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A Family at Odds Reveals a Nation in the Throes

By James Wood

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“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” This is how Mrs. Dalloway thinks of herself, early in Virginia Woolf’s novel. It’s an even better description of how Woolf writes—how she passes between and beyond her characters, their anima and ghost, immanent and posthumous at once. “ Mrs. Dalloway ” appeared in 1925; two years later, in “ To the Lighthouse ,” Woolf would slice through her characters and even more flagrantly stand outside them and look on. In its famous middle section, “Time Passes,” Woolf describes how a decade elapses in an uninhabited country house, as the wallpaper peels away, the books rot, and the animals come to stay. The writing is both domestically meticulous (“The swallows nested in the drawing-room. . . . Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane”) and gravely allegorical: the First World War sends out its tremors, characters die offstage, the sea boils with blood, the house almost falls but is finally saved. The house has come to represent a country and an era, and the novelist, who has become nothing less than time itself, rides the winds of history.

In scope, seriousness, and experimental ambition, modernist writing like Woolf’s sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental epoch, a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in literature’s regenerative power. Yet Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, “ The Promise ” (Europa), suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. 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. (J. M. Coetzee once argued that South African literature is a “literature in bondage,” because a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life.) “The Promise” is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise.” The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the eighties, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s Presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son.

Galgut’s work has often demonstrated an appreciation of modernist techniques and emphases; his previous novel, “ Arctic Summer ” (2014), gently fictionalized E. M. Forster’s first trip to India, in 1912, out of which came Forster’s masterpiece, “ A Passage to India .” Like a number of early-twentieth-century novels (“Howards End” and “Brideshead Revisited” come to mind, along with “To the Lighthouse”), “The Promise” turns on the question of a house and its land (in this case, the Swart family farm), and who will live in it, inherit it, redeem it. But 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. 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. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing.

“The Promise” is broken into four sections of seventy pages or so, each one named for the character whose death summons the family to the farm, just outside Pretoria—four seasons of unchanging weather. The first section, entitled “Ma,” introduces us to the unhappy and divided Swart clan. Three children arrive to mourn Rachel, their mother: thirteen-year-old Amor, who has been sent away to a school she hates; her older sister, Astrid; and the eldest child, Anton, a nineteen-year-old doing his national service as a rifleman in the South African Army. The Swart children are Afrikaners, except that their mother was Jewish, and had converted to her husband’s Dutch Reformed Christianity. Not long before she died, Rachel converted back to Judaism, a fact that enrages her grieving, patriarchal husband, Manie Albertus Swart. Yet it was not Manie who nursed Rachel at the end but the family’s Black housekeeper, Salome: “She was with Ma when she died, right there next to the bed, though nobody seems to see her, she is apparently invisible. And whatever Salome feels is invisible too” is how the book’s spectral, omniscient narrator summarizes the politics of the situation.

Anton, the unhappiest of the three children, is at war with his family; Astrid accommodates; and young Amor, the family’s conscience, watches. In Amor’s role as witness and spy, she overheard a crucial pledge, which gives the novel its title: her dying mother made her husband promise that Salome would become the owner of the house she currently lives in, a three-room structure on the family estate. Now that Rachel is dead, the promise to Salome can be quickly forgotten. “I’m already paying for her son’s education,” Manie complains. “Must I do everything for her?” Amor badgers her relatives to honor her mother’s last wish, but the most receptive family member, Anton (who seems to like the idea mainly because it irritates their father), informs Amor that the gesture is probably illegal, anyway.

It is as if Ma’s death and the unkept promise had released a nimbus of dread. Only nine years later, in the novel’s second section (entitled “Pa”), the family reunites again, this time for their father’s funeral. A robust and religious man, Manie owned a reptile park called Scaly City. But one of his snakes has fatally bitten him. Amor, now grown up, lives in London, and, when she calls home, the ringing of the unanswered phone “almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill.”

It is 1995; Nelson Mandela is the country’s President. When Amor arrives in Pretoria for the funeral, she’s struck by the city’s festive atmosphere. South Africa, long exiled from international sports, is playing France in the Rugby World Cup semifinals. Our narrator, wandering somewhere between Amor’s point of view and a kind of novelistic chorus, is briskly ironic: “Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!” Family dynamics have shifted, somewhat. Astrid is now unhappily married, with two kids, and having an affair with “the man who came to put in our security.” Amor, once the disdained runt, is now considered glamorous. Other tensions are unchanged. Amor again raises the question of the promise made to Salome, and is again rebuffed. Anton, who deserted the Army years ago, is sponging off a girlfriend, and is mired in an aimless unemployability. Still militantly unhappy, he cannot mourn his estranged father. At the family farm, which the three children now inherit, “a thin pelt of dust has settled on every surface.”

Two people on bed deciding if they should cook or order in dinner.

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Summaries like this act as a kind of bad translation, in which what is most distinctive and precious about the novel disappears, to be replaced by time-lapse photography; the plot, on its own, can seem gothically extreme. (There are two deaths still to go: Astrid and Anton are yet to be sacrificed.) But the novel’s beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation. It’s not the first time that Galgut has experimented with a shifting viewpoint. His novel “In a Strange Room,” which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010, moved between third person and first person; since the narrator of that novel was also called Damon, and the story took something of the form of a travelogue, the effect was suggestively autofictional. His new novel exercises new freedoms. 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. Driving to the farm, for instance, Manie’s brother indulges in a bit of Afrikaner self-aggrandizement: “He’s not in the mood for political speeches, much nicer to look at the view. He imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain.” The narration even flows away from itself, into little ironic eddies: “The house is dark, except for floodlights fore and aft, note the nautical terms, illuminating the driveway and the lawn.” Or: “In the hearse, I mean the house, a certain unspoken fear has ebbed.”

Galgut uses his narrator playfully, assisted by nicely wayward run-on sentences. Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus). As the Portuguese novelist José Saramago does, 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. After describing how Ma’s ghost is visiting the farm, Galgut adds, “How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.” And here he writes about Salome and Anton: “She has seen him grow up, from a tottering infant to a golden boy to this, whatever he is now, tending to him every step of the way. When he was little he used to call her Mama and tried to suck on her nipple, a common South African confusion.” Though Galgut’s narrator has the authority of omniscience, it’s used lightly, glancingly, so that this perilous all-knowingness often makes his characters not more transparent but more mysterious: “Dr. Raaff wields his tweezers with more-than-usual dexterity. . . . His fastidiousness is pleasing to his patients, but if they only knew the daydreams of Dr. Wally Raaff, few would submit to being examined by him.” (Those daydreams stay in the private domain of Dr. Raaff.) Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept at moving quickly between characters’ thoughts. At a funeral, at a party, in the middle of the night as the family members sleep in the farmhouse, Galgut’s narrator skims across his spaces, alighting, stinging, moving on to the next subject. As the novel proceeds, his narrator seems to grow in adventurous authority. At one moment, he drops into the minds of a couple of jackals, scavenging on the veldt: “It is necessary to renew their markings, using bodily juices, to lay down the border. Beyond here is us. Written in piss and shit, inscribed from the core.”

And, again like Woolf, Galgut finds the prospect of slipping into an uninhabited house all-tempting:

The house is empty at this moment. It’s been deserted for a couple of hours, apparently inert but making tiny movements, sunlight stalking through these rooms, wind rattling the doors, expanding here, contracting there, giving off little pops and creaks and burps, like any old body. It seems alive, an illusion common to many buildings, or perhaps to how people see them. . . . But nobody is here to witness it, nothing stirs, except for the dog in the driveway, leisurely licking his testicles.

The narration enlivens the book, and one is grateful for the steady beat of humor. The double consciousness of the authorial irony “corrects” the characters, puts them in their place; in so doing, it also makes their lives blessedly provisional and brief, as if the author were reminding us that this particular story, with all its specific horrors, also belongs to a universal history that will soon forget them. Not for nothing does the narrator remind us, and his characters, on the last page of the book, that “other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word. Even these.”

The reader will surely need this teasing authorial doubleness, as a brace against an implacable darkening. The novel’s third section (“Astrid”) brings home the dwindling Swart survivors for another family funeral: Astrid has been killed in a carjacking. Again, history moves forward jerkily, in furlongs of family time, like those juddering minute hands on old railway-station clocks. It is 2004, and Thabo Mbeki is about to start his second term as South Africa’s President. Anton, who is drinking heavily, lives on the farm, where he is working intermittently on an unfinishable novel, one concerning, he says, “the torments of the human condition. Nothing unusual.” Amor now lives in Durban, where she is a nurse in an H.I.V. ward. She’s thirty-one, starting to gray, but still morally aflame: when she presses her brother on “the promise,” he fobs her off. In 2018, when Anton dies, in the fourth section of the novel, only Salome is left to phone Amor. The youngest inherits the farm, along with Anton’s widow, Desirée. There is one thing left for Amor to do—renounce her inheritance and insure that Salome, who is now an old woman, finally becomes the legal owner of the house she has occupied for decades.

Coetzee’s “ Disgrace ,” another novel about a farm, history’s poison, and the question of inheritance, inevitably shadows “The Promise.” In both books, a certain kind of allegorical pressure, partly insisted on by the author and partly by history itself, makes the story gigantically, uncomfortably representative. (It is perhaps what Coetzee meant by a literature held in bondage.) The Swart farm cannot be just a family property but must also come to stand in for debatable land, and perhaps also for an entire contested country. The force of the fable is explicit, becoming more so as the novel gathers its significances. An Afrikaner family has occupied the farmhouse for many years but is cursed to perish, to leave it, and to wander—at Astrid’s funeral, the pastor likens such people to the seed of Cain, exiled from a paradisal land. In the novel’s accounting, white South Africans cannot inherit this land, and do not deserve to: Anton’s low sperm count means that he and Desirée could not have children, and Amor, too, is childless. The optimistic harvest of “Howards End”—children, the very future, at play before the grand old house—has spoiled. As in “Disgrace,” the only posture appropriate for white people seems to be atonement and divestment: Amor selflessly at work in the hospital wards, single in Durban, without family or farm.

If anything, “The Promise” feels more pessimistic than “Disgrace.” In its closing pages, the South African experiment seemingly teeters. Government is corrupt; there are power outages and water shortages, harbingers of worse to come. And when Amor finally makes good on the promise—the moment the novel has been patiently preparing for—Salome’s son, Lukas, who played with Amor when they were kids, is not grateful but angry. Who can blame him? “My mother was supposed to get this house a long time back,” he says. “Thirty years ago! Instead she got lies and promises. And you did nothing.” Even when Amor offers to empty her bank account for Salome and Lukas, the promise has come too late, or come to naught. Like his country, Anton had much promise; his unfinished novel was about a young man who grew up on a farm, and was “full of promise and ambition.” But then, when Amor asks Lukas what has happened to the sweet boy she once knew, he says, “Life. Life happened.” Can Amor’s loving, self-sacrificial kenosis offer a feasible political model? Or is she a holy outlier, an eccentric lost in her saintly inefficacy? Amid this general banking down of possibility, it’s striking that, in a novel marked by the adventurous journeying of its narrator, the perspective of Salome, the very pivot of the book, is barely inhabited. Her ambitions, her thinking, her future, remain largely, and pointedly, unheard. Galgut makes a bitterly deliberate case for such silence—underlining the idea that Salome has indeed been silenced by those in control of her destiny—and insures that it is both eloquent and saddening. ♦

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The Promise by Damon Galgut review — our verdict on the 2021 Booker winner

Damon Galgut has been lauded as one of the great modern writers<cpi:div>

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“One of the world’s great writers,” Edmund White trumpets on the cover of the South African author Damon Galgut’s The Promise . This is no exaggeration. If there’s a better run of three novels in English this century than Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), The Impostor (2008) and In a Strange Room (2010), I want to know about them. But even great writers have off-days, and his last novel, Arctic Summer (2014), about EM Forster, was a bit flat.

He’s back on home turf with The Promise , a family saga in South Africa from 1986 to 2018 that crams so much into 300 pages that there must be secret trapdoors involved. As that suggests, Galgut is an ambitious writer but he’s too considerate to

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Ella fox-martens, the promise, by damon galgut, reviewed by ella fox-martens.

Somewhere in apartheid Pretoria, 1985, Rachel Swart, a recently re-converted Jewish woman, dies of cancer. On her deathbed, she feverishly forces her Christian, Afrikaans husband to promise to give the maid, Salome, the house where she already lives. Despite its illegality— Black people could not own property at the time —the conversation is overheard by Rachel’s teenage daughter Amor, who spends the next thirty years attempting to convince her father and two siblings to make good on her mother’s dying wish. 

So goes the setup of Damon Galgut’s Man Booker Award–winning novel The Promise , which is much less about the Swarts, and much more about deconstructing the place where such a story could feasibly be told. “Do you have no idea what country you’re living in?” Amor’s brother asks her. “No,” Galgut answers for us, “she doesn’t … history has not yet trod on her.” By the time The Promise ends in 2018, history will have ground its boot not only on Amor and her family, but the entire nation. Galgut, though– whom I interviewed in 2021 –welcomes the death of the old South Africa, which allows him to consider the central question of what grows out of its ashes.

Each of The Promise ’s four sections centers around the death of a different Swart. They’re also set in defining eras of South African politics, from the State of Emergency to Mandela’s presidency, Mbeki’s inauguration and Jacob Zuma’s eventual resignation. The romp through South Africa’s sordid past is a bizarre one, populated by impossible coincidences and brutal violence, with a chorus of odd supporting characters: a case of snakes, an incestuous priest, a yoga teacher called Mowgli, an evil reptile park salesman. 

The Promise ’s sweeping scope and utilization of quasi-magical realism to evoke the dysfunction of life in postcolonial states renders it closer to Midnight’s Children than Coetzee’s Disgrace . There is a neat strangeness to the proceedings that suggests a fable; Amor herself gets struck by lightning as a child. It’s a risky approach, given that apartheid and its consequences are raw enough for this kind of fictionalization to feel condescending. Yet, from a distance, the last thirty years—with the absurd scandals, dashed hopes, and constant corruption—do seem like a staged tragedy. After all, it was Jane Taylor’s 1998 play Ubu and the Truth Commission , with its puppets and talking crocodile, that emerged as one of the most painful artistic representations of racist violence under apartheid. The decision to open the novel with a Fellini quote is then eminently sensible. Disdaining unflinching realism as a sufficient vehicle for conveying the weight of history, The Promise instead offers a narrative that is only matched in surrealism by the facts themselves. In South Africa, Galgut implies, art can only ever hope to imitate life.

Even more polarizing is Galgut’s knowingly theatrical voice, which is unsurprising given his background as a playwright. Thoughts swirl around on the page, their origins unclear. Rachel’s ghost floats off to evaluate her own dead body before she is swiftly excised on grounds of unimportance. Galgut’s direction is ever-present, intruding upon events to offer moral judgements, or to muddy the waters until objective truth is blurred. “The family has returned,” he writes, “or maybe they have never left.” He picks people up and sets them down again. Perhaps they were in the living room, or the lounge. Amor left on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, either in the evening or morning. As he notes, whatever actually happens “doesn’t matter.” Galgut implicates the reader with his frequent asides. “Shall we say” and “let us pretend” have the effect of rapping on the glass of an aquarium to startle the fish. The intention that underlies Galgut’s chaotic narration is simple: The reader must never become comfortable enough to forget that this is a story. Galgut’s refusal to allow suspension of disbelief strips the machinations of fiction bare, revealing people as symbols and place as setting—drawing constant attention to the ugly wiring that sustains personal and national propaganda.

What saves The Promise from being an exercise in history is its pitch-black sense of humor. Galgut even manages to force a genuine laugh during a murder scene with his stinging depiction of “South Africa’s finest”—two corrupt and incompetent detectives, one of whom is a little too happy to be examining a body. His ability to eviscerate racist, bourgeois white South Africans is unparalleled:

Astrid huffs audibly. Since she married a rich man, she finds the notion of work distasteful, especially when it’s a job. Running a house and raising a family is bad enough, but that’s why you have servants, to help you. It seems to Astrid that her little sister has chosen the life of a servant instead, and what for? To punish herself?

This is Galgut’s wisest stylistic choice. Without the embrace of satire, The Promise would never work as well as it does. When it comes to apartheid fiction by white writers, earnest sentimentality can reduce an otherwise competent novel into a spectacle of pearl-clutching and exploitation, placing white guilt above Black experience. Galgut never falls into that trap, mostly because he is always aware of his characters as devices. 

Yes, as others have noted , Salome is barely developed—nobody is. As Amor journeys home for the last time, having devoted her life to serving others out of a misguided sense of martyrdom, she proves herself incapable of seeing Salome (or Black people at large) as anything other than the answer to her own problems of conscience. Decades have passed, and Salome is an old woman now. As her son Lukas makes clear, it’s “thirty years too late” to be grateful for anything. Amor’s supposedly noble resolution to keep Rachel’s promise has always been self-serving. Without her guilt, she barely exists. Her peaceful ruminations on her own death sum up Galgut’s core idea elegantly: “Other branches will fill the space,” he writes. “Other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word.” Like a cauterized wound, the Swarts and the South Africa they represent need to die for the new country to decide its own future. With that hope, Galgut ends The Promise on a wistful note as Amor climbs down from the roof, having just scattered her brother’s ashes. She descends towards a fragile blank slate, where the past must be laid to rest in order to survive whatever happens next.

Published on March 17, 2022

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Australian Book Review

Four funerals and a farm

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The Promise  by Damon Galgut

Chatto & Windus, $32.99 pb, 304 pp

R achel Swart is in the final decline of a terminal cancer when she extracts a promise from her husband, Manie: he agrees to give their maid Salome the deed to the Lombard Place, a small house on the family’s farm. It is an act of recognition. Salome has cared for her, has mopped up ‘blood and shit and pus and piss’, doing the jobs Rachel’s family found ‘too dirty or too intimate’. It is 1986 in South Africa, and already the idea of giving Salome the land on which she lives can’t help but invoke the paranoid spectre of widescale repatriation.

Like Maria in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), the name Salome is burdened by the misplaced weight of Western culture. For hers is not a demand for upheaval – John the Baptist’s head – but a disquieting pull towards the promise of her own place; a promise that is cast aside at every opportunity by Manie and two of his children. The only one committed to upholding Rachel’s wish is her youngest daughter, Amor, who witnessed the deathbed bequest unnoticed: ‘They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.’

Amor’s disempowerment, like Salome’s, allows her behind closed doors, but never comfortably. Her family is unnerved by her strangeness. As a child, she was struck by lightning while out on a koppie, an outcrop on the flat dry veld. It scorched her feet and felled a toe, an absence that ties her to the farm by cosmic joke. The farm itself is a bit of a joke too: ‘one horse and a few cows’. Yet it remains at the centre of The Promise , with Galgut offering this place of diminishing worth as a sardonic addendum to the tradition of the farm novel, so long a staple of white South African literature.

The tradition encompasses the idealised plaasroman of Afrikaans alongside antipastoral novels like Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Here on this solitary koppie, as an early review of Schreiner noted, ‘there come up for solution one after another the simple questions of human nature and human action’. In the first decades after the end of apartheid, the farm novel underwent perhaps its greatest upheaval as J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) fundamentally unsettled the genre’s governing motif of domestication, challenging in the process the idea that human nature and action could be contained by the pastoral mode. And yet, in these two novels, the farm still acts as a site of generative connection between people broken by South Africa.

The Promise arrives at a time when the farm novel, having moved from pastoral epic to family tragedy, teeters on the brink of farce. But like the geological layers of the land itself, Galgut’s novel evidences in some vestigial form what has come before. If the farm in Schreiner’s novel was a ‘microcosm of colonial South Africa’, as Coetzee has labelled it, so is the Swart farm. It too represents a close-minded society that ‘drives out those of its number who seek the great white bird Truth’. The difference is that, with the progress of history, the isolated farm is no longer a world unto itself, no longer the model for the society around it.

As in Disgrace and Agaat , the Swart family’s delusions of self-sufficiency are pierced by illness and crime. Those pushed from the farm (Amor and, to a lesser extent, her siblings) are drawn back to bury their dead. Spaced at roughly ten-year intervals, a set of funerals provides both a neat structure for the book and a rough gauge with which to measure the promise of the New South Africa. Behind the burials, the country’s history sweeps from the 1986 state of emergency to Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration, drawing into view the AIDS crisis, the World Cup, rolling power cuts, and Jacob Zuma’s resignation in 2018.

This desire to contain everything is the source of the book’s wit. The typical farm novel’s symbolic reach allows much to be left unsaid. Not so with Galgut’s narrator, who fills the silences, shifting promiscuously in and out of the consciousnesses of the family and a host of ancillary characters with high modernist brio (often in the same sentence). He argues with them, teases them, watches them bathe and shit. He tells us what they think, even apologising when he ‘slips’ and refers to Salome’s house, ‘beg your pardon, the Lombard place’. Taking stock of the farmhouse during Rachel’s funeral, his omniscience rises to heights of glorious bathos:

The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice … Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed. The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them flushed twenty-seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit, one stomachful of regurgitated food and five millilitres of sperm.

Amassing the facts of experience can’t really tell a life. Galgut knows this; the sum of the list signals that there are things that escape the novel’s comprehension.

Comprehension has two interlinked meanings in The Promise : understanding and inclusion. Both falter when it comes to Salome and her son Lukas. Galgut’s attempts to enter their thoughts are tentative, subjunctive. We finally arrive at a silence. In this self-satirising and disturbingly beautiful novel, we see why farms are peripheral in the work of Zakes Mda and not central to the politics of land as they are across the continent in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

The tragedy of Galgut’s novel is that not everyone can fit in – not when the only way to keep promises is to build new layers on the state, the land and its literature without digging for new foundations.

  • Damon Galgut

Marc Mierowsky

  • Chatto & Windus
  • Booker Prize Winner

Marc Mierowsky

Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. His first book, on Daniel Defoe and the campaign to end Scottish independence, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. 

Marc Mierowsky reviews &#039;The Promise&#039; by Damon Galgut

The Promise

by Damon Galgut

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Comments (2).

  • That is a terrific and informative review, Marc, especially for folk like me, born in the UK with family in South Africa and having visited only once - around 1984. A sad, beautiful country I used to be in love with from afar, and still am, truth be told. I now run a book group in Melbourne, Australia. Thank you so much for your insights. Posted by Beryl Beaney 12 August 2022
  • The book is a “good read” as you follow the events and conversations moving back and forth with the narrator. It is a present tragedy. However, I did wonder about the absence of English South Africans - do the two colonial streams never coincide? The priest hardly counts. Posted by Jennifer Raper 15 June 2022

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The Promise

  • Published: 12 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529113877
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • RRP: $22.99
  • Contemporary fiction
  • General & literary fiction
  • Historical fiction

The Promise

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021

Damon Galgut

guardian book review the promise

Winner of the Booker Prize 2021 - discover the powerful story of a family in crisis.

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling story of a family in crisis.

'A tour de force... A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh' Booker Judges, 2021

'A masterpiece - a moving, brilliantly told family epic' Elizabeth Day ____________________________

On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land...yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored.

As each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise? ____________________________

'Astonishing' Colm Tóibín

'Bursting with life' The Times

'So powerful' Clare Chambers

'Utterly compelling' Patrick Gale

'Stunning' Observer

** A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES , GUARDIAN , OBSERVER , DAILY TELEGRAPH , i AND NEW STATESMAN **

About the author

DAMON GALGUT is the author of nine novels. He won the Booker Prize 2021 for The Promise , having been shortlisted for the prize twice before ( The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room ). He lives and works in Cape Town

portrait photo of Damon Galgut

Also by Damon Galgut

The Quarry

Praise for The Promise

This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing Publisher's Weekly (Starred review)
Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief Kirkus
If possible, The Promise packs yet more of a punch than Galgut's previous novels. Fuelled by sex and death, this is a South African Gotterdammerung charting a white family's inexorable decline from significance and power. Its indignation at its morally bankrupt central characters is leavened with languid comedy, as though Galgut had collaborated with Tennessee Williams. The effect is utterly compelling Patrick Gale
Galgut understands the complexities of the human heart which he reveals with the finest delicacy. This is an emotionally powerful and thrilling novel that haunts one long after it has been laid down Gabriel Byrne
The Promise recalls the great achievements of modernism in its imagistic brilliance, its caustic disenchantment, its relentless research into the human. For formal innovation and moral seriousness, Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer. He is an essential writer Garth Greenwell
I was mesmerised by The Promise , Damon Galgut's novel of the decline and fall of a South African family, told over four decades and four funerals. These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin, living out their lives around a family farm in Pretoria, a place suffused with the threat and consequence of violence. Galgut's prose is intoxicating , managing the rare feat of being utterly liberated and fiercely controlled. A brilliant book Anna Hope
The Promise is a gorgeous and pleasurable novel, with an imaginative heft to match Galgut's fellow South African writers Gordimer, Coetzee and Brink . It's richly evocative of the land and its people, and reports on a new South Africa without fake moralising; it made me laugh, too. Dreamlike yet so solidly well-made, The Promise has lived on inside my head, unsettling and troubling me Tessa Hadley
The Promise is fully rooted in contemporary South Africa, but the novel's weather moves into the elemental while attending also to the daily, the detailed and the personal. The book is close to a folktale or the retelling of a myth about fate and loss, about three siblings and land, a promise made and broken. The story has an astonishing sense of depth, as though the characters were imagined over time, with slow tender care Colm Tóibín
A surprising number of novelists are very good; few are extraordinary. Like his compatriot J.M. Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company . . . 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. Simply: you must read it . Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts. The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized Claire Messud, Harpers US
A literary masterpiece of heart, soul and incorrupt wisdom. Galgut addresses conflict and reparation - both political and personal - with extraordinary skill, truthfulness and sensitivity. Sarah Hall
So acute, indeed, are Mr. Galgut's descriptions - of a character's inner life, a body's fragility, a family's shared wounds, a country's accumulated scars - that they seem like our perceptions, not his . . . Time and again in Mr. Galgut's fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
Remarkable . . . The Promise suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge . . . the novel's beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation . . . Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept at moving quickly between characters' thoughts James Wood, New Yorker
Superbly narrated, Galgut's book combines state-of-the-nation novel . . . with something like allegory or even Christian parable Phil Baker, Sunday Times
Stunning . . . Galgut deploys every trick in the book; he's heart-swellingly attentive to emotional complexity . . . Anthony Cummins, Observer
A strange, skilful, spellbinding eighth novel . . . Galgut explores grief, despair and love in a way that feels ageless . . . By the end of this enormously enjoyable novel, our laughter has become complicity and farce become force David Isaacs, Literary Review
The Promise functions as a spare but thoroughly satisfying parable , the decline of the Swarts into moral degeneracy and death tracing the forsaken promises of the post-apartheid era, from early hope to the contemporary realities of corruption and racial enmity . . . [a] magisterial, heart-stopping novel Nat Segnit, Times Literary Supplement
Galgut seems to deliver effortlessly... there's nothing he can't do ... [his] style is quiet but the book feels bursting with life because of all the of all the off-page, between-times details he hints at... This is so obviously one of the best novels of the year... a book that answers the question "what is a novel for?" With a simple: "This!" John Self, The Times
A complex, ambitious and brilliant work - one that provides Galgut's fullest exploration yet of the poisonous legacy of apartheid . . . Galgut describes his characters with rare assurance and skill, conjuring them to life in a narrative voice that moves restlessly from character to character . . . Rarely have I had such a strong sense, while reading a novel, that I myself was there, in the room with the characters William Skidelsky, Financial Times
The Promise by Damon Galgut is a masterpiece - one of the best books I have read in the past decade and definitely my book of the year so far. Galgut is a master of the form. His free-flowing prose moves effortlessly from inside one character's head to another and displays a wealth of compassion and insight from multiple perspectives. This novel is a moving, brilliantly-told family epic with political resonance which also manages in parts to be darkly comic. Phenomenally good Elizabeth Day
Galgut is a terrifically agile and consistently interesting novelist, certain up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee as a chronicler of his nation's anguished complexity Jon Day, Guardian, *Book of the Week*
[A] magnificent new novel. Galgut sweeps his ruthlessly forensic gaze over each of the protagonists...as well as the country at large Laura Battle, Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2021*
Labelled a masterpiece and one of the best novels of the year within a week of publication... Galgut is on his finest form as he explores grief, despair and love in his inimitable style. Read this book if nothing else this year. A Little Bird, *Summer Reads of 2021*
[A] gripping, profound tale... a damning commentary on South Africa's many broken promises Economist
Ingenious... The most distinctive element of the novel, and its greatest pleasure, is the effortless way Galgut flows from mind to mind and body to body, whether male, female, pubertal, menopausal, maturing, ageing or dying. It's almost uncanny Suzi Feay, Spectator
Surrender to the music of Galgut's prose, however, and the rewards are considerable Max Liu
Excellent... The Promise is a powerful novel of character... [an] ambitious novel but, remarkably, Galgut rarely needs to strain for impact... his ability deftly to shift perspective from one character to the next creates a distinctive polyphonic effect Alun David, Jewish Chronicle
A convincing and heartfelt novel Eva Waite-Taylor, Independent
Politically chastening and technically superb. It's hard to see any novel beating it Claire Allfree, Daily Telegraph
A powerful read World of Cruising
This is the finest of all Damon Galgut's extraordinary novels. It reads as if the author has liberated himself from certain shackles he has needed in the past to convey the feelings of repression and social discomfort his people suffer... The writing - so impish, so playful - is a constant joy Paul Bailey, Oldie
Vivid and suggestive, moving and often very funny Alex Clark, Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year*
Damon Galgut is the most worthy winner of the Booker prize we've seen for many years... The book trembles in the hand with its political relevance Rose Tremain, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*
A sobering allegory, to be sure, but also a giddy pleasure, thanks to Galgut's restlessly acrobatic narrative voice, which darts and zooms unpredictably around the action Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail, *Christmas Gift Guide 2021*
One of the world's great writers Critic, *Books of the Year*
A dazzling feat of kaleidoscopic storytelling Claire Allfree, The Times, *Books of the Year*
I would have chosen this novel before it won the Booker... What makes it special is the humanity with which it is written and Galgut's cinematic prose, which shifts seamlessly from one perspective to the next Elizabeth Day, i, *Book of the Year*
The Promise ...is a remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself. Like his earlier books, it reveals him as a master of human complexity. No wonder it won the Booker Joan Bakewell, Observer, *Books of the Year*
A complex, clever, wryly observant tale of one family's decline amid a nation's birth Patricia Nicol, Sunday Times, *Books of the Year*
[A] masterful, sweeping novel... a piercing dissection of a country at a decisive historical junction and the intersection of socio-political events and private life Juanita Coulson, Lady, *Books of the Year*
The Promise is just 300 pages long, but Galgut shows his skills as a concise and piercing novelist by packing so much into this exceptional book Martin Chilton, Independent, *Books of the Year*
A layered, clever and sometimes uncomfortable read, but with a gripping story Claire Fuller, Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*
A remarkably successful combination of formal discipline and finely observed characterisation, it was a worthy winner of the 2021 Booker prize Alun David, Jewish Chronicle, *Books of the Year*
The judges of this year's Booker prize rightly crowned this outstanding multigenerational saga... The morally chewy scenario is given extra zest by an acrobatic narrative voice full of trickery Anthony Cummins, Metro, *Books of the Year*
The Promise ...is mesmerising Helena Morrisey, Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*
A remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself ... No wonder it won the Booker Observer, Books of the Year
Vivid and suggestive, moving and often very funny Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
Brilliant ... Rarely have I had such a strong sense, while reading a novel, that I myself was there, in the room with the characters Financial Times
A dazzling feat of kaleidoscopic storytelling The Times, Books of the Year
Layered, clever...with a gripping story CLAIRE FULLER, Daily Mail, Books of the Year
A joyful masterclass in fiction... a dizzying adventure that underlines one of the most appealing things about fiction: it is the closest we can ever get to inhabiting other perspectives Susie Mesure
A superb novel ; a nuanced, sad, hilarious portrait of a family and a country PAULA HAWKINS
A moving, brilliantly told family epic . . . darkly comic . . . phenomenally good ELIZABETH DAY
Astonishing . . . about fate and loss, about three siblings and land, a promise made a broken COLM TOIBIN
A brilliant book told over four decades and four funerals . . . These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin . . . Intoxicating ANNA HOPE
Outstanding . . . Gripping . . . There is also plenty of unexpected comedy BBC News
This story was so powerful , the writing so strong and supple... What an achievement CLARE CHAMBERS
Inventive and full of energy The Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*
Gentle, precise, insightful, melancholy but warm Shehan Karunatilaka, author of THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA, Daily Mail

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guardian book review the promise

It's third time lucky for Damon Galgut, who won the Booker Prize after being shortlisted twice before.

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THE PROMISE

by Damon Galgut ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2021

Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief.

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.”

Pub Date: April 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-60945-658-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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by Kiley Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 2024

Reid is a genius of mimicry and social observation.

A very thin wall in a college dorm causes complications for eavesdroppers on both sides.

Reid follows her debut, Such a Fun Age (2020), with another sharp, edgy social novel, this time set at the University of Arkansas. Primary among the large cast are Agatha, a 38-year-old gay white visiting professor; Millie, a Black 24-year-old RA; and the five undergrads who live in the suite next door to her. The students include a threesome of white friends—Agatha categorizes them as “Jenna: tall. Casey: southern. Tyler: mean” when she interviews them for a book she’s working on—and two loners: Peyton (who is Black) and the white Kennedy, who’s been through a terrible experience just before arriving at college. Kennedy can hear everything the RAs say when they meet up in Millie’s room, and she has so little going on in her own life that she listens in quite a bit. Meanwhile, everything that’s said in the suites is heard loud and clear in Millie’s room. So when Agatha becomes fascinated with the girls after that initial interview, particularly with the way they talk and their relationships to money, she starts paying Millie (!) to let her come in and eavesdrop on them once a week. As an author, Reid has the very same obsessions she gives her character Agatha, and the guilty pleasure of the book is the way she nails the characters’ speech styles, Southern accents, and behavior and her unerring choice of products and other accoutrements to surround them with. “Tyler wasn’t actively cruel to Kennedy, but she definitely wasn’t all that nice. The small ‘hey’ she gave when Kennedy opened the door stung with the truce of roommate civility. Perhaps it felt more hostile in comparison to the way she greeted Peyton. She’d go ‘Oh hello, roomie,’ or ‘Pey-Pey’s home.’ And then Peyton would say, ‘Okaayyy. Hiii.’ ” Then Agatha decides to start selling these “interviews” to Teen Vogue , and Millie finds she can’t stop thinking about Agatha, and mean pranks beget even meaner ones—Ohmahlord, as Casey would say.

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024

ISBN: 9780593328200

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023

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Reviews of The Promise by Damon Galgut

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

The Promise

by Damon Galgut

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

  • Literary Fiction
  • Middle & Southern Africa
  • 1980s & '90s
  • Contemporary
  • Generational Sagas

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guardian book review the promise

About this Book

Book summary.

A modern family saga that could only have come from South Africa, written in gorgeous prose by twice 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—an atmosphere 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.

Excerpt The Promise

The moment the metal box speaks her name, Amor knows it's happened. She's been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can't remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground. But when the words are said to her aloud, she doesn't believe them. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. No, no. It can't be true, what her aunt has just told her. Nobody is dead. It's a word, that's all. She looks at the word, lying there on the desk like an insect on its back, with no explanation. This is in Miss Starkey's office, where the voice over the Tannoy told her to go. Amor has been waiting and waiting for this moment for so long, has imagined it so many times, that it already seems like a fact. But now that the moment has really come, it feels far away and dreamy. It hasn't happened, not actually. And especially not to Ma, who will always, always be alive. I'm sorry, Miss Starkey ...

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Booker Prize 2021

Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Despite the novel's relatively weighty theme, the book doesn't read like its subject is a heavy one; it's only after pondering the subtext that it becomes apparent that its ultimate message is somewhat pessimistic. Indeed, it's actually pretty funny at times, partially due to Galgut's brilliant depiction of the incredibly dysfunctional Swart family, all of whom, apart from Amor, are unlikeable to one degree or another. They engender no sympathy in the reader, making it easier to laugh at their failings. The truly outstanding feature of this novel, though, is its narrator, who sometimes seems to be omniscient, and at other times feigns ignorance or admits to imagining whole scenes. The voice comes across as conversational — gossipy and critical of the family without explicitly calling them out as the self-centered jerks readers come to know... continued

Full Review (722 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs ).

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Apartheid and south africa's truth and reconciliation commission.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1999

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The Promise

44 pages • 1 hour read

Damon Galgut

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 1-44

Part 1, Pages 45-89

Part 2, Pages 93-130

Part 2, Pages 130-151

Part 3, Pages 155-176

Part 3, Pages 177-192

Part 3, Pages 192-215

Part 4, Pages 219-232

Part 4, Pages 232-257

Part 4, Pages 257-269

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The Promise , published in 2021, is South African writer Damon Galgut’s eighth novel. Galgut’s fiction frequently explores the complicated world of South African society and politics, particularly the legacy of apartheid. The Promise tells the story of the Swarts, a white family descended from Dutch settlers who came to South Africa in the 17th century. The three Swart children come of age as the country undergoes the abolition of apartheid, a system that formally segregated South Africans on the basis of race. Each of the novel’s four parts revolves around one family member’s death, tracing the Swarts’ decline. Stylistically, The Promise aligns with classic works of literary modernism from the early 20th century in the tradition of William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf, thanks to its wandering, fluid point of view .

Plot Summary

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Part 1, “Ma,” revolves around the 1986 death of the Swart matriarch, Rachel. The youngest Swart sibling, Amor , resides at a boarding school, and the eldest Swart sibling, Anton , is current completing his mandatory service with the military. They both return home to join their middle sister, Astrid , and attend Rachel’s funeral services. Before she died, Rachel asked her husband, Manie , to grant the family’s Black maid, Salome , ownership of the house she lives in on the family’s land to repay her for her devoted service. Manie agrees, but after Rachel’s death he denies ever making the promise, despite Amor’s persistent objections that she heard it. Anton’s disagreement with Manie about the promise and other topics surrounding Rachel’s death creates a rift. After the funeral services, Amor goes back to her boarding school and Anton returns to his military unit. At the last minute, however, he decides to desert the military and hitchhikes to a far-off region.

Part 2, “Pa,” finds all three Swart children in their adulthood: Amor lives in London, Astrid is married with twins, and Anton lives far from the Swart family farm without a steady job. Nine years have passed since the last time all three siblings were together at their family home, but Manie’s death brings them back to Pretoria. By this time, Nelson Mandela is president and apartheid has ended, meaning that Black South Africans are now allowed, among other things, to enjoy the same spaces as white South Africans. The details of Manie’s death are macabre: At a publicized fundraiser for his minister Alwyn Simmers’s church, Manie climbs into a snake tank at his reptile park in order to test his faith and try to break the world record for the longest time spent in a snake tank. Predictably, the snake bites him and he dies shortly after. Because of a clause in Manie’s will, Anton is forced to apologize to Simmers over a previous disagreement in order to claim his part of the substantial inheritance Manie leaves behind for his three children. While Anton agrees to Amor’s request that he finally honor Manie’s promise to give Salome ownership of her home, he takes no action to do so.

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Another nine years pass between Part 2 and Part 3. Amor left London and now works as a nurse in a South African AIDS ward. Astrid left her first husband for a man with whom she had an affair. Anton married a girlfriend from his youth, Desirée, and lives on the Swart farm. Although Astrid’s new marriage puts her in close proximity to powerful political figures, this status does not help her avoid South Africa’s rising crime rates: A carjacker kills her to steal and sell her car. Once more, Amor and Anton reunite at the Swart farm for a funeral. Amor again raises the unfulfilled promise to Anton; however, Anton takes no action.

Part 4 begins in 2017. One night, Anton—drunk, mired in depression, and unable to find any purpose in life—kills himself with his father’s gun in a field outside the Swart home. Amor returns home one last time determined to finally do something about Manie’s promise. She enlists the help of the family lawyer and finally, after 31 years, presents Salome with the ownership of the house she lives in. Salome’s son, Lukas, treats this gesture with scorn, insisting it has no meaning given how belated it is. Amor also gives Salome the entire sum of her inheritance from Manie, however, which is a more financially substantial gift. After scattering her brother’s ashes, Amor prepares to leave the farm and start the next chapter of her life with the weight of the unfulfilled promise finally off her shoulders. 

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In This Novel, a Second Civil War Reinstates Black Bondage

Rae Giana Rashad imagines an alternate America in her first novel, “The Blueprint.”

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The book cover of “The Blueprint,” by Rae Giana Rashad, shows an illustration of a snake wrapped around a bird on a tree branch.

By Tochi Onyebuchi

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of “Goliath,” “Riot Baby” and the forthcoming essay collection “Is This a Race Book?”

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THE BLUEPRINT , by Rae Giana Rashad

The past, however deep, is never far from the surface in Rae Giana Rashad’s debut novel, “The Blueprint.” In a near-future America, riven by Civil War II in the mid-20th century, Black Americans in select states are designated as DoS, or Descendants of Slavery. Black men are enlisted to subdue unrest within and along the borders of these states. Black women are forced into concubinage with white statesmen before being married off to Black men, a life course determined by a shadowy, faceless algorithm.

Our protagonist, Solenne Bonet, shares, in many ways, a life narrative with Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s most famous slave. Indeed, the official who circumvents the algorithm to take possession of Solenne, after her initial pairing with a writer, has a portrait of Jefferson in his office. And Hemings appears — as lodestone, as motif, as cautionary tale — at numerous points throughout the novel.

However, freedom is a secondary concern in the story. What occupies the book’s primary real estate is Black girlhood and its constrictions in the past, present and future of these disunited states, the broken promise of it. This is the undercurrent not only to Solenne’s story, but to that of Hemings, as well as that of Henriette, an ancestor of Solenne’s whose biography Solenne transcribes.

“The Blueprint” is ambitious in its themes and were it a bigger book, more specific in its world-building, and were the parallel narratives treated with the same depth as the main story, the novel could have presented a much more powerful statement on the interminability of the Black woman’s struggle to assert her own personhood.

Gaps in the picture Rashad paints raised questions for me, speed bumps that interrupted the flow of the reading experience. If the power of the state is so great that it can coerce such large segments of the population into such bitter oppression, how is our protagonist able to learn about a figure like Sally Hemings in the first place? Why are the so-called executioners, supposedly tasked with rounding up insurgents, allowed to prey on unaccompanied young girls out after curfew? Is the concubine’s primary role that of child bearer? House servant? Secretary? These are all questions the book could have answered, even if the main focus was still Solenne’s psychological turmoil.

But perhaps these are the concerns of someone who has read too much speculative fiction. Where the novel shines is in its depiction of the torment Solenne endures during her relationship with Bastien, a Texas official with his eyes on the presidency. To call it a relationship, though, is misleading, because the power imbalance makes clear at every turn just how nonexistent Solenne’s agency is.

And yet her fight for autonomy amid captivity is the book’s beating heart. Solenne knows she needs to be loved. Indeed, it is one of her deepest truths. But what do you do when the person who claims to offer love is the man who rules you and will never let you go? Why does what Solenne feels, in her moments of weakness, look so much like love? Like infatuation? When the novel explores these questions, it is at its most fascinating. And its most impressive.

THE BLUEPRINT | By Rae Giana Rashad | Harper | 294 pp. | $30

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The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey review – girl turns detective

In 1979, tween best friends in Yorkshire investigate the identity of the Ripper while navigating their own journeys into teenagedom

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To think of the Yorkshire Ripper as a type of terrorist makes sense, given that the fear he engendered during his crimewave was far in excess of his actual reach. Here was a faceless phantom of almost supernatural power, striking at will and at random. In a time before the endless serving up of serial killers as nightly entertainment, women and girls across the north walked in groups after dark or stayed indoors; developed a horror of ginnels, alleys and snickets; looked at the men around them, wondering, could it be him, or him?

When he turned to younger and more “respectable” prey than his earlier victims, who either were, or were characterised as, sex workers, the panic became widespread. Miv, the central character and chief point of view in Jennie Godfrey’s debut novel, is only 12, and while the adults around her are keen to spare her the gruesome details and to assure her that she is not a target, she still feels steeped in the malignity. With the police and media insisting that the Ripper hides in plain sight as “somebody’s husband, somebody’s son”, Miv decides to conduct her own inquiries with her best friend Sharon.

The pair’s investigations commence with a sweet naivety as Miv solemnly writes in her notebook her suspicions of a disliked teacher: “He has a moustache – He has dark hair – He’s always angry – He’s not from round our way”. Being an outsider also counts against Mr Bashir, the local shopkeeper, although with his cheerfulness and love of Elton John, not to mention his long working hours, it’s hard to see him as the elusive killer. Godfrey tenderly portrays that short, significant period in female friendship where one girl, in this case Sharon, is further along in puberty. Miv is “flat as a board” and still childlike, clinging to the best friend who we can see is humouring her out of kindness.

Wombles, swirly carpets, Holly Hobbie dolls, Spirographs and games of Ker-Plunk evoke the era, and in a novel necessarily concerned with facial hair it’s amusing to read of a character with a “Jason King moustache”. Miv’s breathless account takes up much of the narrative, with occasional, slightly jolting forays into the points of view of surrounding adults: her father, Austin; troubled Helen, the mother of a boy she is beginning to fancy; Mr Bashir. These reveal some of the hidden webs of the grown-up world, whose secrets Miv is also starting to divine. They will not uncover the identity of the Ripper – history tells that story – but will contribute to Miv’s accelerating maturity, as well as providing a complex moral education.

For all the grim seriousness of the underlying subject matter, Godfrey mostly tells the tale in a style that wouldn’t be out of place in a Young Adult novel. Some seeming flaws could be interpreted merely as Miv’s limited perspective. The girls, through their bumbling as much as their shrewdness, uncover some genuine villains in their midst, though the local racist bully, a boy at their school, could have done with a little more background to explain his plot-advancing malevolence.

Overall, Godfrey succeeds brilliantly in fitting a gripping and moving story in the interstices of a horrific episode in recent history, without ever trivialising, taking focus from, or minimising the lasting impact of the original crimes.

• The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey is published by Cornerstone (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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IMAGES

  1. The Promise: A Novel

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  2. Promise Keeper (The Guardian Herd: Dark Water Trials #1) by Jennifer

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  3. The Promise by Damon Galgut

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  5. Entrada Book Reviews

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  6. The promise by Damon Galgut: a book review

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COMMENTS

  1. The Promise by Damon Galgut review

    The Promise by Damon Galgut review - a curse down the decades This bravura novel about the undoing of a bigoted South African family during apartheid deserves awards Anthony Cummins Tue 8 Jun...

  2. A Family, and a Nation Under Apartheid, Tears at the Seams

    Critics' Reviews Editors' Choice 100 Notable Books Advertisement Fiction A Family, and a Nation Under Apartheid, Tears at the Seams Damon Galgut, author of "The Promise." Nigel Maister When...

  3. Damon Galgut Wins Booker Prize for 'The Promise'

    A review of "The Promise" in The New York Times Book Review called Galgut "a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters' fecklessness and hypocrisy."

  4. The Promise (Galgut novel)

    Plot The Promise is a family saga spanning four decades, [5] each of which features a death in the family. It concerns the Afrikaner Swart family and their farm located outside Pretoria. The family consists of Manie, his wife Rachel, and their children Anton, Astrid, and Amor. In 1986, Rachel dies after a long illness.

  5. A Family at Odds Reveals a Nation in the Throes

    By James Wood April 12, 2021 The contested fate of an Afrikaner farm forces a reckoning with fraught questions of political inheritance. Illustration by Lorenzo Gritti "She felt very young; at the...

  6. The Promise by Damon Galgut review

    Challenge yourself with today's puzzles. "One of the world's great writers," Edmund White trumpets on the cover of the South African author Damon Galgut's The Promise. This is no ...

  7. The Promise by Damon Galgut

    41,177 ratings4,314 reviews The Promise , winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral.

  8. The Promise

    by Damon Galgut reviewed by Ella Fox-Martens Somewhere in apartheid Pretoria, 1985, Rachel Swart, a recently re-converted Jewish woman, dies of cancer. On her deathbed, she feverishly forces her Christian, Afrikaans husband to promise to give the maid, Salome, the house where she already lives.

  9. Marc Mierowsky reviews 'The Promise' by Damon Galgut

    Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. His first book, on Daniel Defoe and the campaign to end Scottish independence, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. The Promise. by Damon Galgut. Chatto & Windus, $32.99 pb, 304 pp.

  10. Review of The Promise by Damon Galgut

    Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, The Promise chronicles post-apartheid South Africa through the lens of one family's decline. Damon Galgut's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Promise, opens with a death; Rachel Swart is leaving behind her husband Manie and their three children.As she lays dying, she insists Manie give her long-time maid, Salome, the Lombard place, a ramshackle house on their ...

  11. Book review: The Promise by Ann Weisgarber

    In September 1900, a devastating hurricane hit the island city of Galveston in Texas. The storm surge killed over 6,000 people and is still on record as the deadliest natural disaster in American history.

  12. All Book Marks reviews for The Promise by Damon Galgut

    Read Full Review >>. Rave. Damon Galgut's remarkable new novel, The Promise, suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. 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 ...

  13. Book Marks reviews of The Promise by Damon Galgut

    This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized. Damon Galgut's remarkable new novel, The Promise, suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its ...

  14. The Promise by Damon Galgut

    Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief. Kirkus. If possible, The Promise packs yet more of a punch than Galgut's previous novels. Fuelled by sex and death, this is a South African Gotterdammerung charting a white family's inexorable decline from significance and power.

  15. THE PROMISE

    Reviews FICTION THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2021 Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief. bookshelf shop now

  16. The Promise by Damon Galgut: Summary and reviews

    Damon Galgut's novel The Promise is set in South Africa during the dismantling of the country's apartheid system. In this period, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to deal with the after-effects of apartheid, and the body is mentioned several times throughout the book. After the National Party took power in South ...

  17. The Guardian's Promise

    130 ratings20 reviews A Kingdom in Jeopardy An evil queen and her royal guards will stop at nothing to find and kill the rightful heir to the throne of Judah. When their pursuit leads them to Mira's village, only her father's bond servant, Ari, a man shrouded in secrets, can keep Mira safe.

  18. The Promise Summary and Study Guide

    44 pages • 1 hour read Damon Galgut The Promise Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021 A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. Download PDF Access Full Guide Study Guide 6,850+ In-Depth Study Guides

  19. Book Review: 'The Blueprint,' by Rae Giana Rashad

    The past, however deep, is never far from the surface in Rae Giana Rashad's debut novel, "The Blueprint.". In a near-future America, riven by Civil War II in the mid-20th century, Black ...

  20. The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey review

    In a time before the endless serving up of serial killers as nightly entertainment, women and girls across the north walked in groups after dark or stayed indoors; developed a horror of ginnels, alleys and snickets; looked at the men around them, wondering, could it be him, or him? When he turned to younger and more "respectable" prey than ...

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