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language: English
country: South Africa
year: 2020
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 31.5.24-16.6.24
how to describe Nikhil Singh’s Club Ded. hallucinogenic, definitely, but maybe not in a good way. it’s balancing a kaleidoscope of characters — Brick Bryson, a Black American washed up former action star; Jennifer, who works for an enigmatic surveillance corporation; Ziq, a homeless concert pianist who abandoned his career out of disgust with society and the world; Sulette, a bored housewife yearning for adventure; Trill, a trans prostitute constantly marginalized by the narrative and the people around them; Volker, a fucked-up rich guy with too much money and too few scruples; I feel like there’s at least one more I’m forgetting.
it’s also balancing several plots, which are intertwined to varying extents: Brick has been called to Cape Town to save a failing film being directed by the sexual predator who launched his career; Sulette — said director’s landlady while he’s filming — explores the “dark” side of Cape Town nightlife with Trill’s guidance and destroys her marriage; Jennifer’s plot is too complicated to sum up quickly; Ziq is drawn to Jennifer; Volker finds Sulette delivered to him to fulfill some of his bizarre fantasies.
it is, broadly, about the horrid, squalid lifeworlds of the rich and famous — the corruption, the power games, the sex and violence, the exploitation of the “Third World” as a kind of playground (up to and including the establishment of a de facto lawless capitalist microstate). the drugs and alcohol, of course. a major plot follows the distribution of a new psychedelic drug, derived from a rare fish, and the emergence of a kind of underwater cult devoted to this experience — a cult which counts the film’s female lead as one of its stars. everything is connected.
mostly, though, the novel meanders through its characters’ lives. it felt unfocused, and ultimately it rather avoided resolving a group of major plots by having their climaxes happen off-screen. in the end the characters just kind of…disperse. it’s very weird. the writing is also. hm. kind of a mess; practically every phrase is a separate sentence, and it’s very clunky as a result.
my other big hesitation is the handling of Trill, who is referred to as “it” and called “the creature” for the entirety of the novel. the first time this happens it’s from Sulette’s perspective, so I thought, okay, this is because she’s a rich white cis woman and we’re supposed to understand that she’s transphobic. (the same thing happens with Brick’s daughter, who has just begun her transition, but here it’s more clearly Brick’s transmisogynist perspective that shapes the narration when it’s focalized through him.) unfortunately it continues to do this even when the narrative is focalized through Trill.
the thing is, in some ways I actually think the narrative does an okay job with Trill as a character, but it’s marred by this transmisogynist framing, and it makes every scene Trill appears in uncomfortably voyeuristic and dehumanizing, in a way that felt less like a pointed commentary on the function of transmisogyny as a social organizing principle and more like just…transmisogyny.
overall I guess I liked it? but with significant reservations, and I definitely didn’t love it.
moods: dark, grimy, horny, reflective, sad, tense