The Promise by Damon Galgut
Galgut tells the story of a white South African family through a series of funerals across several decades. History is mostly silent in the background for this privileged white family who only experiences the effects of apartheid as minor inconveniences. Galgut is very aware of the social and economic status of these characters and highlights it through irony. The story of this family is nonetheless touching and tragic for all the reasons that life is so. The genius of Galgut’s narration is taking free indirect speech to an extreme, taking cues from Austen, Tolstoy, Woolf, and Dostoyevsky but creating something unique. Like Woolf, Galgut treats time and space very loosely, and like Dostoyevsky he paints a narrator that is familiar with the characters in a very tangible way while being omniscient. This novel is definitely indebted to those classics (and others) but stands as its own great achievement by managing to tell a story of pain, and disappointment in an inventive yet touching way.
metonymiac 