Tag Archives: damon galgut

A novel by an author from South Africa: Damon Galgut

Posted on by
Reply

MRS SWART IS DYING, lying on her bed in a farmhouse in South Africa during the last years of the apartheid regime. Her husband and three children are close by. One of her daughters, Amor, hears, or believes she has heard, her mother promising that Salome, the family’s African maid, will be bequeathed the small outhouse in which she lives. Mrs Swart dies. Nobody else remembers hearing that Salome has been promised that she could own her humble abode, and she is not given possession of it. Many years go by, apartheid ends, and one by one Amor’s father, her brother, and her sister die. Yet, still Salome has not been given ownership of her residence on the farm. Amor, who has largely dissociated herself from her family, becomes the sole inheritor of the family’s farm after her father and siblings have died. Without giving away too much of the story, she honours the promise that her mother made, but what should have been a straightforward happy ending turns out not to be. In between the events I have mentioned, much more takes place, as is revealed in “The Promise”, an excellently written novel published in 2021 by South African author Damon Galgut.

Galgut’s novel contains vivid descriptions of peoples’ lives and their difficulties in South Africa before and after the apartheid regime ended in 1993. In his novel, the personalities of the various people in it are described brilliantly. In addition, he portrays the troubles, physical and psychological, that South Africans must face daily even after the end of apartheid. Reading this book has reinforced what I had already heard about South Africa being a country filled with its own distinctive range of problems.

I believe that Galgut’s novel is a metaphor for what has happened to South Africa after the death of apartheid, a regime that severely suppressed the non-white majority of South Africans. When apartheid eventually ended, many South Africans must have believed and hoped that they had been promised, and could expect, a better life, one from which each person would derive benefit. Sadly, for many, just as Mrs Swart’s promise to Salome was fulfilled but unsatisfactorily, the assumed promise of an improved life post-apartheid has not been fulfilled entirely satisfactorily (if at all) for most of the country’s population.

“The Promise” is the third of Galgut’s novels that I have read to date. Each of the three is beautifully written, interesting, compelling, and moving. Of the three, “The Promise” has appealed to me most, but only a little bit more than the other two (“The Good Doctor” and “Arctic Summer”).

A novel set in South Africa after the end of apartheid

Posted on by
Reply

TO ENHANCE RACIST policies, the apartheid government of South Africa set up a series of ‘homelands’. These were areas in less desirable parts of the country in which black African people were ‘encouraged’ or compelled to set up homes. Notionally self-governing, these territories were, in reality, black ghettos, often impoverished. “The Good Doctor”, a novel  by Damon Galgut, who was born in South Africa, (published 2003) is set after the end of apartheid in a run-down, almost deserted, god-forsaken town in what had been a former homeland close to one of South Africa’s borders.

Most of the novel’s action is centred on the town’s under-staffed, poorly equipped, almost unused hospital. Frank is a doctor, who has been working there for several years. He seems quite content with the boring, uneventful life he has been experiencing while working there. Everything begins to change when Laurence, a young and idealistic doctor, arrives to spend a year at the hospital. He wants to make changes, to give the almost moribund hospital more of a sense of purpose.

Frank is obliged to share his quarters with Laurence, and inevitably they get to know each other well. Following Laurence’s arrival, a series of events begins to affect both Frank and his young room-mate. These occurrences, which Galgut relates beautifully, disturb the life of the hospital. Things get worse after a troop of soldiers, who are patrolling the border, settle in the town for a few weeks. Their commander is an unpleasant man, under whom Frank served while he was in the army before apartheid had ended.

At first, I felt that one of the two doctors was ‘The Good Doctor’ in the book’s title, but by the end of the story I was left wondering whether it was Frank or Laurence who was the good doctor. You will have to read this wonderfully written, compelling tale to be able to assess which of the two deserves your sympathy. Or are they both to be criticised?

I enjoyed this novel, the second by Galgut that I have read, and look forward to reading a third. I have a copy of his “The Promise” waiting close by.

Biography of fiction by an author from South Africa

Posted on by
Reply

SOMEONE SENT ME a message on Facebook, recommending me to read “Arctic Summer”, a novel by the South African author Damon Galgut (born 1963). It was a great recommendation, and I am grateful for it. The story is about the author EM Forster (1879-1970), whose books include “A Passage to India”.

Galgut’s superbly written, well-researched, fascinating novel is a fictional biography of Forster during the period between, and including, his first two visits to India. It also mentioned Forster’s third later visit. The book is not only a biography of Forster, but also a fictional biography of the writing of “A Passage To India”: the biography of a novel. The book also explores Forster’s yearning for the physical love of men, and the frustrations he faced, many of them of his own making. And Galgut, in writing this book, also gives an insight into the difficulties that authors can face when writing fiction.

Galgut’s book reads as well as does his protagonist’s Indian novel. I read “Arctic Summer” after reading “A Passage to India”. Having read the books in this order made a lot of sense. However, if you pick up Galgut’s book first, it will most likely make you want to read “A Passage …”.

I enjoyed Galgut’s novel so much that I am keen to read some more of his work.