The novel “The Promise”, with which the South African author Damon Galgut won the £ 50,000 Booker Prize, has a strange motto. It consists of an anecdote by the Italian director Federico Fellini, in which Fellini met a woman one morning at the wheel of a Cadillac, holding a monkey in her arms, stopping in front of him, asking him “Are you Fellini?” and then continues: “Why isn’t there at least one normal person in all of your films?”
Damon Galgut, who was born in Pretoria in 1963, grew up there and now lives in Cape Town, must have a sense of humor. And a certain sense of tilt figures, monsters who consider themselves normal, and average, normal families who hatch monstrous things. He put such a family at the center of “The Promise”. The story of the white farming family Swart, which goes through the past forty years, is divided into four large parts, from the last attempts at self-assertion of the apartheid system to the immediate present when Jacob Zuma flitted across the screen in 2018 when he stepped down from the presidency .
Damon Galgut is the third South African Booker Prize winner. He is up to the tradition he enters
It looks clear, and each part has a family member in the title: Ma, Pa, Astrid, Anton. But that’s where it gets complicated, and if “The Promise” reminded the Booker jury of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, it was perhaps because of the unrest that Galgut brings into the apparently clear structure of the novel through his narrative technique. It belongs to her that the key figure of the family and closest relatives of the narrator’s voice does not appear in the list of names. Your sphere is the in-between and the invisibility. She is the younger sister of the already married Astrid, is called “Amor” and is thirteen years old at the beginning of the novel. On the very first page she receives the news of the death of her mother, and it won’t be long before she is forever linked to the promise that the novel has in the title. Ma, whose name was Rachel, made her husband Mania promise on her deathbed that she would hand over the ramshackle house in which she lives on the farm to the maid Salome, whom she looked after until death. Even Pa, the father of Mania, will not survive the novel and will die without having kept the promise. Like Rachel, the mother, the promise runs through the novel as an invisible ghost.
Damon Galgut is the third South African Booker Prize winner after JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. And it is up to the tradition in which it enters. With Coetzee’s “Disgrace” (“Shame”), he not only shares the substance of the underlying violence, disillusionment and crumbling certainties in the post-apartheid era, the inner views of the shaken, fear and aggression shaken white South Africa. Like Coetzee, he is close to his characters in the narrative present. Sometimes the narrator speaks directly to the characters, sometimes it seems to speak to the readership. She is never content with the format in which the bourgeois family novel grew up, literary realism. Through his eyes he notes the speaking details of the late apartheid world, looking at the stamp album of a cousin, whose favorite items include the commemorative stamps for Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid politics, who was murdered in 1966.
But just as alert as the visible signs and the audible undertones in the talk of those around them, Cupid perceives the invisible and the inaudible. Because Galgut gave her a background that must have made her clairvoyant. As a child, she almost fell victim to a lightning strike, which forced her into an intermediate realm of recovery for months. The novel makes no symbolic fuss about it, but religion and its decomposition products shape the Swart family. Ma, mother Rachel, has, much to the displeasure of her relatives, returned to the Jewish faith in the last years of her life. Pa, father mania, has converted from alcoholism to a new church whose founder is a fundraising virtuoso. In general there is no shortage of gurus. But just as the panicked search for meaning does not turn into satire, the unhappy marriage of daughter Astrid does not turn into a piece of TV comedy. This is partly due to Cupid, whose presence imbues the entire novel with an aroma of despair and certainty of decay. On the other hand, because Damon Galgut lets his narrative voice strike very sarcastic, cool, pitiless tones over and over again.
Earned the Booker Prize: Galgut’s novel “The Promise”.
The author does not bring the Swart family to trial, he does not excuse them, he refrains from having them made representational figures of their class. He is content to let the great, dark shadow of the promises not kept in history fall over their misfortune.
At the end, Amor reads the manuscript of the autobiographical novel written by her unfounded brother Anton. Although she hardly gets to read because of her work in a hospital, she quickly sees that he has failed because of the novel. This novel is also one of the unredeemed promises in “The Promise”. The novel that Damon Galgut wrote delivers on its promises. He earned the Booker Prize.