Genre Fiction
![Damon Galgut - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_damon_galgut.jpg)
The Promise: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)
WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes a promise to Salome, the family's Black maid. This promise will divide the family-especially her children: Anton, the golden boy; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by feelings of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over thirty years, the dwindling Swart family remains haunted by the unmet promise, just as their country is haunted by its own failures. The Promise is an epic South African drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history, sure to leave its readers transformed.
"Simply: you must read it."-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
★ "This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing."-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes a promise to Salome, the family's Black maid. This promise will divide the family-especially her children: Anton, the golden boy; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by feelings of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over thirty years, the dwindling Swart family remains haunted by the unmet promise, just as their country is haunted by its own failures. The Promise is an epic South African drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history, sure to leave its readers transformed.
"Simply: you must read it."-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
★ "This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing."-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Editorial Reviews
★ "Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief."-Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
★ "This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing."-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
★ "Galgut's compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism…The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant."-Booklist (Starred Review)
"The novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce... To praise the novel in its particulars-for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth-seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it."-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"Galgut's novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner. The novel's beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation... Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept."-James Wood,The New Yorker
"The plot is just the vehicle for a story that reveals the dark heart of South Africa's recent and turbulent history; apartheid, conscription, peace and reconciliation are all glossed. In The Promise is a kind of fluid narrativity which means we, the reader, are literally swept along, while Galgut pays a very direct tribute to Joyce in the final cadenced pages. He's done it with mastery, guile, and a generous amount of empathy. The Promise is a masterpiece."-Independent.ie
"Time and again in Mr. Galgut's fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth."-Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
"
★ "This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing."-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
★ "Galgut's compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism…The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant."-Booklist (Starred Review)
"The novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce... To praise the novel in its particulars-for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth-seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it."-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"Galgut's novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner. The novel's beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation... Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept."-James Wood,The New Yorker
"The plot is just the vehicle for a story that reveals the dark heart of South Africa's recent and turbulent history; apartheid, conscription, peace and reconciliation are all glossed. In The Promise is a kind of fluid narrativity which means we, the reader, are literally swept along, while Galgut pays a very direct tribute to Joyce in the final cadenced pages. He's done it with mastery, guile, and a generous amount of empathy. The Promise is a masterpiece."-Independent.ie
"Time and again in Mr. Galgut's fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth."-Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
"
Readers Top Reviews
Richard RoyceJudith
The Promise is my first exposure to Galgut. He is a modernist writer - perspectives shift between the 1st and 3rd person (even at times including animals and inanimate objects), creating a kaleidoscopic, multi-layered view of both characters and setting. Nonetheless, the writing is fully accessible, with the prose sparse and tightly constructed. And despite the book being only ~250 pages, Galgut's writing skill is such that every character makes a strong impression. While the story is fairly bleak (about an ill-fated family in South Africa, and centered on four funerals, occurring over a wide expanse of time ), I suspect that Galgut is ultimately a humanist. Galgut, as with Camus through his character of Meursault in "The Stranger," is instructing us in how to be live better for ourselves and for others, by displaying the very opposite characteristics and values.
Jason Adams
Galgut has a restless pen, leading the reader through the psyches of his characters with abandon. There is no true POV here, as dialog - both spoken and thought is revealed from all characters as needed to drive the story. This allows him to lay bare the venal and heroic inclinations of our characters. With this style, irony runs rife. Yet, to tell the tale of the Swart clan, such a technique is necessary. A broken and dysfunctional family, they lack the basic ability to empathize and understand each other. The promise of the title could refer to a noble gesture early in the novel that is ignored by the family. It could also refer to the promise of the young family that begins the novel on the cusp of adulthood. In the meantime, South Africa undergoes a transformation with similar promise. Good read.
C. Perez
As a dying wish, Rachel Swart— who co-owns a farm located in the outskirts of Pretoria, South Africa— make her husband, Manie, promise to give Salome, their black employee, the deed of the house where she lives, as a reward for having taken care of Rachel during her convalescence. Manie promises so, but as years go by, the family dwindles and the promise goes unfulfilled. The Promise is an incendiary testament of thirty-one years of contemporary South African history, viewed through the micro-lens of a dwindling white family standing as a perfect metaphor for the moral and social decline at large. The novel reads like a stream of consciousness, ratatat style (at least in the first two chapters), with plenty of dark humor to lighten up the load, though the story becomes increasingly somber and introspective with each passing funeral. I had to re-read several times the first few pages to become accustomed to the writing style—suggestion, give it time. The narrative flows easily once one becomes used to the lack of quotations marks to signal dialogues and to the use of phrases using phonetic English. Overall, The Promise is a cracking read, with original writing and whip smart personal and social commentary. Deserves every bit the accolades received.
Katie
This 2021 Booker Prize-winning novel is a tale of the Swarts, a white family in South Africa. This story takes place over several decades, framed around four different funerals. This story is told in four long sections. I think it was best to read a full section in one sitting when possible, as there were not really good stopping points in the sections. Of the four sections, my favorite section was the one titled Astrid. That section shocked me the most, especially the death that occurred in it. Something I have seen mentioned a lot in reviews of this novel is the writing style. The writing flows between many characters, including more minor characters in the overall scheme of the story. The writing forced me to slow down my reading more than how I normally read so that I could really focus on what was happening in the book. While I don’t think that is a bad thing, I do think that the writing kept me feeling a bit removed from the primary characters. I wanted to feel the emotions in the story deeper and delve more into the lives of the characters, especially Amor. I can definitely understand how this novel won the Booker prize. It seems like a book that is worthy of discussion.
Carolyn
This book, about a South African family brought together over a couple of funeral is wondeful with a very unique style of writing. The narrator is omniscient and shifts perspective at will, sometimes commenting sarcastically on what's taking place. At first I was confused, trying to figure out who the narrator was, but the style soon grew on me. The book raises and asks some important questions about family, home and property, race relations, corruption in the clergy, destiny and white privilege and even Karma. There is some brilliant and moving writing, including a description of rain that comes at the end. I might have rated the book 5 stars, but there were so darn many similes that my attention was always called away from the "story" to the writer's attempt to craft his sentences. Most of them didn't work. I just laughed out loud at most of the similes--for example ""the blasphemy slips out like a goblet of snot". Really? and a description of the aunt as "half melted, like an old candle in a saucer". For me, these constant similes are nothing but an interruption that calls my attention to the writer. Sometimes the author would write a good description as when he said of Amor that she had to "find a place inside herself where a cold wind isn't blowing.". All in all, though, it's a wonderful book with a lot to say and I recommend it.
