BOOK REVIEW: In a Strange Room
DAMON Galgut exhibits the arrogance of a seasoned writer who knows he can take certain liberties with the language and still be read.
Pedantic types say the narrative voice must be singularly uniform. Galgut explodes that myth, moving from first to third person in just one paragraph. Who said a book could only be written in a certain way? If so, literature would be a total bore. We'd not have had the pleasure of "playing" as JM Coetzee did in his Diary of a Bad Year.
In this book, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature and first author to win the Booker Prize twice, writes like he'd intended the material for a personal diary.
With his sixth book, Galgut has reached this level. He writes like he'd never heard of a punctuation. Apart from a comma and full stop, there are no other punctuation marks in the book.
This is the story of a restless itinerant soul who is more at peace travelling the world than being among friends and family in Cape Town or Pretoria. Damon travels like other people bake, sew or fish.
A trip meant to start and end in one place takes him all over Africa - and ultimately Greece, where he follows Reiner, the mysterious stranger in black. His contact with Reiner is somewhat a sign of his sexuality.
He cares deeply for Reiner, who is wrapped up in his own eccentricities. They go to Lesotho and "break up" acrimoniously.
"A few years later he is wandering in Zimbabwe", Galgut writes. This would end up taking his central character further north as he follows a group of backpackers who, like Reiner, are people he just bumped into.
The third part of the book is called The Guardian. He goes to India with Anna, a deranged woman who is not sure if she is gay or straight. She does her best to commit suicide and Damon does whatever he can not to allow it to happen.
He will later put her on a flight back to South Africa, ultimately the most beautiful part of the book. Anna meets a man, Jean, while traveling with Damon. He comes to South Africa to see her, where she's already broken up with her girlfriend.
In his travels, Damon has found himself in many strange rooms, most notably, the one he shared with Anna in India.
Another Galgut masterpiece.
Masterpiece about a restless itinerant soul
BOOK REVIEW: In a Strange Room
DAMON Galgut exhibits the arrogance of a seasoned writer who knows he can take certain liberties with the language and still be read.
Pedantic types say the narrative voice must be singularly uniform. Galgut explodes that myth, moving from first to third person in just one paragraph. Who said a book could only be written in a certain way? If so, literature would be a total bore. We'd not have had the pleasure of "playing" as JM Coetzee did in his Diary of a Bad Year.
In this book, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature and first author to win the Booker Prize twice, writes like he'd intended the material for a personal diary.
With his sixth book, Galgut has reached this level. He writes like he'd never heard of a punctuation. Apart from a comma and full stop, there are no other punctuation marks in the book.
This is the story of a restless itinerant soul who is more at peace travelling the world than being among friends and family in Cape Town or Pretoria. Damon travels like other people bake, sew or fish.
A trip meant to start and end in one place takes him all over Africa - and ultimately Greece, where he follows Reiner, the mysterious stranger in black. His contact with Reiner is somewhat a sign of his sexuality.
He cares deeply for Reiner, who is wrapped up in his own eccentricities. They go to Lesotho and "break up" acrimoniously.
"A few years later he is wandering in Zimbabwe", Galgut writes. This would end up taking his central character further north as he follows a group of backpackers who, like Reiner, are people he just bumped into.
The third part of the book is called The Guardian. He goes to India with Anna, a deranged woman who is not sure if she is gay or straight. She does her best to commit suicide and Damon does whatever he can not to allow it to happen.
He will later put her on a flight back to South Africa, ultimately the most beautiful part of the book. Anna meets a man, Jean, while traveling with Damon. He comes to South Africa to see her, where she's already broken up with her girlfriend.
In his travels, Damon has found himself in many strange rooms, most notably, the one he shared with Anna in India.
Another Galgut masterpiece.
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