Demise of a Family

The Promise 

by Damon Galgut

“Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out.”   ― Damon Galgut, The Promise

The Promise, Damon Galgut's eighth novel, is set in South Africa. I was impressed with the rich flowing narrative style, reminiscent of Faulkner in my experience. Early in the story I was struck by an allusion to Camus' novel L'Etranger, while at moments I sensed an existential aura, although not nearly as powerful as his previous Booker short-listed novel, In a Strange Room, whose protagonist, a solitary wanderer, exudes the uncertainty often found in existentialist fiction. In The Promise as in Galgut's other literature there are typical references to the complex realm of South African society and politics, particularly apartheid's impact.

 

The narrative follows the Swarts (ironically swart means black in Afrikaans), a white family descended from Dutch pioneers who arrived in South Africa in the seventeenth century. The three Swart children grow up in a world where apartheid, a system that formally separated South Africans based on race, is being phased out. Each of the novel's four parts is centered on the death of one of the Swart family members, tracing the Swarts' deterioration. Among the key aspects that augment this deterioration are divisions among both the family and their black household employees along religious, race, and age differences. Also imperative is the development of the two youngest members of the Swart family, Anton and Amor. While Amor, the youngest is too young to remember some of the darker history of apartheid, Anton is literally driven apart by it both from the family and within his own self-identity.

This book reminded me of Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March in which he used the decline of a family to mirror the the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In a similar way, Galgut's novel with its chronicle of the deaths of members of the Swart family provides a mirror or perhaps a metaphor for the dissolution of the Afrikaners' regime in South Africa. It is  profound in its details and ultimate message. Because of its roving, fluid point of view, The Promise is stylistically similar to some of the best works of literary modernism and holds its own in comparison with the great novels of J. M. Coetzee.  The narrative's deft blending of the Swart family history beside the devolution of the apartheid state in South Africa is presented in a unique and powerful way. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to better understand twentieth century South Africa.

Ineffective Satire

Riotous Assembly 
by Tom Sharpe



"Piemburg's mediocrity was venomous  and waited gently on events." (p 4)


I usually try to find something good to say about a book that I have read. It was difficult with this novel by Tom Sharpe. The book is humorous for about one chapter and the rest is downhill as the satire becomes so heavy-handed that is loses its effectiveness. The rest of my review must of necessity be a litany of problems. From the lack of character development to a plot that is notable only in its weakness this novel is a bit of a disaster.

I spent several weeks in South Africa in the late seventies and I thought I learned a little about the country. However the setting of Riotous Assembly, the fictional town of Piemburg, did not resemble the country I visited. I am unable to come up with an excuse for the caricatures that inhabit Riotous Assembly. It is with almost no reluctance that I suggest you avoid this book.



View all my reviews

In the Grip of Eros

Disgrace 
by J.M. Coetzee


"She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident , modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district." (p 115)



At the heart of this fine novel set in contemporary South Africa is a man who is self-destructive; a professor of English who cannot communicate and who must face not only the results of his own mistakes but the troubles of others and a world that he is unable to understand. J. M. Coetzee's ability to make this dark story readable is what makes this a great story. As the outset the professor, David Lurie, is medicating himself with weekly visits from a prostitute named Soraya but an incident occurs that ends that relationship.  Then we meet the professor in his school room teaching "Communications 101" to bored students whom he cannot reach:
"Silence again. The very air into which he speaks hangs listless as a sheet. A man looking at a mountain: why does it have to be so complicated, they want to complain? What answer can he give them?" (p 21)

But by this time he has begun to meet one of his students, Melanie, on the side. While she does not respond to Shakespeare she seems to respond to David's erotic advances until. Well this is where the story begins to explore the world of personal self-destruction, dramatic changes in David's life and ultimately, disgrace. If it ended there it would be well-written but not interesting, not challenging. David is let go by the University and he leaves for the countryside. But that will not be the end as we see when he is confronted by Melanie's father:
“‘Professor,’ he begins, laying heavy stress on the word, ‘you may be very educated and all that, but what you have done is not right…We put our children in the hands of you people because we think we can trust you. If we can’t trust the university, who can we trust?…No, Professor Lurie, you may be big and mighty and have all kinds of degrees, but if I was you I’d be very ashamed of myself, so help me God. If I’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick, now is your chance to say, but I don’t think so, I can see it from your face.’” And when Lurie finds the accusation beneath him and turns away, the girl’s father shouts, “‘You can’t just run away like that! You have not heard the last of it, I tell you!’” (p 38)

The challenges, for David, begin when he moves in with his daughter (from an earlier failed marriage) and finds out what fate really has in store for him. He tries to explain his mistake with the student to his daughter Lucy:
"I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me. What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely."(p 89) He cannot take responsibility to himself or with others. His resulting actions seem out of sync with the world around him. His inability to understand himself fuels his inability to communicate with others.
It is with his daughter in the eastern Cape that we are introduced to Petrus, her black neighbor who is slowly taking advantage of the changed social order to lift himself from a “dog-man” to a substantial land holder. Lucy is nearly alone in her refusal to join the “white-flight” exodus out of such predominantly black areas; in the book’s most dramatic scene she is raped by three black men as her father is locked in a bathroom and set afire. How David and Lucy deal with this event defines the remainder of the story. You can see David's disgrace as a metaphor for the experience of whites in post-apartheid South Africa.

Disgrace is a gripping read, paced, shaped, and developed in a way that gives the narrative an immediacy. Through the embedding of recurring images, like that of fire, the novel slowly builds to an unbearable climax. This is one of the better novels of J. M. Coetzee that I have read; that is it is very good and worthy of the awards. In it he details a story of personal trials and integrates the culture of post-apartheid South Africa effectively into the story. I would have rated it slightly higher, but it is not a pleasant story to read. It is neither as affecting nor as imaginatively fashioned as Coetzee's other Booker winner, Life and Times of Michael K. The characters are so flatly presented that it is difficult to penetrate their mental worlds, yet the sparse prose is eminently readable. After rereading the novel and learning more about these characters I would include this in my list of favorite Coetzee novels.

View all my reviews

Daughter of an Activist

Burger's Daughter
by Nadine Gordimer

“I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. --One is married and there is nothing to be done.-- Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other...."  ― Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter

This was the second novel by Nadine Gordimer that I have read; several years ago I read her short novel, July's People. I wish this novel had been a bit shorter, for I did not enjoy reading it. The story follows the life of Rosa, the title character, as she comes to terms with her father Lionel's legacy as an activist in the South African Communist Party over the course of 30 years. The perspective shifts between Rosa's internal monologue (often directed towards her father or her sometimes lover Conrad), and the omniscient narrator. The novel is rooted in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa with references to actual events and people from that period.
Her somewhat cryptic style and the difficulty I had trying to focus on what was happening in the story made reading it more difficult than it was worth. There were moments of beautiful prose and my own travel to South Africa helped me picture some of the settings. However the history seemed to overwhelm the story of Rosa Burger.  I asked myself whether this was a novel about Rosa Burger with historical context or if Burger's daughter was a cipher who inhabited a narrative about the history of twentieth century South Africa?  There were moments in the narrative arc that seemed to exist for Rosa, but there were others that intruded creating a jagged edge.  It was these moments where I had to force myself to keep reading from page to page. For a while I hoped the next chapter would bring some relief, but I gradually realized that this book was not going to succeed for this reader.

Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer.  Penguin Books, 1980 (1979).

"Master Harold" and the boys

Sam. Should we try again, Hally?

Hally. Try what?

Sam. Fly another kite, I suppose. It worked once, and this time I need it as much as you do.

Hally. It's still raining, Sam. You can't fly kites on rainy days, remember.

Sam. So what do we do? Hope for better weather tomorrow?

Hally. (Helpless gesture) I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.

- "Master Harold" and the boys, p. 59

"Master Harold" and the boys is a short play that has an immense impact upon first reading. The playwright Athol Fugard manages to imagine a relationship between a boy and two Black servants in early 1950s in South Africa and make it become a universal experience that continues to resonate with readers in the Twenty-first century. I was impressed with the economy of words that were used to express multiple levels of feeling and meaning throughout the play. The culture of England, long the colonial power in this country, is also ever present in language and simple things such the names of towns.

The basic story is a simple tale of a boy, Hal, on the verge of manhood struggling with his education and his relationship both with his friends, the Black servants Sam and Willie, and his father who is nearing the end of what must have been a tyrannical patriarchy. Hal, who is "Master Harold" to Willie and plain Hally to Sam and everyone else, struggles through the issues of his relationships and what they mean until the difficulties with his father overtake him and he lashes out at the Black servants, reminding the reader that this is the era of apartheid and this is South Africa. One of the most powerful metaphors is that of the dance that is used from the opening of the play and culminates in a beautiful moment as the linchpin for transcendent beauty and the meaning of art. The day ends with tentative attempts at reconciliation, but we are left wondering whether the next day will bring a new level of maturity and hope for the master and his boys or more of the same tensions that make compassionate friendship crumble in this moving drama.


"Master Harold" and the boys by Athol Fugard. Vintage International, New York. 2009 (1982)