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A review by daja57
The Promise by Damon Galgut
5.0
Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. For other winners of the Booker see here.
The Swarts are a white South African farming family, clinging on to their way of life through the political changes marking the end of apartheid and the birth of the new majority-rule country. At the start of the book the mother of the family dies; on her deathbed she makes her husband promise to gift to the maidservant the house in which she (the servant) lives with her son. The refusal to honour this promise seems to act as a curse.
The parallels with the decline of the nation are obvious. Swarts?
This beautifully written book is told through multiple streams of consciousness (though the thoughts are usually fairly well-formed and there seemed to be more tell than show; the author-in-character sometimes speaks directly to the reader), head-hopping in a 'PoV tag' sort of way that reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
The Swarts are a white South African farming family, clinging on to their way of life through the political changes marking the end of apartheid and the birth of the new majority-rule country. At the start of the book the mother of the family dies; on her deathbed she makes her husband promise to gift to the maidservant the house in which she (the servant) lives with her son. The refusal to honour this promise seems to act as a curse.
The parallels with the decline of the nation are obvious. Swarts?
This beautifully written book is told through multiple streams of consciousness (though the thoughts are usually fairly well-formed and there seemed to be more tell than show; the author-in-character sometimes speaks directly to the reader), head-hopping in a 'PoV tag' sort of way that reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.