kagablog

Uselessly
Aryan Kaganof
Jacana

buy uselessly now (in south africa) (in united kingdom)

You may have spotted him in Melville coffee shops, having a lonely spaghetti for breakfast, scribbling away in his strange cubist handwriting or reading Nietzsche. You may have seen his artworks, his movies or his performances. Or you may have come across some of his self-published books.
Now Aryan Kaganof, a man with more flair for self-promotion than Jacob Zuma, has managed to interest a “real” publisher in making his new novel more widely available. Apparently, the need for money became bigger than the urge to do-it-himself.
One has to admire Jacana for taking on Uselessly, because it’s not an easily digestible book and certainly not a potential bestseller.
While there’s not much in terms of plot or narrative, the protagonist JJ Uselessly, and his father Harry are mysogynist souls, who excell in absurd dialogues.
The story, written as a series of letters from Uselessly Jr to God, basically revolves around the son finding his father after the old man has abandoned mother and child at an early age. It’s quite a miracle that Uselessly is with us at all, because dad insisted on an abortion. Mother, however, decided to keep her son, who now feels he was “born by accident”.
Uselessly grows up in Joburg, and when the time for military service arrives, he goes to Amsterdam, where he disappears into a haze of drugs and underground culture - which doesn’t prevent him from producing offspring.
In Holland at the age of 35, and now the father of a daughter, he gets a letter from someone called S Cohen, telling him that his dad has been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, a type of cancer. Uselessly flies to Cape Town to meet his prodigal father finally, after so many years.
What follows is a tale of father and son reunited and bonding over a similar iconoclastic lifestyle and philosophy. Both never wanted to grow up. Both abhor work.
Uselessly was visited by angels at the age of five, and decided to become a sensualist instead of joining the rat race. Adulthood is the living dead. His philosophy: live to slow things down. He idolises his womanising, horse riding, playing the stock market and playing dad.
JJ and his father Harry (”a jaded Jewboy from Joburg”) agree never to be mundane.
They are nonconformists.
They also concur that “neither of us had been prepared for fatherhood and neither of us had a clue how to be a good son. Prodigals. A pair of prodigals. Uselessly the both of us.”
And so the story goes on, shifting forwards and backwards in time until the inevitable death of dad. In between, Kaganof throws in bits of Nietzsche on the verge of madness.
He lets his useless alter-ego ridicule Cape Town’s “white clique”, shopping malls and the senseless conversations other people engage in.
Women, in his world, are only in it for the money. The “thrive on the amount of effort you’re willing to expend on gaining and keeping their favour”.
All this in letters to God - whose answers we never see. All very post-modern.
But does it work?
Sometimes. Kaganof can be quite funny and his outsider status enables him to point out society’s hypocrisies. Some of dad’s one-liners and his not so politically correct observations are certainly good for a laugh and a nod.
And when the author occasionally deals with genuine emotions he can be surprisingly touching.
It’s also a very South African book: rough, corrosive, and a complex mix of literary and low-brow, and in more way than one way between Good and Evil.
But too often it feels like Kaganof wants to be rude and misogynist for the sake of being rude and misogynist. The targets of his derision are too easy. The puns about James Joyce’s Ulysses are too obvious. And the fact that God is the receiver of Uselessly’s endless stream of letters doesn’t add to the story.
Morevoer, why address Him as if it’s a 13-year-old writing instead of someone aged 39?
Surely God can handle more profound thoughts?
When you close the book after 191 pages, one nagging thought remains: was the choice of form, these often childlike letters to God, really the best way to deal with such highly emotional, rich and autobiographical material?

Fred De Vries