And starting with that as a framework I sort of went sideways and thought, well, you could do more than just tell the family history, you could, if you spaced those funerals out in different decades of South African history, open the window a little bit wider and show some of the background of where South Africa was at that point. This is a history of the living, not the dead. Mark Gevisser: With diminishing returns as they die off …ĭamon Galgut: Well, some people die, but there are always more stepping in.

If all you were telling was what happened at this particular time when this body was being buried, and you saw the same cast of characters, you know, at the next funeral and the next one and the next one.

Funerals are very sad events, obviously, but they tend to involve the living more than the dead, and it occurred to me that it might be an interesting structure for a book to look at a family’s history through the device of four funerals. He is a very funny raconteur and he had me in stitches one day with a series of anecdotes about incidents at the four family funerals that he’d been to. The very first germ of the book came from a conversation with a friend who is a bit older than me and who is, as it happens, the last surviving member of his family he has lost his mother, his father, his brother and his sister. We’re always, as writers, looking for the next project, what might be interesting enough to occupy us for a few years, and I’m no different in that respect. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about the structure of the book, what it concerns, and how you came to this structure.ĭamon Galgut: As I’m sure you know, Mark, books arrive in unexpected ways. Let’s begin, Damon, by talking about those parts and adding them up. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts.’ ‘To praise the novel in its particulars-for its seriousness for its balance of formal freedom and elegance for its humour, its precision, its human truth-seems inadequate and partial. I’m going to begin with a citation by Claire Messud from her review in Harper’s Magazine. So congratulations, Damon, it’s really wonderful to be with you. I think that is one of the triumphs of this book, its genealogy and its uniqueness.

But at the same time is all of Damon’s own and this moment’s own. I’ve read it twice, once in draft and once between covers, these very handsome covers, and it is quite remarkable in the way it hits on truths-on political truths, on emotional truths-through a kind of experimental, innovative style that has deep, deep roots in modernist literature. Mark Gevisser: The Promise is one of the most thrilling literary experiences I’ve had in a very long time.

The promise damon galgut review