“No,” Galgut answers for us, “she doesn’t … history has not yet trod on her.” By the time The Promise ends in 2018, history will have ground its boot not only on Amor and her family, but the entire nation. “Do you have no idea what country you’re living in?” Amor’s brother asks her. So goes the setup of Damon Galgut’s Man Booker Award–winning novel The Promise, which is much less about the Swarts, and much more about deconstructing the place where such a story could feasibly be told. Despite its illegality- Black people could not own property at the time -the conversation is overheard by Rachel’s teenage daughter Amor, who spends the next thirty years attempting to convince her father and two siblings to make good on her mother’s dying wish. On her deathbed, she feverishly forces her Christian, Afrikaans husband to promise to give the maid, Salome, the house where she already lives. Somewhere in apartheid Pretoria, 1985, Rachel Swart, a recently re-converted Jewish woman, dies of cancer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |