Author: Damon Galgut
I’m a sucker for Booker Prize winners and that is how “The Promise” landed on my bookshelf. There are a lot of hurdles to cross to get the top spot and I have rarely been disappointed. This one actually exceeded my expectations and opened my horizons to what life must been like in South Africa while the apartheid system was being dismantled there.
The book tells the story of the Swarts, a white family that is descended from Dutch Settlers and from what I gather, has the stereotypical qualities of entitled white families in South Africa at the time. The novel spans 40 years from the end of Apartheid to recent times, and is broken up into four parts with each section covering a certain period in the lives of the Swart family members. The book opens with the death of “Ma”, the matriarch of the family. The second part focuses on the adult life of the Swart children. The third part delves in to the characters struggles with life and their unfulfilled promises. The final chapter makes starts in 2017 and chronicles the family’s ultimate decline. The narrator is always in the third person and has a playful and sarcastic tone that is a joy to read. I felt that I was getting an intimate view into a typical, if highly stylized, life of a privileged white South African family.
