Reviews of three other books by Aryan Kaganof appear below. Click on a title for more.
Sugar Man and Other Bitter Stories
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Underbelly of Sleepy Town
Sugar Man and Other Bitter Stories
Hectic
Aryan Kaganof
2002
Pine Slopes Publications
Reviewed by Trevor Steele Taylor
Allow me to introduce you, gentle reader, to a certain Ian Kerkhof. A renaissance man, one might say, who is actually no longer Ian Kerkhof. Born in South Africa, emigred in Holland for sixteen years, Kerkhof became South Africa’s most prolific filmmaker. Some thought he was Dutch, but he wasn’t, although he could speak the lingo. In 1999 he returned to South Africa and although everybody thought he was Dutch (he, after all, did speak the lingo) he set about becoming a visual artist, noise musician and novelist. He also died but not in that prosaic death sort of way. Oh no! This Kerkhof ceased to exist and shape-shifted becoming Aryan Kaganof, apparently a more fun sort of guy. Three novels have followed and a book of poetry. They are very South African, mixing Afrikaans, English and our own peculiar patois with great effect. He does, after all speak the lingo.
Hectic is his first novel, a picaresque tale of a drug-swallowing, pimply, phallocratic, red-haired, Nazi, Jew-boy from Cape Town’s Sea Point called Red Kowalski (a sly allusion to a popular radio serial from the days before South Africans were allowed the dubious pleasures of television). Owing a certain debt to Charles Bukowski, Kaganof’s sometimes shockingly visceral work follows Kowalski as he desperately tries to get more than his fingers into the vagina of his pug-ugly Afrikaans girlfriend Spacey who, despite ears that stick out and a general lack of appeal, obsesses him. His adventures take him into many late-night bars and many beers are consumed, each described with the relish befitting a country where drinking beer could be considered an occupation.
Relationships are violent and cursory, sexual encounters even more so. Cape Town is referred to as Rape Town (well deserved statistically) and SlaapStad (Sleepy Town), inferring that when Capetonians are not busy raping, they are busy sleeping.
Widely diverse cultures from traditional Jewish Sea Point (in the person of the worldly Auntie Faye) to the Afrikaans ‘alternative’ culture of the Bloemfontein nightspot, The Mystic Boer, are observed with precision and a good deal of caustic humour. Nobody escapes the point of Kaganof’s blade, least of all himself and the shocking denouement which involves some gut-wrenching violence and a rape of note involving the use of a brick cannot fail to leave the reader unmoved.
Published in English and patois in South Africa, which includes a glossary rivalling Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, and in Dutch in Holland.
One of the most challenging and unsettling novels to emerge from South Africa in a long time.
A journey up the arse of God
Sugar Man and Other Bitter Stories
Aryan Kaganof
2002
Pine Slopes Publishers
Aryan Kaganof’s second novel begins with quotations from Puerto Rican singer Jesus Rodriguez and Baudelaire and is informed by a quotation from Heraclitus: "Nothing worthwhile is gained without strife". Existing within the same essentially South African Hell which informed his earlier novel Hectic, Sugar Man is a work of many levels. Hectic went for the gut with the clarity of a Charles Bukowski. Sugar Man plumbs the depths of a Hell that is on Earth with the precision of Georges Bataille or Edgar Allen Poe. The eponymous Sugar Man, a drug-dealer and philosophical low-life is searching for the drug lord known as the Dark Magus. To truly know the Dark Magus he must become the Dark Magus. This is a journey that leads to death or possibly to realising that he is dead already. Street girls with drug habits pepper the narrative with names such as Nameless Nobody. There is also an array of blondes, perhaps all of them one blonde, perhaps not. Their melanin deficiency is a sign of a particular form of vampirism.
And then there are the meetings with film producers. Kaganof as a successful filmmaker knows this world well, especially the bullshitters, liars, pretenders, sniffers and snorters that do penance in these halls of Karma. Sugar Man takes time out for three such meetings within the narrative. Many of the characters described are mighty close to real celebs of South Africa’s belicose film industry. For those who haunt the places where people with projects congregate, these narrative asides are worthy of note.
No easy read, Kaganof takes his search into the dark side, even unto the very ends of the cosmos, up the very arse of God. J.K.Rowling beware. Sugar Man is a mature Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the Chamber Pot of Secrets. The final revelations exist in the scatological
South African literature has been waiting a long time for the incisive brilliance of Kaganof. Only two South African authors I can think of are his equal. Etienne le Roux and J.M.Coetzee. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Philosophy from the shopping mall inferno
Abraxas: The Prophet of Nothing
Aryan Kaganof
2003
Pine Slopes Publications
Kaganof’s third book is an impressive work of philosophy which comes complete with a Parental Warning ….. Explicit Philosophy. An arch joke, certainly but also a very spot-on jibe at modern society’s values.
Reminding the reader of John Fowles’ ground-breaking book of philosophy THE ARISTOS, Kaganof’s slim volume alternates point-form philosophical thoughts with biographical details of the philosopher Abraxas (a thinly veiled presentation of Kaganof himself).
Here follows a random selection of observations:
On Cinema: "New Media overload leaves no time for memory. Thus no reflection, thus no morals. The techno-culture is the logical inheritance of the camps"
On Lies and Advertising: "We are even lied to by Carling Black Label which claims to be America’s lusty, lively beer, but is, in fact, unobtainable in America"
On Surveillance: "Surveillance has taken over from religion as the practice most revered by the masses. It restores the notion of the omniscience of God’s eye …."
On the Search for God: "I was looking for God in a bottle. I had to drink to the bottom to find out God was looking for me elsewhere"
On Poetry: "The word poetry is a sacred name. It is an invocation of the gods from before time began"
On Young Girls: "A fourteen-year old girl is always sexy. No matter how much acne or puppy fat"
Audacious stuff from an audacious individual, Kaganof’s philosopher wanders around the modern infernos of shopping malls in search of the divine light.
Romanticism, physicality and the devil
Drive-Thru Funeral
Aryan Kaganof
2003
Pine Slopes Publications
And so to Kaganof’s fourth publication and this time it’s a book of poetry. Alternating between pseudo-biographical details of ‘the poet Kaganof’, his history and finally his death, and the poetry itself, the book is a complex pixillated view of South Africa (especially encapsulated in its late-night eateries and drinking holes). Sometimes the poems are predictably scatological in the Kaganof vein (‘Joan of Arc Again’ for instance) but however much physicality might seem to be the overriding tone, romanticism is the key. Particularly beautiful (to my way of thinking) are ‘Goodbye’, ‘Advice for my Daughter’ , ‘God’ and ‘Angellogical’. I also really enjoyed ‘Tenderloin Passage’, a lengthy poem concerning an evening spent in the company of the Devil.
Collections of poetry can often be a nightmare to read. Collections of poetry by South Africans can be analogous to being burned at the stake to read. I read this one on a coach ride between a hellish British town called Swindon and a larger one called London. I was engrossed.
Trevor Steele Taylor is the co-director of the Cape Town International Film Festival.
