June 22, 2006
By Gary Cummiskey
Place: Jacana
Price: R135
The multitalented Aryan Kaganof has previously produced novels such as Hectic!, Stones Again and Laduma (as AK Thembeka). Kaganof's fiction tends to be drawn directly from his own life, but most especially so in his latest novel, Uselessly, which focuses on his relationship, and reconciliation, with his once-estranged father.
Constructed as a series of letters to God by the male narrator JJ Uselessly, the novel constantly shifts between past and present. Back in the early 1960s, Harry Uselessly, JJ's father, who prefers to arrange abortions for his pregnant lovers than use a condom, makes Daphne Nobody pregnant.
Though Harry gives Daphne money to have an abortion, she decides to have the child instead. JJ grows up in with his mother in a flat in Joubert Park, slowly beginning to despise her for her constant complaints about blacks and Jews, and will eventually regard the most irritating thing about her as being that she never realised how stupid she was.
Years later, as an adult filmmaker and poet in Holland, JJ receives a letter from Harry's current girlfriend, telling him that Harry has been very ill, and that it would be a good time for JJ to return to SA, as his father wants to see him.
The novel thus focuses mainly on the reconciliation between ageing father and near-middle-aged son, and the scenes move from JJ's interaction with his father in Cape Town and his own life in Joburg, having his car stolen, living off his girlfriend, spending almost every spare moment writing, and refusing to work for a living.
Indeed, the bond that seems to connect father and son is their mutual unconventional attitude to society, their refusal to be tied to commitments, a need for independence, and an admitted misogynist attitude towards women. To show allegiance to his father, JJ changes his surname from Nobody to Uselessly.
The tone of the novel is generally humourous, biting, irreverent and satirical. Yet beneath the humour there is sadness, tenderness, nostalgia and regret.
Some of the warmest scenes involve JJ's recollections as a child playing the role of DJ during parties in his mother's flat, and his walks with the family maid to visit her husband in prison
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There is an early indication of his disdain for material possessions as he throws his toys over the balcony into the street below. There is also a silent scream of emotional pain as JJ recalls how his mom would verbally abuse him, saying that she should have used a knitting needle on herself and flushed him down the toilet.
Harry generally comes across as a somewhat selfish, hedonistic and miserly character, and his chuckling remark that he had sold what was to become the notorious Vlakplaas torture farm to the Nationalist government in the 1970s, seems callous (in fact he says he should have charged them more).
But in a scene, set towards the end of his life, when he phones JJ and weeps, saying he feels terrible that he left JJ to be raised alone with his crazed mother, there is a momentary insight into a vulnerable and guilt-ridden man.
Fairly early in the novel, JJ is puzzled that God has never met Harry in Heaven, because, despite "the abortions and that Nazi stuff", he was essentially a very good man.
Like Nietzsche (who also appears in the novel) Kaganof questions conventional notions of good and evil, and his making God the recipient of JJ's letters, as well as the references to Harry as being The Devil and Daphne as The Fallen Woman, are not incidental.
To conventional thinking, Harry is a selfish villain and Daphne a discarded victim, but in Daphne's embittered and abusive attitude towards JJ, and Harry's later warm reconciliation with him, we are forced to reassess such surface attitudes. But irrespective of parents' intentions, the bottom line is, as Harry quotes from Philip Larkin: "They f**k you up your mom and dad, they may not mean to but they do."
Uselessly is an enjoyable, engrossing and sometimes disturbing novel, which throughout its almost 200 pages rarely loses momentum. Written in a casual, colloquial style, it is a definite read.
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