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Pleasure by Nthikeng Mohlele
Picador Africa
192 pages
R233 at takealot.com
4/5
Nthikeng Mohlele draws you into his insightful literary world in his latest novel, Pleasure. Beautifully written with mesmerising anecdotes and delicate imagery, this is one book that managed to satisfy my curiosities.
We are taken through the thoughts of Milton, who ponders on his journey of self-discovery and the mystery of the concept of pleasure.
Milton traverses between a dream that he has, set in World War 2, and waking up to the realisation of present-day Cape Town.
The dream, which is so profound in its message to Milton, gets him thinking about his life and the significance of it.
It’s the 1940s and Adolf Hitler reigns supreme. “The Führer is not dead. I see him, show him a rude finger, but he does not seem to see me. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.”
Milton awakes and realises that the circumstances in which he found himself in the dream are similar to what he experiences in his present day.
He feels compelled to highlight the fact that Africans need to come out of their shells and refuse to be bound by the past enslavements of colonialism.
In Pleasure, we are also introduced to several of Milton’s past lovers, whom he draws delight from. Pleasure, as he tells us, can be experienced in different ways and is not confined to the human touch.
“I think of pleasure as a slave to the imagination. It can, at the whim of the imagination, be either passive or delayed. When delayed, reserved for appropriate moments, for answers from would-be companions in courtship, the very existence of unconfirmed possibilities can itself be pleasurable: something as mundane as observing a stranger skilfully eating pasta, for instance.”
As my own dreams often serve as a guide to my life, I related to the tale that Milton has to tell and consumed this novel with, well, pleasure.
