot of contestation of cultural space and language and resources and so on.
Cape Town is actually very queer friendly these days, and it’s a very comfortable place from that perspective to be, even though the country on the whole, with all its history and political complexities, is not always such a comfortable place to be.
My own life has moved. Not only did I leave my early career in law in New York and London behind and came back to South Africa and started writing here, but I'm older now. I have a husband, and we've had a child through the process of surrogacy, and he's now six years old. So yeah, I certainly spend less time in gay bars and European cities [laughs]. Life has changed a lot. I'm certainly far happier as a writer than I was as a lawyer.
One thing that I think is underneath this conversation is also this feeling of rootlessness. In the book, Daniel feels this both as a gay person and as a writer. In the beginning, he encounters the Serbian men, and he's thrust into a story but doesn't really know what he's doing. Do you see resonance between the rootlessness of Daniel as a writer and Daniel as a queer person?
I'm not sure I formulated it to myself in those terms while I was writing it, but yeah. I think all of the male, gay characters in this book come from social, cultural environments and a specific era in which it certainly wasn't comfortable being gay. The Serbian men's fathers are not present in the book, but one can infer that they might have had fathers who were perhaps somewhat authoritarian, domineering figures in the same way that Daniel's and his cousin Theon's fathers were. I think they’re all fugitives, as the title implies. They're all fleeing from something, from fathers, from countries, and they become rootless in the process, becomes in-between figures. Daniel says his real home is in the frozen skies above Africa, on an airplane back and forth between north and south.
Daniel has an early career as a consultant in the corporate world, and then later on becomes a journalist/author, but he also gives up the writing after a while. Daniel is this cosmopolitan figure with all the concomitant drift that implies. I was interested, then, in re-parochializing him—sticking him back not in the comfortable world of Cape Town but in the rural heartland of the country where his family's roots lie and seeing where that goes.
I want to talk about process too. On 28 there's this passage: “Eventually he thought he could bring into being an Afrikaans text that has next to nothing in common with his original sentences.” This book was translated from Afrikaans. How do you feel the novel changes from one language to the next?
I have a bit of a history with translation. I've written four books and translated the first three into English myself. The notion of self-translation is quite interesting. It has its benefits. It allows you to do whatever the hell you want. You don't have to listen to any author. You can make changes, and you can change translation strategies. With this book, I wanted to experiment, see what the outcome would be if I let someone else translate it, and it's very good.
I quite like a very smooth translation, one that isn't too close to the Afrikaans. Sometimes you translate with great fidelity and in a way which might make the text in the target language sound quite strange, a little bit odd syntactically or in terms of vocabulary or idiomatically. I quite like a smooth text, one that reads as if it were written in English. Of course, there are always gains and losses with translation. Every language has a whole world view encapsulated in it, so from that perspective, you don't retain everything. I think in some European languages, authors are writing in anticipation of translation, and I think one should be careful of that. Once you start adjusting the way you write in your source language, I think that is problematic and things get lost from the beginning.
Of course, there are always gains and losses with translation. Every language has a whole world view encapsulated in it, so from that perspective, you don't retain everything.
That point about the world view is so interesting. This translation is gorgeous. The writing is so lyrical—there are passages I wanted to live inside of.
Thank you. That's very kind.
Hearing you talk about how the world view embedded in Afrikaans—to me, as a reader in English, that is inaccessible, but I think that's one of the curiosities with the problem that you're outlining—what could be lost by writing towards an eventual English translation?
Absolutely, I think some of it can get lost, and just on a language level as well, if you start genericizing what you're writing with a view to making it more translatable, that's a very dangerous route to take.
I want to ask about your influences. I had in mind André Aciman with your writing about place and relationships between parents and children.
That’s interesting. I've only read one of his novels. Yes, it's always quite hard for me to know what my influences are: some people you admire but are inimitable and others you might not admire as much but you might write like them.
I'm quite a fan of two of my fellow countrymen: J.M. Coetzee and Damon Galgut, who won the Booker Prize for his book, The Promise. I'm quite a fan of Colm Tóibín as well, Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian author. An American writer I'm very fond of is Brandon Taylor. He is someone whose writing is unlike anyone else that I know.
Marilynne Robinson is quite an interesting one. I was reluctant to start reading just because deep down there’s some religious source for the work, but it's just extraordinary writing.
I love Housekeeping. I think that's such a gorgeous book.
I haven't actually read Housekeeping, but that's been recommended to me. The recent one that I read was Lila, and that was also absolutely exquisite.
What's exciting to you in fiction, with your reading or writing, or even more broadly, other things you're drawing creative inspiration from these days?
When I was a depressed corporate lawyer in New York and London and sat in boardrooms until three o'clock in the morning fighting with people, part of my survival was looking at visual art. I'm a huge fan of lots of visual artists. I mentioned Agnes Martin, but also Cornelia Parker or Louise Bourgeois or Anselm Kiefer.
I'm a big architecture fan as well. Architecture always features in my work. When I travel, I always chase art exhibitions and buildings, and film as well. My first novel, a book called The Third Reel, which wasn't actually published in the U.S., is the story of a young man who finds in the 1980s in London the first reel of a lost 1930s Jewish German film and then searches for the other two reels. In that novel, I tried to get as close as one can to filmmaking through writing a book. I think in some sense, I'm jealous of other forms of art making. There's always a sense that I try to get closer to visual art or architecture or filmmaking in my books.
Order Fathers and Fugitives here.
Reference Section
I was in conversation with Lyta Gold at Print: A Bookstore on Monday. Lyta’s book, Dangerous Fictions, comes at an important moment, and we spoke at length about book bans and political action through fiction and reading.
Note: I earn a small commission when you shop for books through my Bookshop links, and I appreciate your support, which helps keep Referential free.