→ December 29, 2021
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The Promise.

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise won this year’s Booker Prize, beating a tough field that included Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (whose Klara and the Sun made the longlist); Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers; and the delightful No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. It’s a fine novel, but I think without more knowledge of the recent history of South Africa, I didn’t get the full gist of the work.

The novel focuses on a white family in South Africa, the Swarts, whose matriarch dies as the novel opens. She made her husband promise her that he’d leave the family home to the Black woman, Salome, who helped raise their children and take care of the home, but he later denies this – except that Amor, their youngest child, heard it. She refuses to forget what she heard (or says she heard, as Galgut only gives us her assertions), even as it causes a break between her and her siblings, Anton and Astrid. The four chapters in the novel each revolve around the deaths of one of the family members, leaving only Amor in the end to reckon with the family’s legacy.

Galgut sets The Promise againsta backdrop of societal upheaval in South Africa, including the end of apartheid, the tenure of HIV/AIDS denialist Thabo Mbeki as Prime Minister, and his corrupt successor Jacob Zuma, who was in the news again this month when a judge ordered him to return to prison. Each of the Swarts family members dies in a way that could serve as a metaphor for one of those larger changes – one dies as a result of religious mania, a clinging to old and outdated ways; one dies in a carjacking, of which there are over 10,000 a year in South Africa. Without knowing a lot more about the recent history of South Africa, however, I can only guess at any deeper meanings here.

Lacking that context, the novel doesn’t have as much to offer the reader as the accolades imply. Amor is the only remotely interesting or sympathetic character in the book. The father, Manie, is two different messes in two different chapters. Astrid is shrill, materialistic, and selfish. Anton could have been a deeper character in his own novel, but he’s off the page enough in The Promise that we only see the surface, never getting at, say, why he deserted from the military, or what he did in the intervening years before he returns for the next funeral. Galgut keeps all of his characters, even Amor, at arm’s length, giving the whole text a feeling of emotional reserve and thus preventing the readers from getting to know any of the characters enough to connect with them. I’m only assuming that Amor is supposed to be the central character, or most central one; she is the moral compass, refusing to budge from her recollection of the promise or belief that the remaining family members should fulfill it, even when it leads to a rupture between her and her siblings. Her life away from the farmstead would appear to be more interesting, or at least a way to further develop her character, but instead she comes across as cold and remote even when she has the strongest feelings of any character in the book.

The Booker Prize has always felt more enigmatic than the Pulitzer Prize, even though they are often seen as analogues to each other; it’s easier to understand why a book wins the Pulitzer than why one wins the Booker, at least in more recent times. (I won’t even get started on the early Pulitzer committees’ apparent love for wildly racist novels.) In the case of The Promise, I’m assuming I just missed what they saw in the novel. If it won because it serves as an allegory for the last forty years of South African history, I plead ignorance. As a narrative, however, it was merely good – an interesting premise, with solid execution and a strong conclusion, but lacking the well-defined characters that might have elevated this novel to something greater, and something that I would associate with the sort of plaudits The Promise has otherwise received. For whatever it’s worth, I would have voted for No One Is Talking About This instead.

Next up: I’m between books but just finished Harold Evans’ Do I Make Myself Clear?, a wonderful book of advice for writers and editors by the former editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times and founder of Condé Nast Traveler. Evans died last September at 92.

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→ January 9, 2019
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The Life and Times of Michael K.

J.M. Coetzee has won two Booker Prizes, the first of them in 1983 for his parable The Life and Times of Michael K., a bleak, opaque novel that seems to draw from Kafka’s The Trial while also influencing Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road. The novel was Coetzee’s immediate follow-up to Waiting for the Barbarians, another fable that also puts its main character through the ringer to make larger humanist points, although Michael K.‘s target, the apartheid system of South Africa at the time, seems more overt than that of Barbarians.

Michael K. is the main character, a somewhat simple man, born with a cleft lip and abandoned by his mother to an institution for most of his life, although when her health begins to fail she reconnects with him for entirely selfish purposes. They live in Cape Town, where he has a job as a gardener and she has one as a domestic servant, but when her health slips further and the country devolves into civil war, she asks him to bring her back to the town of her birth so she can die there. Stymied by a faceless bureaucracy that won’t issue him the permits required to leave the city, Michael builds a rickshaw to carry his mother to the countryside, but she dies before they reach their destination, which sets Michael on a perverse series of adventures that find him living off the land as a hermit, impressed into two different labor camps, accused of aiding rebel forces by growing vegetables for them, and eventually in a hospital where one kind doctor takes an interest in him just as he seems to have given up on living.

I compared Waiting for the Barbarians to the writing of fabulist Italo Calvino, and Michael K. has the same atmosphere, one of watching the action in the story at a greater remove, so that even where Coetzee provides detail on Michael’s surroundings – in the camps, for example, or when Michael plants sees to grow pumpkins and other winter crops while he’s living on his own in the valley – there’s a sense of distance and opacity throughout the text. Michael is an unknowable character, not a cipher to the reader but a man without definition even to himself, and thus his interactions with others – government forces, mostly, but occasionally residents of the towns through which he passes or other people in the labor camps – all have an amorphous tenor to them, as if Coetzee passed them through a filter before presenting them to the reader.

Coetzee is South African by birth and he implies that the civil war in the novel is between the white authorities, who still enforced the apartheid policy to subjugate the country’s black majority at the time of the book’s publication, and rebel forces that included people of color and those sympathetic to them. Most characters are not identified by race, although Michael is identified as “colored” early in the book, which would put him at immediate odds with the racialist white soldiers he meets. Yet beneath the theme of racial animus is a strong streak of individualist philosophy – Michael is happiest, if you could call it that, when he is living off the land, supporting himself, living daily with the simple purpose of sustaining himself, with no contact with others.

The Kafka parallel is perhaps a little too overt here. Michael K. has the same sort of experiences with intransigent, oblique authority figures, from the bureaucrats who won’t give him the permit to leave the city and then give him circular explanations for why to the soldiers and officers at the labor camp who explain that he can’t leave but he’s not a prisoner. His name is such an obvious nod to The Trial, and his experiences in the camps mirror those of Josef K. in detention, so that the result is too on the nose. (Wikipedia says Coetzee was also influenced by a German novel, Michael Kohlhaas, but I’m unfamiliar with it.)

Waiting for the Barbarians was bleak, and often more graphic, but I found I connected to both the protagonist and the themes of the novel more than I did to The Life and Times of Michael K., where Coetzee keeps the reader one degree farther away from the material. I can understand why it was honored and is still regarded as a great novel, but its literary merit far exceeds its accessibility.

Next up: Still reading Anna Burns’ Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Brize.

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→ November 3, 2017
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Waiting for the Barbarians.

I’d sort of avoided J.M. Coetzee for a while, given his reputation for dark, depressing themes; one of his two Booker Prize-winning novels, Disgrace, involves rape as a significant plot point more than once in the book. I was in a used book store in Manhattan in June, however, and saw Waiting for the Barbarians, which made the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written, on the shelf for a few bucks, and figured at 156 pages it would at least be over quickly if I hated it – and maybe it would surprise me. I can’t see it as a top 100 all-time novel, but I got more out of the book than I expected, as it’s a fable that seems to combine some of the best of Italo Calvino and Kazuo Ishiguro (the latter of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as did Coetzee), in a work that I’d call the better Darkness at Noon.

The story is set in an unnamed frontier town at the edge of the Empire, where the main character, the Magistrate, has served his country for some years when a Colonel arrives and “interrogates” some prisoners, including a father and son, about the activities of nearby barbarians who might threaten the town or the Empire itself. The Magistrate is dubious about the actual level of the threat, and is disgusted by the Colonel’s use of torture, which kills one of the prisoners and leads to questionable answers – likely the ones that the Colonel wanted anyway to justify a military effort against the barbarians. When the first effort yields a new set of prisoners, who are further tortured, the Magistrate takes pity on one woman among them who’s been blinded by the Colonel’s men. This decision and a journey to eventually return her to her people pits the Magistrate against the Colonel, who declares him a traitor and makes him a political prisoner and pariah in his own town.

Waiting for the Barbarians was first published in October of 1980, winning the James Tait Memorial Prize for that year, but it certainly seems to presage the United States’ two invasions of Iraq (1991 and 2003), especially the latter which, as we now know, was predicated on questionable intelligence about the Iraqi regime’s possession of or attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Coetzee’s use of nameless towns and characters only emphasizes its fabulist, universal nature; he’s discussing core features of leaders who operate without viable opposition and exposing how functionaries may work to provide the answers desired by their superiors rather than the correct or just ones. Coetzee exposes the worst of humanity here, but it’s all well-grounded in actual events that preceded the book’s writing, in dictatorships and democracies.

I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, considered one of the peak novels of anti-communist literature, back in 2008, but couldn’t connect with any of the characters and found the narrative to be distant and cold. Coetzee infuses the Magistrate with more complexity; he’s flawed, a little bigoted, or at least mistrustful, but also highly empathetic, and less disdainful of women than the government officials or soldiers who come to the village and do as they please. The submissive response of the residents of the town, who seemed to respect the Magistrate until the Empire turned on him and labeled him a traitor, mirrors the inaction of many residents of past aggressors, including the Axis powers of World War II, who stood by while their neighbors were arrested, tortured, or murdered. The Magistrate seems to hope that if he stands up for what he believes to be just, others will support him; instead, people he thought were his friends act as if he’s not even there, until later in the novel when the tides shift the other way again and it’s safer to come out on his side.

This is a very grim worldview, but it’s an accurate one, and the 37 years since the book’s publication haven’t dulled its (deckled) edges one iota. Leaders continue to provoke conflicts and pursue wars on spurious grounds to distract their citizens or stage some patriotism theater. Had Coetzee made the Magistrate more of a one-dimensional martyr, it would have come at a great cost to the story’s staying power, but because his protagonist is so thoroughly human, it seems like a story that, while depressingly real, will have staying power for decades to come.

Next up: Angela Carter’s Wise Children, also on that Guardian list.

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