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Ladataan... Löftet (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 2021; vuoden 2022 painos)Tekijä: Damon Galgut (Tekijä)
TeostiedotThe Promise (tekijä: Damon Galgut) (2021)
  
Books Read in 2023 (117) Books Read in 2022 (108) » 10 lisää
 thisisstephenbetts | Nov 25, 2023 |   Galgut uses what we might call an omniscient narrator, but the voice is very close to us, practically whispering the stories in our ears. Each family member's history, character and trauma is revealed through an ironic South African Afrikaner lens. The writing is wonderful, lush, pointed - it brings you in close to this story and situation. This novel certainly deserves its Booker award. (  ) ffortsa | Nov 8, 2023 | ) kjuliff | Nov 6, 2023 | austcrimefiction | Oct 8, 2023 | Amor, 13 years old, the youngest child of the Swart family overhears her dying mother Rachel extract a promise from her father Manie to grant legal ownership of the Lombard House a ‘broken’ house on the edge of their farmland to Salome , their domestic help who has been serving the family for decades . "Salome, of course, who has been here on the farm for ever, or that’s how it feels. My grandfather always talked about her like that, Oh, Salome, I got her along with the land." Manie , however, has no intention of making good on his promise. The siblings Anton, Astrid and Amor are not particularly close and their mother’s death is the beginning of them drifting further apart .The fate of the Swart family and siblings’ stories are narrated in segments each timed almost a decade apart corresponding to the death of a family member. Funerals are the only converging event that brings the siblings back together in their family home only to part again till the next tragedy comes calling. Amor is racked with guilt over the broken promise and she tries to persuade her father and then her brother, Anton ,after her father’s death, to fulfill her mother’s dying wishes but to no avail. Anton’s excuse is that prohibitive apartheid laws would prevent Salome and her family from lawful ownership, thereby attempting to justify their stance to not honor the promise. However, the changing political landscape and eventual abolition of apartheid does not result in any change in attitude on the part of Anton , Astrid or their relatives. Amor’s guilt remains a common theme throughout her life and this story. Every trip back seems to compound her complicated feelings towards her family home and its inhabitants. "Who belongs here now? The answer is no longer clear. Among the various people who’ve stayed over, there’s now a general sense of restiveness, an itchy need to move on. A spirit of agitation flickers in the corners of the house. All the rituals are completed, why are we still here?" The author gives a more than subtle indication of racial inequality in the post apartheid social construct .While on one hand people unite to cheer for their country’s integrated rugby team , Salome’s status in the family remains unchanged. "An expression of disappointment has started to harden on Salome’s face, like the calluses that thicken the soles of her feet. She still wears no shoes. In this house, she never will wear shoes." With a brutally honest (occasionally satirical) narrative and fluid prose the author touches upon themes of spirituality and religion, segregation and social and racial inequality ,death and the far reaching affects of guilt and grief. This brilliantly crafted family saga is my first experience of reading Damon Galgut’s work and while it took me a while to adjust to the slow pace and distinctive writing style I am glad I didn’t give up. I hope to read more of his work in the future. (  ) srms.reads | Sep 4, 2023 |
 Damon Galgut’s stunning new novel charts the decline of a white family during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. It begins in 1986, with the death of Rachel, a 40-year-old Jewish mother of three on a smallholding outside Pretoria. The drama of the novel turns on a promise that her Afrikaner husband, Manie, made to her before she died, overheard by their youngest daughter, Amor: that Manie would give their black maid, Salome, the deeds to the annexe she occupies. Now that Rachel is dead, Manie has apparently forgotten and doesn’t care to be reminded. Nor does his bigoted family, who regard Amor’s stubborn insistence that Salome should own her home as the kind of talk that “now appears to have infected the whole country”.  For three decades the South African writer Damon Galgut has been assessing his country through scrutiny of its white people. His prior novels include the Booker Prize finalist “The Good Doctor,” set at a clinic in one of apartheid’s forlorn “homelands,” and “The Impostor,” an account of a poet self-exiled to the lonely countryside. Galgut’s new work, “The Promise,” studies the Swart family, descendants of Voortrekker settlers, clinging to their farm amid tumultuous social and political change — “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” he writes, “holding on, holding out.” Beginning in 1986, the novel moves toward the present, following Ma, Pa and the alliterative trio of Swart children: Anton, a military deserter and failed novelist; Astrid, a narcissistic housewife; and Amor, an introspective loner who eventually becomes a nurse. In scope, seriousness, and experimental ambition, modernist writing like {Virginia} Woolf’s sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental epoch, a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in literature’s regenerative power. Yet Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, “The Promise” (Europa), suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability. (J. M. Coetzee once argued that South African literature is a “literature in bondage,” because a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life.) “The Promise” is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise.” The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the eighties, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s Presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son. Sisältyy tähän:4 Book collection (tekijä: Damon Galgut) PalkinnotNotable Lists
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HTML: WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE A modern family saga written in gorgeous prose by three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life's unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country??one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones. "Simply: you must read it."??Claire Messud, Harper's Magazin Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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 Google Books — Ladataan...LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Kongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo: (4.03)
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My main gripe is that the main character is soooo passive. Every other character is more interesting, and her total inactivity over 30 years to have the promise fulfilled totally undermines her sanctimony toward her family. Could have knocked down to 3 for that annoyance, but, well, it's closer to 4*.
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