Written by Damon Galgut
Brutal emotional truths hit home in Damon Galgut’s deft, powerful story of a diminished family and a troubled land
The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks, deliciously lethal in its observation of the crash and burn of a white South African family. On their farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation detests everything the family stands for, not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land, yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.
‘The original idea came from a conversation with a friend, who’s the last surviving member of his family. He’s a great raconteur and he told me one drunken afternoon about the four family funerals he’d attended – of his mother, father, brother and sister - and he made them tragic and hilarious. And it occurred to me that it would be an unusual and interesting way to construct a story. Four funerals, a day or two in each case, no narrative filler in between. You’d get the history of a family in four separate snapshots. From there it was a short hop to the notion of setting the funerals in different decades, and of what you could convey through those big jumps in time. Not only about politics, but about people’s lives.’
Read the full interview here.
‘The Promise is an expansive family novel that explores the interconnected relationships between members of one family through the sequential lens of multiple funerals. Death assumes here both a closing but also an opening into lives lived. It is an unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century. In The Promise, Damon Galgut makes a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself that can best be summed up in the question: does true justice exist in this world? The novel’s way of tackling this question is what makes it an accomplishment and truly deserving of its place on the shortlist.’
Chigozie Obioma
James Wood, The New Yorker
‘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 […] The Promise is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all ‘promise’.’
Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
‘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 […] In such moments The Promise acquires a perilous grandeur that veers toward melodrama, but Mr. Galgut deploys these climactic scenes sparingly and to great effect, all the while keeping our anxious gaze fixed on characters linked by blood and chance whose final inheritance is a shared, contested land.’
William Skidelsky, Financial Times
‘Galgut describes his characters with rare assurance and skill, conjuring them to life in a narrative voice that moves restlessly from character to character, inhabiting each consciousness for just a few lines before moving on to the next person. This all-seeing voice is not a neutral presence, as it would be in a conventional realist novel; instead, it possesses its own personality and outlook, making it more like a chorus in a Greek drama […] The intriguing effect of this technique—a kind of hyper-omniscience—is to create an almost physical sense of immediacy. Rarely have I had such a strong sense, while reading a novel, that I myself was there, in the room with the characters. And the up-close narrative has an additional advantage, which is to distract from—or at least delay awareness of—the larger symbolic points being made.’
Tom Leclair, Open Letters
‘What saves The Promise from earnest, grave-digging melodrama and post-apartheid political correctness is Galgut’s combining the tragic downfall of The Sound and the Fury with the antic comedy of As I Lay Dying, where another dysfunctional family has very different motives before and after the burial of the mother.’
‘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 […] 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 to lyrical.’
Award-winning audiobook narrator Peter Noble brings Damon Galgut’s The Promise to life.
