Galgut became well-known for The Good Doctor, which was sort of Disgrace Part Two, but I much prefer this earlier, more uneven novel. Its about a young, implicitly gay, white south african man who has been conscripted into the south african army and fought in the border wars of the late 1980s in Namibia. He is discharged, having lost his mind for a while after a boy he loved is killed, and the story begins shortly after his discharge, when he is back in Namibia with his mother and her new black lover, just as the first democratic elections are being held there (they happened before South Africa's, and its fascinating to read an account of that historical moment). His mother is a bit of a monster. The way in which she feels she is finally becoming a real African through a sexual relationship with the black man, Godfrey, while finding his political passion increasingly tiresome, is not a pretty picture. The young man, meanwhile, becomes friends with Godfrey, and finds himself fascinated with a (beautiful) white male SWAPO activist who has just been assassinated, who stands for an alternative life he could have lived if he hadn't been trying so hard, and unsuccessfully, to conform to white masculinity. His intense alienation is really beautifully conveyed--"Though I strain and I beat, my efforts are muffled, my cries are eaten by my silence. I have longed for a way to vent my country from me, to bawl it out of my flesh"--and this scene, during a SWAPO rally in the desert, is in some ways the core of the novel: "There occurred, later, an instant of grace: at some point that evening, a black man nudged my leg. Looking up, I saw him: a youth, the same age as me. He was grinning, extending his hand. "Hey, brother," he said. I accepted his grip. "Brother," I mumbled in reply. As he shambled away over the bluish sand, the moon broke free of the clouds. It had waxed to the full, was brimming with light. Hanging behind us, swollen with dust, it cast a radiance down. And here, in this corner of the desert, its roundness infected us all. In a moment, sucked up by its gravity, we were all on our feet. The orator at the microphone fell silent. And into the hush, hesitantly at first, a song slowly spread through the crowd. I didn't know this song. I'd never heard it before. But the rhythm went through me, moving my feet; I brought my heel down on the earth. My mouth hummed along without words. As my foot stamped the ground, a hand touched my back: Godfrey pulled me towards him. With his other arm, he embraced my mother. All three of us were singing; my mother, her lover, myself...for a second I saw how things could be: part of a mass, of a singing congregation, the family to which I'd never belonged. I stamped hard on the earth, treading my past. Words rose in beautiful arcs. This lasted only that moment."
Do You like book The Beautiful Screaming Of Pigs (2006)?
Having become unmoored during his military services - fighting against Namibian independence - Patrick feels increasingly disconnected from the world around him. He returns to Namibia at the time of its first free elections but struggling to find an identify for himself, he doesn't quite understand what's happening to him: "I was losing all sense of who I was by then, but I didn’t know how to give voice to the gathering absence." Confused, he vainly tries to make sense of not just himself but, in both place and time, how he fits into the prevailing environment of disorder and instability: "It was like the edge of the world. Beyond it, as in ancient maps, was where monstrous and unknown things dwelled: Communists. Terrorists. Other Ideas." A growing feeling of senselessness and futility sets in and he comes to the realization "My individuality was isolation, my personality an absence."This is a fairly early effort by Galgut (1991) and it doesn't feel quite as technically gifted as his subsequent work. It's a little bit uneven but it also has a more immediate bite to it.
—Kenneth
