Armchair travel to ICELAND with Katie for Vegout Voyage
Novel set in LONDON and SOUTH AFRICA
12th September 2025
Fathers and Fugivies by S J Naudé, novel set in London and South Africa.
TR: Michiel Heyns
“A novel of stylised dislocation … this is a work of hypnotic, self-annihilating prose” (The Wall Street Journal)
The novel opens with a dispassionate portrayal of Daniel, a writer living in London who finds himself with two Serbian lodgers. My fear for his safety was rife as the two unknowns are welcomed into his spare bedroom but his disconnection enables him to accommodate them in his flat without any observable qualms. Later he acknowledges that he had hoped they might “bring some colour into his days and shock his fiction into a new direction..”. He continues about his life, going to the theatre and art shows.
Their togetherness evolves into a kind of lacklustre ménage-à-trois and at one point the two Serbs disappear and then invite Daniel to join them for a camping holiday in Southern Germany. Alcohol fuels their stay and a brief and soulless sexual liaison with another Serbian (Daniel knows because of a tattoo on the man’s torso) is just the pre-amble to having some of their items stolen. They then all head to a derelict suburb in Belgrade, where things take a more sinister turn and money appears to be the issue.
He then turns his attention to his father, whose dementia is taking over his life, and Daniel relocates for a period to Cape Town to be with him. There he tries to regale his father with details of his relationships, with a distinct punishing edge towards his parent because he has always experienced his father as an unbending tyrant, conceited and prejudice-prone.
Once his father dies, Daniel is forced to spend a month living with his estranged cousin Theon (who is in remission from cancer), in order to gain his inheritance. Theon is living in curious circumstances, surrounded by lodgers and it is not long before Daniel and Theon are off to Tokyo with a very sick child for specialist treatment. Here again it is assumed that Daniel’s perceived wealth will facilitate the trip and the treatment.
The book is divided into 5 sections and the last two have a distinctly different feel to the previous three. The style turns darker and becomes tightly compacted, introducing more characters who, in turn, become the focus. The setting has moved to the Free State.
The writing style is certainly engaging and the author is a very concise and firm storyteller. There is a lot packed into this short book of just over 200 pages. It is intense, weird at times, encompassing big themes of loss and death, familial relationships and how money can become an overarching issue; ultimately the author ponders the question of what it means to live a life to the full. The settings all come to life and there is a real resonance about the descriptions.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)
Please wait...
