One country, one farm, one family.

Four funerals in four chapters and a promise that has been broken over and over again for a long time, narrated in the present tense in a modernist tradition, with a few bows to Virginia Woolf.

These are the subject matter, theme and form of the novel “The Promise” by Damon Galgut, who recently received the Booker Prize for this book (after a few nominations finally!).

Verena Lueken

Freelance writer in the features section.

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Rachel Swart, the mother of the siblings Astrid, Anton and Amor (the parents later found the alliteration no such a good idea), demanded the eponymous promise on her deathbed. Cupid heard it, but the father, Mania, who made the promise to his dying wife, first denies it and then lets it go. His descendants too. It's not about very much, one might think. Salome, who had been the family's black housekeeper for decades, is to get the simple house in which she and her son have lived for a long time. It could be, one of Swart's heirs suspected late in the book, that land ownership was not even legally possible for blacks in 1986, at the time of Rachel's death. But that's not the problem.Regardless of the legal situation, no one in the Swart family except Amor intends to grant Rachel's wish.

The family conscience

The broken promise is a curse on the family.

Or is the history of the country already the curse that also weighs on the Swart family, white South Africans who hold onto what they have, rightful or not?

Is the only way out of history and the misfortune and guilt that lies in it, separation and atonement, as chosen by Cupid, the youngest daughter?

It is the family's conscience that only prevails when everyone else is dead.

But it may be too late by then. Weren't other people living on the land that she wants to give away much earlier, whose descendants are now declaring a right to repatriation? What claims do heirs of the Voortrekkers have to the land they call their possession? And isn't it better to turn away from all this and go away, in order, as Amor has long since made up his mind, to live in simple circumstances and to help as a nurse where she is needed and where she can?

The decline of the Swart family parallels the development of South Africa, which is on the way out of apartheid and into further disasters on the way to democracy. Told in a fluid, indirect gesture, floating from one character to the other, Damon Galgut's novel encompasses more than thirty years of South African history, from the last years of the apartheid regime under Pieter Willem Botha to Nelson Mandela and the victory of the Springboks at both rugby world championships 1995 (an identity-creating event of national importance) for the inauguration of Thabu Mbeki until the resignation of Jacob Zuma. The occasion for the family to gather together are the funerals of their members, combined with more or less grief, old and new rifts.

Ma, Pa, Astrid, Anton - the four chapters of about the same length are also songs of the dead, not necessarily melancholy, grieving or even desperate, but also bizarre, bitter and satirically undermined.

“I'm sorry about your mother” is the mourning formula in the first chapter, which is repeated by so many people that it takes on the character of a

running gag

.

The “pull that a corpse develops” is brought to the attention of the public, as is the observation of the disappearance of the deceased, which begins immediately after the dead are removed and “in a certain sense never stops”.

In view of the political and personal catastrophes that occur, Galgut brings up a lot of humor in his story.

The human feeling in all its facets

And a polyphony that goes beyond the number of people and also makes those who are silent audible: “In all townships there are riots, everywhere people talk about it, behind closed doors, and although the state of emergency hangs over the country like a dark cloud , the news is being censored and the overall atmosphere is slightly tense, slightly charged, these voices cannot be silenced, they are always there, in the background, like a static crackle.

But to whom do these voices belong, and why can't we hear them now?

Shh, you will hear them if you just pay attention, when you perk up your ears. "