By Robert Allen Papinchak

Award-winning Afrikaans writer S. J. Naude’s slim, stunning Fathers and Fugitives (with a very Turgenev-like title) starts with a queer throuple. If the unsettling novel were a rom-com, the meet cute moment would occur when Daniel, a gay journalist living in London, encountered a same-sex Serbian couple—Oliver and Yugo—at the Tate Modern during a retrospective exhibit of Agnes Martin, an American minimalist. Oliver is a film enthusiast; Yugo, a waiter. What looks like it might be a brief, casual fervent hookup becomes a deeply dark, shocking situationship.

Against his better judgment but driven by desperate desire for connection, Daniel impulsively invites the disarming duo to his flat for a glass of wine. Their unequal menage a trois quickly evolves into a dependency when Daniel succumbs to financing all of the couple’s requests—from cigarettes and food to tickets to the English National Opera (an “insipid American” work), other art exhibitions, movies, and first rate camping gear for a fateful three night getaway.

Eventually, after more than a month that includes frequent sex in various permutations (often “systematically, purposefully”) Oliver and Yugo convince Daniel to buy them airline tickets to a “relatively unvisited part of Southern Germany” before they hook up again in the outskirts of Belgrade. Daniel wonders why he is there “in the company of these two increasingly morose and remote men.” Their unbalanced involvement ends in a shocking, unforeseen tragedy that eventually sends Daniel back home to South Africa to tend to his dying octogenarian father.

From there, the striking novel takes several significant, remarkable turns. There is an electrifying sequence when Daniel becomes aware of his father’s corpse:

He bends forward, listening with his ear close to his father’s nose, puts his hand on the heart, feels the pulse. He does these things with the grave air of a doctor. The heart is no longer beating. His father’s body is cold, the wrist in Daniel’s hand already stiff.

There is an emotionally raw and tender moment when he “switches on his father’s electric razor. It sounds loud and rude. Then he shaves his father’s face. He moves the chin back and forth with two fingers while guiding the little machine, first one cheek, then the neck and chin, then the other cheek. The skin is cool to the touch. He is careful and thorough. The razor obediently follows the contours of his father’s face. He pulls the sheet neatly over his father’s chest, up to his chin.”

Afterward, Daniel’s grief drives him to take a sea kayak into the dangerous tanker crowded waters of Table Bay. When “it looks like one will cross his path, Daniel estimates the vectors. He slows down, positions himself right in the path of the approaching ship. Ten he waits. When it is almost too late, he begins rowing frantically to escape the approaching water turbulence and the threatening hull. Whoever is steering the ship would have no idea he is down here, and would, in any case, be unable to change course . . . His arms ache, his muscles burn. He is now rowing to escape the tons of steel, approaching relentlessly from barely twenty meters away . . . [until] between the ships and the harbour Daniel and his kayak are floating, a yellow speck on the wide expanse of water, lying there as clear and still as brain fluid.”

In the longest section and core of the novel, titled “Hankai” (meaning “half destroyed”), Daniel’s life takes another totally upending turn because of his father’s will. It explores his treacherous, ongoing journey with grief and its unending aftermath.

The family estate is divided in half between Daniel and his sister. But there is a startling stipulation. Daniel’s bequest is bound by a specific, unconditional prerequisite: he must visit an ailing cousin, Theon, in the Free State, someone he hasn’t seen since childhood. He has to spend at least one month with him and “do the best to support and encourage him.” Their relationship defines the remainder of the novel.

Theon comes with uncomfortable baggage. His wife has left him. His farm (called Eenzaammheid—which means loneliness) is failing. In his good will, he has allowed the land’s laborers to move into the main house. Daniel learns that Theon’s bone cancer is in remission but he is taking care of a laborer’s son, Motlale, who has a rare form of blood cancer. Theon urges Daniel to take the boy to Japan for an experimental cure. In exchange, he will help him obtain his inheritance.

Reminiscent of the novel’s original trio—Daniel, Oliver, and Yugo—this group becomes a kind of shadow echo of companionship. Daniel convinces himself that the trip might unblock his writing if he could write an article on the “complicated relationship between buildings and people” in Tokyo for a British paper. It would be titled “Architecture and Death” and focus on an obsessive theme that overwhelms him, “man-made structure and loneliness.”

The trip proves unsuccessful in a number of ways. Daniel frequents gay bars. The medical trial fails. Theon returns to South Africa. Daniel goes back to the UK, sells his London flat, buys a home in Kent where he plans to “settle permanently in the real England,” and “renounced the life of relationships.” At first, he stops communicating with Theon but a nagging, lingering realization that his own sense of continual “grief is really for his cousin’s grief” surfaces when Theon sends him an email with an unlikely yet tempting proposal: come back to Eenzaamheid where they can “listen to the earth, measure themselves by the seasons and [not] even notice they are growing old together.”

Daniel accepts. The narrative jumps thirteen years. Daniel and Theon shape a new family grounded in their past experience with Motlale. Daniel proposes marriage. To avoid spoilers, it’s best to say the conclusion is a heart-breaking melancholy one. In Daniel’s “old age” he is neither an “inhabitant, or even a visitor” to life. He imagines seeing the “eleven letters of E-e-n-z-a-a-m-h-e-i-d unexpectedly float past in the sky, like smoke signals.”

Naude ameliorates the certain bleakness of Fathers and Fugitives with sizzling, blistering rhetoric, compelling characterizations, touches on social and political differences between the Free State and Cape Town, and incorporates enough life-altering events to make it a compelling, unforgettable read.

Robert Allen Papinchak is a former university English professor whose reviews, criticism, and interviews have appeared regularly in The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, On the Seawall, World Literature Today, The National Book Review, Mystery Scene Magazine, and, more recently in The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Asymptote, and in newspapers, literary journals, and online. He was named a Runner-up Finalist for the 2022 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing by The Washington Monthly. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won a STORY award. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction.