Pleasure By Nthikeng Mohlele

Mohlele’s fourth novel is about his author protagonist Milton Mohlele, who’s wrestling with the idea of what pleasure means throughout the novel. In the book, the protagonist describes himself as a “studious, literary slut of sorts: solitary, cerebral, mysterious and divorced.” In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mohlele tells of the inspiration behind his novel: “The genesis of Pleasure was an inability to comprehend disturbing and morally reprehensible acts of brutality… The manuscript presented opportunities to examine universal themes (war, love, desire, dispossession, pleasure co-existing with strife) and how these echo in the personal space.”

The cover and the title of this book might conjure up all sorts of ideas, depending on how deep in the gutter your mind is. But as soon as you start reading the book, you find Mohlele weaving complex and interrogatory narratives between the war in Germany and today’s Cape Town.

In his two previous books, Rusty Bell and Small Things respectively, Mohlele’s protagonists talk about making sense of what is to be expected from life… The beauty in the elusiveness. We see the same thread in his latest novel, Pleasure, a story delivered with deliberately vague open-ended themes which leave the reader with the moral responsibility to delve deeper into the narrative before making up their own minds. Does the reader choose the already paved and ordinary way of viewing the world or the non-conformist interrogatory way of being? At the same time, Mohlele explores how the past and the present converge, haunting and destroying his characters into nothingness. Sexual violence, prison, war.

In trying to write about pleasure, Mohlele’s protagonist – who’s also a Mohlele – takes us into the war in Germany and tries to balance the equation by giving the reader a glimpse into ways of finding love and pleasure in small things even during the most brutal of times.

In his quest for pleasure, and perhaps love, Milton is a flawed character at heart. He views women as sex objects who can be used for his own pleasurable gains. In fact it’s difficult to tell whether Milton is a womaniser or just a mere pervert. But the women characters in the novel are powerful ones, no different from Noria in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying who “knew that her influence came from her ability to give others pleasure. She could give or withhold pleasure at will, and this made her very powerful.”

The novel also touches on how depressing the process of writing a book can be, as most authors can testify. When Milton receives critical feedback and advice on his novel from his academic friend his musings are rather saddening. “He is not aware how depressed I have been, how loneliness has snuffed the life out of me, how I live in the dark,” he thinks out loud.