The sociological component of the narrative made in Galgut opens the doors to the peculiarities of a South Africa located in all sorts of ambiguities between ethnic groups and territories. But beyond its set design located in the great country of southern Africa, its intimate court combined with an action that borders on the existential ends up presenting us with sophisticated canvases of the human.
A kind of exuberance in all kinds of details about the human condition, from its most intimate notion to a multitude of more general aspects. Balances that this master of current narrative draws with the agility of what can only be a gift for telling intra-stories that can well be extrapolated to any other context.
Detail and universality. Microcosm observed under different focuses depending on the point to which he directs us like a painter facing his larger work. Galgut always achieves that point of transcendence of the literary as a truer testimony of the human. A performance of decades that gradually reaches its peak.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Damon Galgut
The promise
Do the words are gone with the wind. Always. Confidence and faith in what was agreed without its proper paper support can drag us into unpayable debts under the most strange ad hoc justifications for each new moment of non-compliance.
The Swarts are a white family who have lived for generations on a farm outside Pretoria, South Africa. After the death of the mother, everyone gathers for the funeral at the family home. Amor and Anton, two of his children, reject what the family represents and do not forget the promise that their father made to their mother shortly before he died: that Salome, the black woman who has been working for them all her life and who took care of her in his last days, he could keep the small house in which he has always lived. But time is passing and the promise is not fulfilled.
The narrative follows the Swarts' footsteps over more than three decades; Through the detailed exploration of family members and their conflicts, Galgut also tells us about the political and social changes in the country after the end of racial segregation.
The Promise, a highly original and moving novel that won the 2021 Booker Prize, is considered one of the great literary works in English of the last decade.
The good doctor
There seems to be no cul for endemic diseases spread over generations. Resentment does not seem to find a vaccine or a cure. A good doctor arrives with new spirits. Discouragement can be a matter of time not finding miraculous solutions...
When Laurence Water arrives at a rural hospital to take his job, Frank is immediately suspicious. Laurence is the opposite of Frank: young, optimistic and with many projects. An uneasy friendship then develops between them. The rest of the staff watch Laurence with a mixture of respect, fear and mistrust.
The population beyond the hospital also faces new arrivals and people who lived there in the past. It is rumored that a general, a man from the apartheid times, who considers himself a dictator, is still alive. And at Mama's house a group of soldiers and their evil boss settle, a man whom Frank had known for a long time and with whom he has no desire to meet. Laurence wants to help him, but in a world where the past demands reparation for the present, his ill-fated idealism cannot last.
The impostor
Nothing worse than inhabiting the emptiness of someone who cannot be found. Perhaps a poet yearns for alienation to write his most lucid verses. But in the meantime, inertia can lead to fatality...
Adam Naiper, a middle-aged white man, is going through a rough patch: he has lost his job, his marriage has broken down and he feels that disappointment is a constant in his life. Fleeing from everything, but especially from himself, he takes refuge in a small house near the Karoo desert that belongs to his brother Gavin, a prosperous real estate developer who symbolizes the new South Africa. Determined to start a new life, he takes up his poetic vocation, which he abandoned twenty years ago; but a disturbing atmosphere envelops Adam's life.
One day he accidentally meets an old school friend, Canning, whom he barely remembers. Soon, he begins to frequent the house of his old friend, heir to a great fortune and owner of a reserve, Gondwana, which he intends to convert into a golf course. To do this, he will have to bribe corrupt officials and deal with gangsters.
Napier slowly and unwittingly finds himself drawn into his friend's criminal plot and thrown into the arms of his enigmatic and brooding wife, Baby. The Impostor is a disoriented man's struggle to find himself in a world shaken by enormous social and political change; a cruel and claustrophobic world, in which ambition, sex and death are always on the lookout for the characters.
