I listened to an full audiobook for the very first time and let me say up front – I actually enjoyed it so much! Before this experience I was a little anti where audiobooks were concerned, imagining that it must be ‘cheating’ and a grating experience akin to listening to the world’s longest podcast. But it was neither of those things.

Choosing to listen to this book by Daniel Black rather than read it was a choice driven by convenience, the cost of living crisis and a book club meeting less than a week away. A softcover copy would have set me back R700, while the audiobook was free to listen to Everand with their 30-day free trail (which I forget to cancel and led to a loud ‘FUCK’ in the middle of a set of leg presses at the gym last night when the bank notification popped up) and promised to only take up 7 hours and 28 minutes. And boy did those seven hours fly by – I was THOROUGHLY entertained from the onset and throughout.

Read by the author himself, I noted that the cadences and timing were always spot on, there were one or two audible editing/recording flashes but not noticeable enough to ruin any part of the experience. In a nutshell, this is a tale about a father and son’s complicated relationship, told from the oft times problematic point of view of a dying father. It felt honest in sometimes cringeworthy ways, but I really liked that because that is human. The narrator is deeply flawed and in the parts where he can’t or won’t recognise that in himself, we are afforded the freedom to colour in for ourselves – which is the best part of reading for me. No two people interpret or experience a passage, a chapter, a whole book the same way and that’s so cool to me.

Anyway back to the book, I was particularly struck, again, by just how recent slavery was. That some people and their parents and were raised on plantations within the last 100 years. The periodization makes it easier to understand Jacob as a (by)product of his environment and circumstances. He can’t help but be the man he is, despite sometimes knowing better, acting against that better judgement and honouring his true feelings. It is unfortunately too relatable in parts (domestic abuse, racism, homophobia, sexism – all the ism’s really).

As I listened along, bookmarking some of my favourite bits was really easy on the app, transcribing them for the purposes of this post not as much.

I would love to read this again (or for the first time if we are to be pedantic), really enjoy the exploration of black fatherhood and the level of grace it forces one to extend as a result.