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Galgut outsources his storytelling, handing off a phrase or an insight to an indistinct community of what seem to be wise elders, who then produce an ironically platitudinous or proverbial commentary. Galgut uses his narrator playfully, assisted by nicely wayward run-on sentences. One is struck, amid the sombre events, by the joyous, puckish restlessness of the storytelling, which seems to stick to a character’s point of view only to veer away, mid-sentence. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing. Galgut is at once very close to his troubled characters and somewhat ironically distant, as if the novel were written in two time signatures, fast and slower. Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner in the way it redeploys a number of modernist techniques, chiefly the use of a free-floating narrator. The Promise is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all 'promise'. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability. Read Full Review >ĭamon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, The Promise, suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized. The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts. To praise the novel in its particulars-for its seriousness for its balance of formal freedom and elegance for its humor, its precision, its human truth-seems inadequate and partial. Indeed, the novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce, including, from the former, an almost rushing fluidity of narrative consciousness, and from the latter, a direct allusion to The Dead in its final pages, when a torrential rain is unleashed upon the veld. He has, however, and mercifully, a sense of humor, even an occasional playfulness, which leavens that stringency.

Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company like Coetzee, he is stringent, pure.

A surprising number of novelists are very good few are extraordinary.