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Interview: Damon Galgut, author of The Promise, winner of the Booker Prize for 2021

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Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize win for his portrayal of racism and injustice done to a Black maid by her Afrikaner employers in his ninth novel, The Promise, has kindled in him the hope that his work will stand on its own. For long, well-meaning critics in the West have compared him to his compatriot JM Coetzee, who made history by becoming the first writer to have received the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999. “I have been frustrated by these endless comparisons because it feels a little bit easy and lazy to me,” says Galgut in a video interview from Cape Town, where he lives. He finds the novels of Coetzee and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer “exciting in different ways” and underlines that without them there is no way to write in the South African tradition. But the constant clubbing of his works with others has left him exasperated.

304pp, ₹699; Penguin Random House

Galgut and Coetzee are both White men of a certain “tortured mindset,” writing out of Cape Town. Although Coetzee now lives in Australia, most of his early novels were set in the city of his birth. “It’s hard for me to understand why these comparisons keep getting made. I don’t see myself as a writer similar to him. And I certainly don’t think he would have written a book remotely like The Promise. It’s not just the sort of technique that he is particularly drawn to,” says Galgut, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize for A Good Doctor (2003) and A Strange Room (2010). On both these occasions, as DBC Pierre and Howard Jacobson took home the award for their novels, Vernon God Little and The Finkler Question, Galgut went back to his world and got on with his life: “My life went my way.” When the Booker winner was announced early this month, it caught Galgut by surprise: “I didn’t think I would, but there it is. In the end, it is all luck.”

The 57-year-old author has a stroke of luck in a year that has proved to be a big moment for African fiction, with the Nobel Prize putting the global attention on the work of Zanzibar-born Abdurrazzak Gurnah. “It’s very interesting that Africans have swept the board with a whole host of major awards,” says Galgut. While it has brought him some cheer, he also wonders whether it’s a “sign of change” or random “fluke”. Africa, he believes, never had the dearth of writing talent ever, but it certainly has missed the opportunity for its many voices to be heard. He is saddened by the fact that there is no infrastructure in most African countries that could help promote good writing. “You are pushing against the current in trying to promote writers here. Barring South Africa and Nigeria, the two countries dominating international African writing, there are almost no publishers or booksellers in large parts of Africa. It should not be the problem of the West to be publishing and promoting African voices. It should be Africa’s problem,” says the author, who ascribes the woeful state of affairs to the lack of value placed on writing by most African governments, which meets a corresponding lack of value from local readers. The Promise, incidentally, had no reviews in English in South Africa until it landed on the Booker longlist. Galgut laments about the pervasive “cultural cringe” in several ex-colonies, including South Africa, which considers only the works lauded in the Western countries to be valid: “Only when Britain has validated your achievement will you be taken seriously. It is embarrassing and small-minded. I hope the slew of prizes, even if they turn out to be accidental, will at least crystallise people in thinking around the idea that African writing should be taken seriously — long before Britain decides its literary worth.”

A chronicler of the racial fault lines in post-Apartheid South Africa, Galgut is filled with a sense of despair at its downward trajectory, its descent into chaos and corruption. “We are now into 27 years of democracy and the gap between the rich and poor is the biggest in the world — bigger than it has ever been. Covid has wrecked the economy, which was already in trouble. The sense of despondency in South Africa is very deep. Things could have been very different. I feel despairing and angry and just sad at the wasted opportunity, and the betrayal of the trust of millions of South Africans. They have been very patient, waiting for their lives to change,” says Galgut, adding that it is an understatement to say that the promise of the Mandela years has been unfulfilled. In Cape Town, Galgut leads a privileged, protected life, but the distress in the country’s air besets him, too: “No politician or party has got any plan that could change the situation.”

He finds it hard to understand why the African National Congress (ANC), which was always based on socialist premises when it was a resistance organisation, had to capitulate to a Capitalist model when they came to power. “There was a possibility back in the 1990s since they had an enormous moral credibility. There was also a lot of goodwill on both sides — with the White and the Black population. However, it is not the case any longer,” says Galgut, who is convinced that if South Africa had set in motion a big national reconstruction project, providing housing and education to as many people as possible, things would not have been so bad. But the ANC instead put an enormous amount of money into buying weapons: “For what? The war was finished. We are not fighting anybody. The truth is that it’s firstly a prestige project to make the government look good. And, secondly, an opportunity to skim off a lot of money involved in various deals. The highest priority for the ANC government after it came to power seems to be enriching itself or its members. They have turned their back on the people they were supposed to represent.The Promise tells the story of a White South African family’s history through the unusual structure of four funerals across four decades. Galgut “widens the window” to include the background of the country’s political history — through its troubled transition from Apartheid to democracy. The real subject of the novel, he says, is the passage of time, the span of four decades as it plays out in individual lives as well as in the life of a country, which he consciously tries to dwell on: “Time is a key part of the structure of the novel — if you tell a story, you basically trace a movement through time. However, as I get older, time seems to me the most important subject, more central than plot, which was significant to me when I was younger. It is a preoccupation and a structural concern over and above everything.” Galgut’s ingenious use of the polyphonic narrative voice allows him to capture multiple spectrums in the novel. It also gives the many characters a voice. Instead of keeping a steady eye, which is what a conventional narrator would do, his narrator shifts between persons: “Jumping in that way fractures the perspectives so that you can move very quickly between the point of view of one character and another – sometimes giving a very large, panoramic viewpoint and sometimes a very close one.” By doing so, he draws attention to the artifice of fiction, the fact that it’s all “artificial,” and also that there are multiple perspectives in the story, which is “quite satisfying” in terms of South Africa where “there is no one narrative,” but multiple ones, with each trying to “overlap or contradict or cancel out” the other. “Many voices pushing together to be heard was what pleased me about the narrative voice,” he says.

As haunting and unforgettable as his previous novels, The Promise may have all the trademark themes of Galgut’s fiction — alienated characters, uneasy relationships, troubled family, sex, violence and death — its real subject, he asserts, is the passage of time, the span of four decades as it plays out in individual lives as well as in the life of a beleaguered country. “Time is a key part of the structure of the novel — if you tell a story, you basically trace a movement through time. However, as I get older, time seems to me the most important subject, more central than plot, which was significant to me when I was younger. It is a preoccupation and a structural concern over and above everything,” he says. The inexorable march of time reveals to us the changing moods of the nation under the leadership of four presidents — PW Botha, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki Jacob Zuma. The novel opens in 1986 with the death of the matriarch, who wishes to give away the house, including the land it is on, to the family’s longtime maidservant, Salome. However, her word is forgotten after her death and the broken promise hangs like a curse over the family in the years that unfold, with every subsequent decade claiming one of its members, including the patriarch, elder daughter Astrid and only son, Anton. By the time the novel ends in 2018, the disintegration of the family is complete and South Africa, too, has slid into political morass — from the optimism of Mandela’s time to Zuma’s betrayal of the South African dream. Unlike The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), which was overtly political, The Promise keeps political changes hovering and heaving in the background.As in his other novels,he remains fascinated by his country’s complexities and contradictions. Anton and Amor, the siblings in The Promise, represent the two opposing impulses of White South Africa — the desire to hold on to what it has, and the yearning to give it up. Neither of them, however, does it perfectly. Anton’s effort seems to be geared towards retaining his privilege as much as possible in the beginning of the book. He feels the future belongs to him, but he also feels that the future is slipping away, just as many White men of his generation have felt in a country where power and privilege no longer belong to you because you are a White man: “There is a sense of failed promise, of wasted opportunity in Anton’s life which leads to his unfortunate mode of exit from the world.” Amor embodies the desire to give up privilege and power, but it’s not a straightforward process: “What you do if you are born into a social structure where power and privilege is your right? How do you give it up? It’s not something one just does,” Galgut explains.Amor’s way of giving up on her privilege is to work endlessly in order to help other people who are struggling with “the business of being alive.” She works as a nurse to care for the ill and the wounded. However, that is not enough and her mode of giving up on what her family would provide her is to simply renounce what would be rightfully hers. Galgut is not particularly enamoured with the idea that certain characters in books should be a moral example because it’s something which people generally are. White South Africans, he says, are known for their “moral wreck”. Even though he expresses his “frustration and disgust” with what he sees and feels about White South Africa, he is aware that it’s not without its moral impulses: “There are many White South Africans, who have gone to prison in their fight against Apartheid.” To him, Amor exemplifies the moral impulse of White South Africans, but then she is open to questions herself. And it is something that is really ineffectual — the promise is fulfilled too late to have much need. “Amor wants to do the right thing. But does she do it fast? It takes 40 years for a piece of land to be given to Salome. Maybe she doesn’t really follow through on her impulse in a way she could have,” says Galgut, who laces Amor’s moral choice with ambiguity. South African writers from a previous generation, like André Brink, were concerned with White characters finding their way to moral clarity and then acting based upon what they have found. But Galgut is “mistrustful” of moral clarity because he thinks every moral action is subject to scrutiny, clarifying that this, in no way, undermines the fact that certain impulses are generous or altruistic. He remembers reading Coetzee’s novels and finding a huge “revelation” in them because even his moral characters are flawed, suffering from some defect or damage: “And that seems to me to tell the truth about human beings: the fact that even the most immoral amongst us are human. We are all limited and damaged to different degrees. It reflects how reality is for me: That people, even in their best impulses, are open to question.”

A view of Cape Town, South Africa. (Shutterstock)
A view of Cape Town, South Africa. (Shutterstock)

Galgut also leaves it open-ended for us to guess the real reason behind Amor’s moral impulse. Since she was struck by lightning as a child, is it the case that she is brain-damaged? Is it really a moral impulse that she doggedly clings to the question of the land and the promise that was made to the maid? Or is it because she can’t let go of it because there is something wrong with her? I wanted to leave this a bit open for the reader. I don’t answer that question because I like the ambiguity and the mystery attached with it. Amor has a saintly quality, but it seems a little bit suspect at the same time,” he says. If the novel’s atmosphere is stark and bleak, it is partly due to the fact that Galgut himself is “generally not a very optimistic person”. The trajectories of most of his stories are “entropy and disintegration” rather than “coherence and resolution”. But that seems to him to reflect the path that most human life is on, and indeed the path that the planet seems to be on: “Things don’t simplify and resolve so much as become more complicated and fall apart. It may not be inevitably or invariably, but by and large that’s the way things go.” Despite the morose and morbid setting, however, the narrator, like Galgut himself, finds the world funny a lot of the time: “That was necessary in this story because the material of funerals and deaths is very depressing. It was good to be able to offset that with the narrator’s voice that still finds humour even in the extreme situations.”Much of what makes the novel grim, besides the four funerals, is the way Galgut dwells on bodily details, their decay in death. The body is central to the human experience, he argues, because we all navigate our minds through the vehicle of the body: “I don’t think so much that we have a body as we are a body. Whatever happens to your body is essentially what happens to you in your life. A lot of people would like to glorify the bodily experience, something more wonderful than it is, but most of us are reflected by the limitations and pains of the physical body and they, of course, increase when you get older. In a novel saturated with death, the body and its failings become a central preoccupation. This is something Galgut owes to being sick in his childhood: he had lymphoma when he was five and it made him aware of mortality: “At an unnaturally young age, I was aware that bodies decay and eventually stop. It is an idea that finds reflection in quite a few of my books.”There are various points when Galgut, employing his characteristic sardonic tone, takes a dig at the deceit in the name of religion, both Judaism and Christianity: “I was just playing for the most part. Religion has been very closely connected to power through the Apartheid years; the project was underpinned by severe Calvinism — a lot of hypocritical piety. I don’t have much patience with that form of religious approach.” Since the story is around four funerals, he had to have four funeral services. If there was just one religion at play, it would be boring: “I thought I would find ways to have the funeral services and may be have a bit of fun around the subject. I was entertaining myself and wanted the same for the reader, too.”Galgut was exposed to “suffocating religious attitudes” early on while growing up in Pretoria, the nerve centre of Apartheid system, in the 1970s and ’80s. It was a confusing place for a child and “not very nice” — conservative and characterised by rigid mindset, underpinned by religion. “Everybody was trying to be more virtuous than everyone else while the system we were all participating in had no virtue at all. It was hard to make sense of. There were many moments when everybody felt insane around. So, you took that on yourself and started to wonder something was wrong with you because you saw the world differently than everybody else,” recollects Galgut, who grew up on a staple of Enid Blyton: “I know she has a bad reputation these days, but I really loved those stories when I was little.” Soon, he graduated to other “regular fares” like Lord of the Rings and other fantasy novels that were predominant for teenagers back then. The discovery of modernist writers, including Patrick White and William Faulkner, during his late adolescence and early adulthood, opened “a big doorway” for him and, in many ways, triggered in him the desire to be a writer.Having studied drama at the University of Cape Town, he felt “a bit torn” about whether to write plays or novels in his early 20s. But he resolved this early on in his writing career. Even though he has left theatre behind, it has shaped a lot of his subsequent writing because it gave him “a very good ear for dialogue”. He also owes to the medium his strong visual sense and the need “to be able to imagine how something looks and sounds” before he can describe it. He has written several scripts for cinema, but hardly any of them has made its way to a movie yet. Writing the script, however, has taught him a thing or two. “In a movie script, the language is the least important thing since everything is in the service of the image. So, you learn to take language less seriously, which you don’t do as a novelist since it is a paramount element and you get very particular about it,” he says, adding that he would recommend writing a script to those who have writer’s block. It teaches you to throw out your “self-importance” around language. “It’s also quite liberating if we just see language as a means to an end, it’s freeing to the imagination. The logic of cinema which I have carried over to the narrative voice in The Promise was extremely energising and freeing for me because it gave me a whole new way to imagine the telling of the story. There is a lot to be gained from transplanting certain things from other disciplines to prose. It helps you break out of the box if you are feeling stuck in any way,” says Galgut, who is working on a collection of short stories, his first since Small Circle of Beings (1988).With each new book, it is important for Galgut to find something entirely different, a pursuit that often leaves him “wasting a lot of time” looking around. The shorts stories are a bit of “departure” for him. Over the years, he has written a number of them, but it occurred to him recently that he could add to the ones that he already has and put together a collection. There is a slight hiccup at the moment though. The stories he has written already have a common theme of being about people who are away from home. “I tried to keep that consciously as the theme, but it’s proving to be more challenging than I had expected because, in recent years, I haven’t travelled nearly as much,” says Galgut, who believes that a journey, another theme in his novels, gives a natural shape to the narrative: “The stories that unfold during the course of the journey may or may not be stories that you could tell in a single location, but if they take place during a journey, they are shaped with the shape of the journey.” His Cape Town apartment keeps Galgut homebound more often and most of his travelling these days are only work-related or for festivals. “Imaginatively, it has been more challenging to think myself into the space. It was easier to me when I was younger and was often away from home. But, still, I will resolve this one way or the other,” he hopes.

Nawaid Anjum is a Delhi-based freelance feature writer, translator and poet.


Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize win for his portrayal of racism and injustice done to a Black maid by her Afrikaner employers in his ninth novel, The Promise, has kindled in him the hope that his work will stand on its own. For long, well-meaning critics in the West have compared him to his compatriot JM Coetzee, who made history by becoming the first writer to have received the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999. “I have been frustrated by these endless comparisons because it feels a little bit easy and lazy to me,” says Galgut in a video interview from Cape Town, where he lives. He finds the novels of Coetzee and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer “exciting in different ways” and underlines that without them there is no way to write in the South African tradition. But the constant clubbing of his works with others has left him exasperated.

304pp, ₹699; Penguin Random House
304pp, ₹699; Penguin Random House

Galgut and Coetzee are both White men of a certain “tortured mindset,” writing out of Cape Town. Although Coetzee now lives in Australia, most of his early novels were set in the city of his birth. “It’s hard for me to understand why these comparisons keep getting made. I don’t see myself as a writer similar to him. And I certainly don’t think he would have written a book remotely like The Promise. It’s not just the sort of technique that he is particularly drawn to,” says Galgut, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize for A Good Doctor (2003) and A Strange Room (2010). On both these occasions, as DBC Pierre and Howard Jacobson took home the award for their novels, Vernon God Little and The Finkler Question, Galgut went back to his world and got on with his life: “My life went my way.” When the Booker winner was announced early this month, it caught Galgut by surprise: “I didn’t think I would, but there it is. In the end, it is all luck.”

The 57-year-old author has a stroke of luck in a year that has proved to be a big moment for African fiction, with the Nobel Prize putting the global attention on the work of Zanzibar-born Abdurrazzak Gurnah. “It’s very interesting that Africans have swept the board with a whole host of major awards,” says Galgut. While it has brought him some cheer, he also wonders whether it’s a “sign of change” or random “fluke”. Africa, he believes, never had the dearth of writing talent ever, but it certainly has missed the opportunity for its many voices to be heard. He is saddened by the fact that there is no infrastructure in most African countries that could help promote good writing. “You are pushing against the current in trying to promote writers here. Barring South Africa and Nigeria, the two countries dominating international African writing, there are almost no publishers or booksellers in large parts of Africa. It should not be the problem of the West to be publishing and promoting African voices. It should be Africa’s problem,” says the author, who ascribes the woeful state of affairs to the lack of value placed on writing by most African governments, which meets a corresponding lack of value from local readers. The Promise, incidentally, had no reviews in English in South Africa until it landed on the Booker longlist. Galgut laments about the pervasive “cultural cringe” in several ex-colonies, including South Africa, which considers only the works lauded in the Western countries to be valid: “Only when Britain has validated your achievement will you be taken seriously. It is embarrassing and small-minded. I hope the slew of prizes, even if they turn out to be accidental, will at least crystallise people in thinking around the idea that African writing should be taken seriously — long before Britain decides its literary worth.”

A chronicler of the racial fault lines in post-Apartheid South Africa, Galgut is filled with a sense of despair at its downward trajectory, its descent into chaos and corruption. “We are now into 27 years of democracy and the gap between the rich and poor is the biggest in the world — bigger than it has ever been. Covid has wrecked the economy, which was already in trouble. The sense of despondency in South Africa is very deep. Things could have been very different. I feel despairing and angry and just sad at the wasted opportunity, and the betrayal of the trust of millions of South Africans. They have been very patient, waiting for their lives to change,” says Galgut, adding that it is an understatement to say that the promise of the Mandela years has been unfulfilled. In Cape Town, Galgut leads a privileged, protected life, but the distress in the country’s air besets him, too: “No politician or party has got any plan that could change the situation.”

He finds it hard to understand why the African National Congress (ANC), which was always based on socialist premises when it was a resistance organisation, had to capitulate to a Capitalist model when they came to power. “There was a possibility back in the 1990s since they had an enormous moral credibility. There was also a lot of goodwill on both sides — with the White and the Black population. However, it is not the case any longer,” says Galgut, who is convinced that if South Africa had set in motion a big national reconstruction project, providing housing and education to as many people as possible, things would not have been so bad. But the ANC instead put an enormous amount of money into buying weapons: “For what? The war was finished. We are not fighting anybody. The truth is that it’s firstly a prestige project to make the government look good. And, secondly, an opportunity to skim off a lot of money involved in various deals. The highest priority for the ANC government after it came to power seems to be enriching itself or its members. They have turned their back on the people they were supposed to represent.The Promise tells the story of a White South African family’s history through the unusual structure of four funerals across four decades. Galgut “widens the window” to include the background of the country’s political history — through its troubled transition from Apartheid to democracy. The real subject of the novel, he says, is the passage of time, the span of four decades as it plays out in individual lives as well as in the life of a country, which he consciously tries to dwell on: “Time is a key part of the structure of the novel — if you tell a story, you basically trace a movement through time. However, as I get older, time seems to me the most important subject, more central than plot, which was significant to me when I was younger. It is a preoccupation and a structural concern over and above everything.” Galgut’s ingenious use of the polyphonic narrative voice allows him to capture multiple spectrums in the novel. It also gives the many characters a voice. Instead of keeping a steady eye, which is what a conventional narrator would do, his narrator shifts between persons: “Jumping in that way fractures the perspectives so that you can move very quickly between the point of view of one character and another – sometimes giving a very large, panoramic viewpoint and sometimes a very close one.” By doing so, he draws attention to the artifice of fiction, the fact that it’s all “artificial,” and also that there are multiple perspectives in the story, which is “quite satisfying” in terms of South Africa where “there is no one narrative,” but multiple ones, with each trying to “overlap or contradict or cancel out” the other. “Many voices pushing together to be heard was what pleased me about the narrative voice,” he says.

As haunting and unforgettable as his previous novels, The Promise may have all the trademark themes of Galgut’s fiction — alienated characters, uneasy relationships, troubled family, sex, violence and death — its real subject, he asserts, is the passage of time, the span of four decades as it plays out in individual lives as well as in the life of a beleaguered country. “Time is a key part of the structure of the novel — if you tell a story, you basically trace a movement through time. However, as I get older, time seems to me the most important subject, more central than plot, which was significant to me when I was younger. It is a preoccupation and a structural concern over and above everything,” he says. The inexorable march of time reveals to us the changing moods of the nation under the leadership of four presidents — PW Botha, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki Jacob Zuma. The novel opens in 1986 with the death of the matriarch, who wishes to give away the house, including the land it is on, to the family’s longtime maidservant, Salome. However, her word is forgotten after her death and the broken promise hangs like a curse over the family in the years that unfold, with every subsequent decade claiming one of its members, including the patriarch, elder daughter Astrid and only son, Anton. By the time the novel ends in 2018, the disintegration of the family is complete and South Africa, too, has slid into political morass — from the optimism of Mandela’s time to Zuma’s betrayal of the South African dream. Unlike The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), which was overtly political, The Promise keeps political changes hovering and heaving in the background.As in his other novels,he remains fascinated by his country’s complexities and contradictions. Anton and Amor, the siblings in The Promise, represent the two opposing impulses of White South Africa — the desire to hold on to what it has, and the yearning to give it up. Neither of them, however, does it perfectly. Anton’s effort seems to be geared towards retaining his privilege as much as possible in the beginning of the book. He feels the future belongs to him, but he also feels that the future is slipping away, just as many White men of his generation have felt in a country where power and privilege no longer belong to you because you are a White man: “There is a sense of failed promise, of wasted opportunity in Anton’s life which leads to his unfortunate mode of exit from the world.” Amor embodies the desire to give up privilege and power, but it’s not a straightforward process: “What you do if you are born into a social structure where power and privilege is your right? How do you give it up? It’s not something one just does,” Galgut explains.Amor’s way of giving up on her privilege is to work endlessly in order to help other people who are struggling with “the business of being alive.” She works as a nurse to care for the ill and the wounded. However, that is not enough and her mode of giving up on what her family would provide her is to simply renounce what would be rightfully hers. Galgut is not particularly enamoured with the idea that certain characters in books should be a moral example because it’s something which people generally are. White South Africans, he says, are known for their “moral wreck”. Even though he expresses his “frustration and disgust” with what he sees and feels about White South Africa, he is aware that it’s not without its moral impulses: “There are many White South Africans, who have gone to prison in their fight against Apartheid.” To him, Amor exemplifies the moral impulse of White South Africans, but then she is open to questions herself. And it is something that is really ineffectual — the promise is fulfilled too late to have much need. “Amor wants to do the right thing. But does she do it fast? It takes 40 years for a piece of land to be given to Salome. Maybe she doesn’t really follow through on her impulse in a way she could have,” says Galgut, who laces Amor’s moral choice with ambiguity. South African writers from a previous generation, like André Brink, were concerned with White characters finding their way to moral clarity and then acting based upon what they have found. But Galgut is “mistrustful” of moral clarity because he thinks every moral action is subject to scrutiny, clarifying that this, in no way, undermines the fact that certain impulses are generous or altruistic. He remembers reading Coetzee’s novels and finding a huge “revelation” in them because even his moral characters are flawed, suffering from some defect or damage: “And that seems to me to tell the truth about human beings: the fact that even the most immoral amongst us are human. We are all limited and damaged to different degrees. It reflects how reality is for me: That people, even in their best impulses, are open to question.”

A view of Cape Town, South Africa. (Shutterstock)
A view of Cape Town, South Africa. (Shutterstock)

Galgut also leaves it open-ended for us to guess the real reason behind Amor’s moral impulse. Since she was struck by lightning as a child, is it the case that she is brain-damaged? Is it really a moral impulse that she doggedly clings to the question of the land and the promise that was made to the maid? Or is it because she can’t let go of it because there is something wrong with her? I wanted to leave this a bit open for the reader. I don’t answer that question because I like the ambiguity and the mystery attached with it. Amor has a saintly quality, but it seems a little bit suspect at the same time,” he says. If the novel’s atmosphere is stark and bleak, it is partly due to the fact that Galgut himself is “generally not a very optimistic person”. The trajectories of most of his stories are “entropy and disintegration” rather than “coherence and resolution”. But that seems to him to reflect the path that most human life is on, and indeed the path that the planet seems to be on: “Things don’t simplify and resolve so much as become more complicated and fall apart. It may not be inevitably or invariably, but by and large that’s the way things go.” Despite the morose and morbid setting, however, the narrator, like Galgut himself, finds the world funny a lot of the time: “That was necessary in this story because the material of funerals and deaths is very depressing. It was good to be able to offset that with the narrator’s voice that still finds humour even in the extreme situations.”Much of what makes the novel grim, besides the four funerals, is the way Galgut dwells on bodily details, their decay in death. The body is central to the human experience, he argues, because we all navigate our minds through the vehicle of the body: “I don’t think so much that we have a body as we are a body. Whatever happens to your body is essentially what happens to you in your life. A lot of people would like to glorify the bodily experience, something more wonderful than it is, but most of us are reflected by the limitations and pains of the physical body and they, of course, increase when you get older. In a novel saturated with death, the body and its failings become a central preoccupation. This is something Galgut owes to being sick in his childhood: he had lymphoma when he was five and it made him aware of mortality: “At an unnaturally young age, I was aware that bodies decay and eventually stop. It is an idea that finds reflection in quite a few of my books.”There are various points when Galgut, employing his characteristic sardonic tone, takes a dig at the deceit in the name of religion, both Judaism and Christianity: “I was just playing for the most part. Religion has been very closely connected to power through the Apartheid years; the project was underpinned by severe Calvinism — a lot of hypocritical piety. I don’t have much patience with that form of religious approach.” Since the story is around four funerals, he had to have four funeral services. If there was just one religion at play, it would be boring: “I thought I would find ways to have the funeral services and may be have a bit of fun around the subject. I was entertaining myself and wanted the same for the reader, too.”Galgut was exposed to “suffocating religious attitudes” early on while growing up in Pretoria, the nerve centre of Apartheid system, in the 1970s and ’80s. It was a confusing place for a child and “not very nice” — conservative and characterised by rigid mindset, underpinned by religion. “Everybody was trying to be more virtuous than everyone else while the system we were all participating in had no virtue at all. It was hard to make sense of. There were many moments when everybody felt insane around. So, you took that on yourself and started to wonder something was wrong with you because you saw the world differently than everybody else,” recollects Galgut, who grew up on a staple of Enid Blyton: “I know she has a bad reputation these days, but I really loved those stories when I was little.” Soon, he graduated to other “regular fares” like Lord of the Rings and other fantasy novels that were predominant for teenagers back then. The discovery of modernist writers, including Patrick White and William Faulkner, during his late adolescence and early adulthood, opened “a big doorway” for him and, in many ways, triggered in him the desire to be a writer.Having studied drama at the University of Cape Town, he felt “a bit torn” about whether to write plays or novels in his early 20s. But he resolved this early on in his writing career. Even though he has left theatre behind, it has shaped a lot of his subsequent writing because it gave him “a very good ear for dialogue”. He also owes to the medium his strong visual sense and the need “to be able to imagine how something looks and sounds” before he can describe it. He has written several scripts for cinema, but hardly any of them has made its way to a movie yet. Writing the script, however, has taught him a thing or two. “In a movie script, the language is the least important thing since everything is in the service of the image. So, you learn to take language less seriously, which you don’t do as a novelist since it is a paramount element and you get very particular about it,” he says, adding that he would recommend writing a script to those who have writer’s block. It teaches you to throw out your “self-importance” around language. “It’s also quite liberating if we just see language as a means to an end, it’s freeing to the imagination. The logic of cinema which I have carried over to the narrative voice in The Promise was extremely energising and freeing for me because it gave me a whole new way to imagine the telling of the story. There is a lot to be gained from transplanting certain things from other disciplines to prose. It helps you break out of the box if you are feeling stuck in any way,” says Galgut, who is working on a collection of short stories, his first since Small Circle of Beings (1988).With each new book, it is important for Galgut to find something entirely different, a pursuit that often leaves him “wasting a lot of time” looking around. The shorts stories are a bit of “departure” for him. Over the years, he has written a number of them, but it occurred to him recently that he could add to the ones that he already has and put together a collection. There is a slight hiccup at the moment though. The stories he has written already have a common theme of being about people who are away from home. “I tried to keep that consciously as the theme, but it’s proving to be more challenging than I had expected because, in recent years, I haven’t travelled nearly as much,” says Galgut, who believes that a journey, another theme in his novels, gives a natural shape to the narrative: “The stories that unfold during the course of the journey may or may not be stories that you could tell in a single location, but if they take place during a journey, they are shaped with the shape of the journey.” His Cape Town apartment keeps Galgut homebound more often and most of his travelling these days are only work-related or for festivals. “Imaginatively, it has been more challenging to think myself into the space. It was easier to me when I was younger and was often away from home. But, still, I will resolve this one way or the other,” he hopes.

Nawaid Anjum is a Delhi-based freelance feature writer, translator and poet.

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