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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
This is a beautiful book. It contains three stories, written in a minimalist style, that convey strong emotions (interest, weariness, frustration, panic, and most of all guilt). We learn little about the narrator, except that he has the same name as the author and is also a writer, that he is an aimless traveler, and that he has a hard time sustaining positive connections with other people. The narration's switching from third to first person is a curious technique that forces the reader to question and reflect on what these three stories mean to the author.
The third of my Booker shortlisted book reviews and while I applaud it for being there as a bit of an oddity, the whole is considerably less than the parts. This book started out life as 3 short stories published in the "Paris Review" and possibly should have been kept separate. Stories 1 and 2 really did nothing for me, but it's only when we get to an astoundingly moving and gruelling third story that the book comes alive. The itinerant traveller anchored to nothing and no one of parts one and two, takes the responsibility for a suicidal acquaintance and strives to keep her alive in story 3. Fantastic, but I wish it just stayed a story on its own without the other two.
Great psychological tension throughout made this a very compelling read. My favourite (so far) of all the 2010 Booker nominees.
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Fascinatingly weird exploration of the narrator's past travel experiences and of the people he meets. Hauntingly beautiful prose. By no means an easy read but certainly rewarding.
Great psychological tension throughout made this a very compelling read. My favourite (so far) of all the 2010 Booker nominees.
Dry, humourless and fatally pretentious, Damon Galgut’s triptych of nightmarish travel stories was one of the most unsatisfying reading experiences I’ve had all year.
Originally published as three separate pieces in "The Paris Review", someone (presumably Galgut’s agent) had the bright idea of combining them into a single volume and hawking it as a novel. The strategy paid off: the book was well-reviewed, hailed for its exploration of the murky grey matter between fiction and memoir, and became a surprise nominee for the Booker Prize.
I’m afraid its merits were largely lost on me, which isn’t to say that it’s badly written. Galgut is an intelligent and perceptive writer, and every aspect of this book – the mysteriously undefined narrator, the short, astringent sentences, the pervading atmosphere of melancholy, the decidedly cynical view of white Western tourism in the Third World – has been carefully chosen and exhaustively worked at. Perhaps it’s this "craft" – the overweening self-consciousness of Galgut's writing and the chalk-dust residue of his technique – that got between me and any sense of enjoyment of the work.
Following the original format of the pieces, the book is divided into three sections, each of roughly 60 pages. Each piece is narrated by a man named Damon, a strategy that automatically invites us to read the pieces as memoir. (More on that later). Damon tells us nearly nothing about himself - he is white, South African, apparently gay and seems sufficiently well-off to be able to travel for extended periods without working. Everything else we learn about him is through his observations of other people, whom he regards with caustic disapproval and a sense of repressed longing.
In the first section, "The Follower", Damon meets a German man called Reiner, and the two set off on an ill-advised walking tour through Lesotho. The trip becomes a kind of latter-day "Sheltering Sky", with Reiner as the handsome, feckless, vaguely sadistic object of desire, while Damon follows behind, besotted and puppy-like, and increasingly frustrated by Reiner’s unwillingness to fuck him. After an eleventh hour fight, they part company, apart from a brief and unsatisfying coda. The second section, "The Lover", is set a few years later. Damon is travelling in Zimbabwe and meets a trio of European tourists. Damon follows them to Tanzania and develops a crush on one of the group, Jerome, a friendly but rather colourless Swiss. He follows Jerome to Switzerland and meets his family, which bizarrely no one seems to mind, though it’s unclear whether everyone is just being polite or if Damon has been able to successfully mask his bunny-boiler tendencies. Eventually, his interest fades or he just gives up on another doomed enterprise, and the story falls away. In the third and most interesting story, "The Guardian", Damon goes on holiday to India with his friend Anna, a fellow South African and hot mess, whose suicide attempt lands her in hospital with Damon as her reluctant carer.
The predominant theme of each piece is repression - which perhaps explains its popularity with British readers, for whom inability to express one's feelings is held up as a virtue. Damon is ashamed of his desires, and incapable of naming them, let alone acting on them. Like many self-hating gay men, he pursues unattainable objects of desire - straight men - exerting himself so as to prove himself worthy of their affection. I suppose there are readers out there who find this kind of tortured sexual dynamic interesting, but I found it frustrating and more than a bit retro. (Actually, that’s not fair - even Gore Vidal’s doomed lovers in "The City and the Pillar", written in the 1940s, had more spine than this). Damon’s (and Galgut’s) refusal to confront the penis-shaped elephant in the room means that the cycle of repression reproduces itself in a way that feels deeply dissatisfying, and feeds a complacent type of readerly voyeurism about homosexuality. Through Damon, Galgut's readers can have a transgressive little reading adventure, without ever having to confront the realities of gay desire.
The inhospitable locations Damon travels to become a kind of objective correlative of his alienation and self-pity, putting Galgut in a long tradition of white writers who use Third World countries as exotic backdrops for their First World problems. Galgut seems aware of this dynamic, and attempts to redress it. In "The Lover", he has Damon comment disapprovingly about a group of Western tourists who take little interest in the Zimbabwayan locals who wait on them. But like most of Damon's insights, nothing is followed through – the character's liberal posturing becomes just another footnote to describe his radical alienation from others and his refusal to confront himself.
Just as things are becoming as dry and desiccated as Galgut’s prose, "The Guardian" arrives, providing a welcome jolt of energy. Anna is an appalling character – narcissistic, deeply damaged and oblivious to anyone else’s needs – but she’s a stunning scene stealer, literally walking away with the rest of the narrative. Her actions are selfish and destructive though they are, but there's something thrilling about her compulsive need to act, in stark contrast to Damon's very tiresome passivity. The crisis provoked by Anna’s illness and hospitalisation push the story along like a thriller – even though her trajectory ends badly, at least she’s heading in a clear direction, unlike Damon’s road-to-nowhere erotic wanderings.
Like many works in the auto-fiction genre, Galgut displays a fussy self-consciousness about the act of storytelling. The narrative shifts continuously (and, I’ll admit, skilfully) between first and third person, transforming Damon from the teller of his own story to the distant object of a character in someone else’s. This is presumably meant to undermine the authority of the narrative – another staple of auto-fiction – and arouse our suspicions about the truth of Damon’s first-person version of events. It all sounds very clever, and in some ways it’s an appropriate narrative device for a person so uncomfortable in his skin that he wants to disappear from his own life. But little other insight is offered, leaving us with literary craft in place of compelling storytelling or characterisation.
Galgut is a gifted writer, and I suppose he deserves some congratulation for writing work that’s in a strange room in the house of literary fiction. As a piece of gay fiction, it's unusual in its refusal to play into many gay cliches - there's little if any humour in the book, and nothing that could be considered camp. But to me there’s little point in reading about alienation for its own sake, or presenting characters so passive and unlikeable that they spring to life only in relation to others. Writerly technique is all well and good, but next time I hope Galgut finds a story that’s worthy of his talents.
Originally published as three separate pieces in "The Paris Review", someone (presumably Galgut’s agent) had the bright idea of combining them into a single volume and hawking it as a novel. The strategy paid off: the book was well-reviewed, hailed for its exploration of the murky grey matter between fiction and memoir, and became a surprise nominee for the Booker Prize.
I’m afraid its merits were largely lost on me, which isn’t to say that it’s badly written. Galgut is an intelligent and perceptive writer, and every aspect of this book – the mysteriously undefined narrator, the short, astringent sentences, the pervading atmosphere of melancholy, the decidedly cynical view of white Western tourism in the Third World – has been carefully chosen and exhaustively worked at. Perhaps it’s this "craft" – the overweening self-consciousness of Galgut's writing and the chalk-dust residue of his technique – that got between me and any sense of enjoyment of the work.
Following the original format of the pieces, the book is divided into three sections, each of roughly 60 pages. Each piece is narrated by a man named Damon, a strategy that automatically invites us to read the pieces as memoir. (More on that later). Damon tells us nearly nothing about himself - he is white, South African, apparently gay and seems sufficiently well-off to be able to travel for extended periods without working. Everything else we learn about him is through his observations of other people, whom he regards with caustic disapproval and a sense of repressed longing.
In the first section, "The Follower", Damon meets a German man called Reiner, and the two set off on an ill-advised walking tour through Lesotho. The trip becomes a kind of latter-day "Sheltering Sky", with Reiner as the handsome, feckless, vaguely sadistic object of desire, while Damon follows behind, besotted and puppy-like, and increasingly frustrated by Reiner’s unwillingness to fuck him. After an eleventh hour fight, they part company, apart from a brief and unsatisfying coda. The second section, "The Lover", is set a few years later. Damon is travelling in Zimbabwe and meets a trio of European tourists. Damon follows them to Tanzania and develops a crush on one of the group, Jerome, a friendly but rather colourless Swiss. He follows Jerome to Switzerland and meets his family, which bizarrely no one seems to mind, though it’s unclear whether everyone is just being polite or if Damon has been able to successfully mask his bunny-boiler tendencies. Eventually, his interest fades or he just gives up on another doomed enterprise, and the story falls away. In the third and most interesting story, "The Guardian", Damon goes on holiday to India with his friend Anna, a fellow South African and hot mess, whose suicide attempt lands her in hospital with Damon as her reluctant carer.
The predominant theme of each piece is repression - which perhaps explains its popularity with British readers, for whom inability to express one's feelings is held up as a virtue. Damon is ashamed of his desires, and incapable of naming them, let alone acting on them. Like many self-hating gay men, he pursues unattainable objects of desire - straight men - exerting himself so as to prove himself worthy of their affection. I suppose there are readers out there who find this kind of tortured sexual dynamic interesting, but I found it frustrating and more than a bit retro. (Actually, that’s not fair - even Gore Vidal’s doomed lovers in "The City and the Pillar", written in the 1940s, had more spine than this). Damon’s (and Galgut’s) refusal to confront the penis-shaped elephant in the room means that the cycle of repression reproduces itself in a way that feels deeply dissatisfying, and feeds a complacent type of readerly voyeurism about homosexuality. Through Damon, Galgut's readers can have a transgressive little reading adventure, without ever having to confront the realities of gay desire.
The inhospitable locations Damon travels to become a kind of objective correlative of his alienation and self-pity, putting Galgut in a long tradition of white writers who use Third World countries as exotic backdrops for their First World problems. Galgut seems aware of this dynamic, and attempts to redress it. In "The Lover", he has Damon comment disapprovingly about a group of Western tourists who take little interest in the Zimbabwayan locals who wait on them. But like most of Damon's insights, nothing is followed through – the character's liberal posturing becomes just another footnote to describe his radical alienation from others and his refusal to confront himself.
Just as things are becoming as dry and desiccated as Galgut’s prose, "The Guardian" arrives, providing a welcome jolt of energy. Anna is an appalling character – narcissistic, deeply damaged and oblivious to anyone else’s needs – but she’s a stunning scene stealer, literally walking away with the rest of the narrative. Her actions are selfish and destructive though they are, but there's something thrilling about her compulsive need to act, in stark contrast to Damon's very tiresome passivity. The crisis provoked by Anna’s illness and hospitalisation push the story along like a thriller – even though her trajectory ends badly, at least she’s heading in a clear direction, unlike Damon’s road-to-nowhere erotic wanderings.
Like many works in the auto-fiction genre, Galgut displays a fussy self-consciousness about the act of storytelling. The narrative shifts continuously (and, I’ll admit, skilfully) between first and third person, transforming Damon from the teller of his own story to the distant object of a character in someone else’s. This is presumably meant to undermine the authority of the narrative – another staple of auto-fiction – and arouse our suspicions about the truth of Damon’s first-person version of events. It all sounds very clever, and in some ways it’s an appropriate narrative device for a person so uncomfortable in his skin that he wants to disappear from his own life. But little other insight is offered, leaving us with literary craft in place of compelling storytelling or characterisation.
Galgut is a gifted writer, and I suppose he deserves some congratulation for writing work that’s in a strange room in the house of literary fiction. As a piece of gay fiction, it's unusual in its refusal to play into many gay cliches - there's little if any humour in the book, and nothing that could be considered camp. But to me there’s little point in reading about alienation for its own sake, or presenting characters so passive and unlikeable that they spring to life only in relation to others. Writerly technique is all well and good, but next time I hope Galgut finds a story that’s worthy of his talents.
Damon Galgut is a South African writer. He started writing as a young man, and met with immediate success. This is his second Man Booker nominated and short listed novel. Much of his writing is set in South Africa and surrounds, and much of it also autobiographical. This novel is also partly set in Africa and may or may not be autobiographical. It could also be a book of travel writing of sorts too - he journeys to many of the countries of Africa, as far north as Morocco, and to India where the last part of the book takes place. It is such personal writing, with such personal insight and depth I almost felt as if I was intruding on someone's inner being. Such spare and beautiful writing deserves to be more widely read as it also allows us to look into our own selves.
This book is not just one story as most novels are, but more like three short stories, each from a different part of the narrator's life as he struggles to find his path in life. The chapters are entitled 'The Follower', 'The Lover' and 'The Guardian' and the narrator is each of these people. 99% of the story is narrated in the 3rd person, but so weirdly very occasionally, in mid sentence or mid paragraph he suddenly talks about 'I' and then immediately goes back to 'he'. I can't think of a possible reason why he would want to do this, it doesn't make sense. Damon is a loner, a young man who really does not know what he wants in life or how to get there. I get the impression money is not a problem as he doesn't really seem to do anything except travel aimlessly. Lucky him. In the third story, he would appear to be quite a lot older, settled and I would say now a successful writer. But he is still essentially a loner, still looking for that essence of peace and belonging.
I think every now and again we need to read books like this, beautiful writing, very spare, very reflective. It makes us think about relationships we have with people and how deeply affected we can be by the things we may say or do to those people - the subtle nuances of our friendships and relationships.
This book is not just one story as most novels are, but more like three short stories, each from a different part of the narrator's life as he struggles to find his path in life. The chapters are entitled 'The Follower', 'The Lover' and 'The Guardian' and the narrator is each of these people. 99% of the story is narrated in the 3rd person, but so weirdly very occasionally, in mid sentence or mid paragraph he suddenly talks about 'I' and then immediately goes back to 'he'. I can't think of a possible reason why he would want to do this, it doesn't make sense. Damon is a loner, a young man who really does not know what he wants in life or how to get there. I get the impression money is not a problem as he doesn't really seem to do anything except travel aimlessly. Lucky him. In the third story, he would appear to be quite a lot older, settled and I would say now a successful writer. But he is still essentially a loner, still looking for that essence of peace and belonging.
I think every now and again we need to read books like this, beautiful writing, very spare, very reflective. It makes us think about relationships we have with people and how deeply affected we can be by the things we may say or do to those people - the subtle nuances of our friendships and relationships.
Spare, intense, profound reflections of a man travelling through different continents at different periods in his life. Some of the prose is magical and other parts are utterly forgettable.
It reminded me of traveling in my youth. The feelings one has when one is travelling alone. Everything seems so momentous and yet at the same time so very insignificant.
It reminded me of traveling in my youth. The feelings one has when one is travelling alone. Everything seems so momentous and yet at the same time so very insignificant.
Damon Gadget’s In a Strange Room is a lush, hypnotic novel that explores longing and desire through the prism of travel.
Divided into three seemingly unrelated parts — The Follower, The Lover and The Guardian — it merges in the reader’s mind to form a seamless whole.
If you’ve ever gone travelling/backpacking, felt alienated or not known what you want from life, it will resonate.
To read my review in full, please visit my blog.
Divided into three seemingly unrelated parts — The Follower, The Lover and The Guardian — it merges in the reader’s mind to form a seamless whole.
If you’ve ever gone travelling/backpacking, felt alienated or not known what you want from life, it will resonate.
To read my review in full, please visit my blog.
A bit of a sad book - a lonely man travels endlessly, meets several strangers who he travels with. All his relationships with these strangers are stilted and uncomfortable. He seems lost and not sure what he wants. The book has a statement in the beginning about all people and events in the book being fictional, but then the protagonist is an author named Damon from the same country as the book's author. Also strange, the book is written in third person but every now and then switches to first person, even in the middle of a sentence. :S