The promise -that promise that is not fulfilled throughout the work- is the guiding thread of this novel that narrates the decomposition of a family as well as that of the country that welcomes them. An excellent narration of the evolution of South Africa, which is only the backdrop that allows us to situate the course of the protagonists, the Swarts, a white family established on a farm in Pretoria, without financial worries thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of their father.
The death of the mother triggers the conflict that gives rise to the promise of the title, the one that will only be resolved at the end: the promise to donate to Salome, the invisible black caretaker of the family -“ah, Salome came with the land”− , the little house where she lives, situated on the farm grounds. The route of that promise until its achievement -or not, we will not reveal the end-, is updated at the funerals for the successive deaths of its members. Each of these encounters, with her will and especially her family reunion, occupies one of the four chapters in which the novel is structured. All separated by a period of time.
Thus, Damon Galgut introduces us to the personal and, above all, mental evolution of family members and their entire community: from religious representatives to the homeless who lives in the church porch or the psychotherapist that one of the brothers goes to. ; With an almost cinematographic ability, the author allows us to accompany him on a visual journey through the environment that he locates and, above all, interprets the context, the manner and manner in which the family lives.
From a segregated South Africa to the liberation that Mandela’s political rise first supposes – “from the cell to the throne, I never thought I would see something like this” – and the subsequent advent of Thabo Mbeki, very close in social relations to some of the characters, the novel moves through racial conflicts, but also through religious ones, with an interest even in “alternative” spirituality; by the underworld and the resolution of debts, by the abuse of alcohol, but also by the excitement of the external symbols of power, with their love affairs.
All of this runs through the narrative, a novel of maturity in the writing of the Praetorian Damon Galgut, with which he has obtained the Booker Prize of the year 2021, and which recently landed in Spanish through Libros del Asteroid, has already reached its second edition.
The best thing about the novel is its surprising writing, like jumping, like blots that are actually very clear appreciations; with wise reflections in the voices of the different characters, so varied: “What is the family for?” -they will wonder-, as well as in passing, without hindering the narration. The jury highlighted the value of the work as the “spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think.” But it is that, above all, it does so by introducing us to the characters, each one of them, who appear in constant alternation. How to narrate from misunderstandings and broken writing, I would point out, but I also would not want to imply that the novel needs a double reading, because it does not.
It is agile, light, very visual, with a language appropriate to each moment and character, splendid in the sensationalism that allows immersion in each one of them. There are four deaths and a latent promise, which the laws first do not allow to apply but later, with the evolution of the country. And that death with which it begins, as an example, is narrated by Galgut in this way in an internal monologue of one of the secondary but persistent characters, such as the aunt tannie Marina: «The terrible news revealed in public, in front of the director! But her niece, that fat and useless lump, has hardly said a word ». Great portrait of vanity and bewilderment, full like so many portraits and events, with pearls like that. A great pleasure novel.