In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut
Atlantic Books $36.99
This haunting, Booker-short-listed novel follows a young South African man identified only as Damon. Yes, just like the author. In each of the three 60-page sections, Damon undertakes a journey: in Mycenae and then through Lesotho with a silken-haired German; across Tanzania with beautiful Swiss twins; to Goa with a hectic, disturbed woman friend.
Damon plays a different role in each story. Galgut's titles tell you: "The Follower ... The Lover ... The Guardian". Our anti-hero starts out each time with high hopes, and ends up in low spirits, as his journeys deteriorate into disaster.
It's bare-rooms, bare-bones travel, but with none of the smugness that often bloats such narratives. Damon travels with little plan or purpose, "fraying out into endless ambiguities and nuances, like a path that divides and divides endlessly, growing fainter all the time".
Galgut writes in an alternation of first and third person, which at times almost convinces you that you're reading a memoir, until narrator and author openly admit their unreliability. "I forget ... I don't remember." The resulting dislocation is accentuated by motifs of isolation, "placelessness", dispersal, alienation even from oneself.
The paradox is that the essentially transitory contacts between people, and especially Damon's tentative reachings for a relationship, make such moments more vivid and poignant.
Equally vivid are the evocations of place, often via the tiniest detail, spaced across the minutes or weeks that pass between the brief paragraphs: "the vision of a cracked brick wall growing hotter and hotter in the sun ... a wooden canoe passes slowly by in perfect profile, like a hieroglyph".
There are moments of total joy, when Damon is walking and alone. There is the kindness of strangers and the revealed beauty of the world. There's grotesque comedy in every shade of black. Make sure you never have to admit yourself to an Indian public hospital.
But Damon isn't a happy traveller. He grows older and tentatively more settled as the book progresses, but he always carries solitary confinement inside him. "He spends most of his time on the move in a state of acute anxiety."
His main lesson from all his journeys is that "lightning can strike from a clear sky one morning, and take away everything ... leaving wreckage and no meaning behind".
A small, sparely-written but richly emblematic novel with a big impact. It searches and startles as you read; echoes and lingers for a very long time after you've finished.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
