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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
A modern family saga written in gorgeous prose by three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut.
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life's unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country--one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones.
"Simply: you must read it."--Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
Summary
Ormai alla deriva, le vite dei tre fratelli si muovono separatamente attraverso le acque inesplorate del Sud Africa; Anton, il ragazzo d'oro che risente amaramente per le promesse non mantenute della sua vita; Astrid, la cui bellezza è il suo potere; e il più giovane, Amor, la cui vita è plasmata da un nebuloso senso di colpa. Riunita da quattro funerali nell'arco di tre decenni, questa famiglia in declino riflette l'atmosfera del suo paese: un'atmosfera di risentimento, rinnovamento e, in definitiva, speranza.
Author Notes
Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria. His 2003 novel The Good Doctor won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a Strange Room (Europa, 2010) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2021, Galgut won the Booker Prize for The Promise (Europa, 2021). In 2013, Galgut was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the keenly observant Galgut (Arctic Summer) offers a deeply affecting family saga spanning decades of upheaval in South Africa. The promise referenced by the title, made but never kept, is first overheard in fragments by preteen Amor, youngest daughter of the white Swarts family, when her father vows to Amor's dying mother that he would bequeath a house on their property to their Black maid, Salome. Ten years later, Amor reunites with her vain sister, Astrid, and unpredictable brother, Anton, after their father suffers a fatal snakebite. Amor has not forgotten the promise, and Anton, an army deserter with grandiose plans to write a novel, assures Amor he will follow through after having inherited the house himself. A decade later, tension brews between the siblings as Astrid and Anton resist Amor's calls to legally transfer the property to Salome, who now lives in it. Galgut's astounding prose effortlessly navigates the roiling thoughts of his characters (Astrid, on her boredom: "That's my life, she thinks, miles and miles of brown grass"; Anton, meanwhile, looks "for something... searching and searching, but fucked if he can remember what for"). He's an expert at voices, stealthily examining the world from the inside out and engaging the reader with inventive triangulation, such as the omniscient narrator's sudden mocking of Anton's habit of repeating himself ("Did I ever tell you about, Yes, you did, actually, so shut the fuck up"). This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
In Damon Galgut's 2008 book The Impostor, a man named Adam loses his job and moves to a shack in the Karoo to try to write poetry. Like Galgut himself, who wrote his debut novel, A Sinless Season, when he was 17, Adam's first collection - "poems about the natural world, ardent and intense and romantic" - was published when he was a young man. But Adam has become aware of the weight of history since then, and wonders whether such poetry is acceptable in contemporary South Africa: When his first collection had come out he'd been astounded by one especially vitriolic review, which had charged him with deliberately avoiding the moral crisis at the heart of South Africa. He'd had no ideological project in mind with his pursuit of Beauty, and he'd been stung at the suggestion that he was indifferent to suffering. But in his weakest moments he reflected privately that maybe it was true; maybe he didn't care enough for people. The fall of apartheid promised to give South African novelists licence to write, as Galgut said in an interview in 2003, about "things like love ¿ which would have been considered slightly immoral as a theme until apartheid crashed", but his own novels have only become more politically engaged over the course of his career. His early works were sometimes criticised - like Adam's poetry - for abnegating their moral responsibilities. Both A Sinless Season (1982), a novel of boyhood cruelty set in a young offenders' prison (Galgut has since disavowed it), and the novella which formed the backbone of his collection Small Circle of Beings (1988) - a stark domestic miniature about a mother caring for her ill child - were precocious and emotionally perceptive, but neither seemed particularly interested in the world outside themselves. Since the mid 1990s, he has been more willing directly to tackle the legacies of apartheid in his fiction. In The Good Doctor, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2003, a cynical South African doctor is challenged by a naively ideological new colleague. In a Strange Room - which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2010, and is by far Galgut's best novel - is an autofiction in which a man named Damon goes on three journeys in Europe, Africa and India, bearing his nationality like a stain on his back. His most recent book, Arctic Summer, was a historical novel about a decade in the life of EM Forster, but even here the tension between individual innocence - or ignorance, or indifference - and the sweep of history is evident. The Promise is one of Galgut's most directly political novels. It is also one of his most formally inventive, borrowing many of the narrative techniques he developed so effectively in In a Strange Room. If the results are mixed, this might be because the novel sometimes strives too hard to present a balanced collective perspective, or because it fails to reconcile aesthetic with moral questions. It's not that it's at all crude, or simplistic; more that the injustices it wants to examine are rendered slightly inert by the intrusion of something like a conscience - a narrator - in moments which might have been more effective if left unresolved. The novel is divided into four sections, beginning in the mid-1980s, during the state of emergency that marked the height of apartheid, and ending in 2018. The Swarts are a white family who own a ramshackle farm deep in the veldt. The head of the family is Herman "Manie" Swart, an unreconstructed racist who runs a reptile park called Scaly City and has recently found religion. His wife, Rachel, has converted (or reverted) to Judaism on her deathbed, and her death marks the beginning of the book. She leaves behind three children: Anton, Astrid and Amor. The "promise" of the title is a literal one, made by Rachel before she dies: to give a house on the farm to their black servant, Salome. It's also a metaphorical one. Over the years, as members of the family find reasons to deny or defer Salome's inheritance, the moral promise - the potential, or expectation - of the next generation of South Africans, and of the nation itself, is shown to be just as compromised as that of their parents. In its themes The Promise aspires to a Joycean universalism, and stylistically too, this is a neo-modernist novel. The narrator occupies an indistinct space, halfway between first and third person, drifting from tight focus on a single character to a more piercing, detached view, often within a single paragraph. There's plenty of free indirect discourse, and sections written in something approaching Joycean stream of consciousness. Galgut is too good a writer to really mess any of this up, but the gears do grind occasionally when the focus shifts between characters. "Astrid on the line", thinks Anton, rather too helpfully, when his sister calls him. "He can hear it's her, though only bits of words are coming through. Probably on that new mobile phone of hers, so proud of it, useless heavy brick with buttons. Not an invention that's going to last." The irony isn't subtle in these moments, and consequently the characterisation can feel slightly crude. But then, Anton is a crude man. Occasionally the effect is more jarring. When an old aunt's disappointment is described as "almost palpable, like a secret fart", or when Amor is described as feeling "ugly when she cries, like a tomato breaking open", it's not clear whether the similes belong to the characters themselves, to the characters observing them, or to an external narrator. At other times it's clear who's doing the talking. After Rachel's death, Salome offers a prayer. "Oh God. I hope You can hear me. It is me, Salome. Please welcome the madam where You are and look after her carefully, because I wish to see her again one day in heaven." A bit later the narrator intervenes: "Perhaps she doesn't pray in these words, or in any words at all, many prayers are uttered without language and they rise like all the rest. Or perhaps she prays for other things, because prayers are secret in the end, and not all to the same God." The moment is telling for the way the novel wants to be able to speak on Salome's behalf while simultaneously disavowing any hope of doing so. Perhaps this is just one more example of Salome's disenfranchisement - no home, no voice, no narrated inner life. But novels are made of words, and it does seem doubly cruel - or, at least, too easy - to deny Salome even this degree of self-expression. For Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, history was a "nightmare from which I am trying to awake", and in Galgut's novels too, history exists independently of the individuals who are inevitably shaped by it. In The Impostor, Adam recalls that when black students were first accepted into his school, he became "aware of history impinging on his existence", which is an odd way of putting it, and might reveal more about his views than he - with his uninterrogated liberal values - can admit to himself. In The Promise, the 13-year-old Amor can't understand that her mother's promise to Salome will not be kept because, the narrator says, "history has not yet trod on her". That's one way of looking at history - as an external force that comes for you when you least expect it, and against which it's impossible to take a stand. But it's not the only way. Galgut is a terrifically agile and consistently interesting novelist, certainly up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee as a chronicler of his nation's anguished complexity. And in trying to navigate the demands of being a South African writer and being a writer who just happens to be South African, The Promise is a fascinating, if inevitably partial, achievement. But while reading it I sometimes wished Galgut would return to the smaller frame of In a Strange Room, and remember that it's not an abnegation of one's artistic responsibilities to paint with a small brush, and attend to personal rather than historic dramas.
Kirkus Review
Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria. Rachel Swart has just died of cancer. Her husband, Manie, and three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are all walloped by different incarnations of grief. Only Amor, the youngest daughter, cares about her mother's dying wish--that Salome, the Swarts' domestic servant, receive full ownership of the house where she lives with her family, though under apartheid law, Black people are not legally allowed to own property in White areas. Nobody else pays any mind: Amor is 13 years old at the start and functionally voiceless in her family. The promise is buried along with Rachel, only to be unearthed years later when subsequent family deaths force the Swarts to recollide for the rituals of mourning. Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped ("One day, she says aloud. One day I'll. But the thought breaks off midway…") to lyrical ("There's a snory sound of bees, jacaranda blossoms pop absurdly underfoot") to metafictional ("No need to dwell on how she washes away her tears"). Galgut's multifarious writing style is bold and unusual, providing an initial barrier to entry yet achieving an intuitive logic over time. "How did it become so complicated?" Amor wonders at one point. "Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war." Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Award-winning South African author Galgut's (Arctic Summer, 2014) compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism. Focused on a white, Afrikaans South African family and launched in the 1980s during the waning years of the apartheid regime, it begins with a chapter titled "Ma." Amor, at the transformational age of 13, remembers overhearing her recently deceased mother on her deathbed, asking that her husband (Amor's father) promise to give a cottage on their farm to Salome, the family's Black helper. He agrees, but does not act. The unfulfilled promise drives the next three chapters, also named for family members--"Pa," "Astrid," and "Anton"--that take place over several ensuing decades. Through internal and external struggles, Amor dwells on the promise. Amid sweeping changes in the country, deaths in the family, and her own quiet yet sustained rebelliousness and journey of self-discovery, Amor realizes that, in contrast to her siblings, she, like her country, has changed. But when the haunting, elusive promise, years later, is finally possible, has it soured? Is the promise a stained artifact rooted in white guilt or a gift that transcends? Will Amor follow through? Lyrical, brimming with situational irony and character contrast, The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant.