The Promise

No, no. It can't be true, what her aunt has just told her. Nobody is dead. It's a word, that's all. She looks at the word, lying there on the desk like an insect on its back, with no explanation.

Prachtig boek dat aan de hand van vier sterfgevallen in dezelfde familie de roerige geschiedenis van Zuid Afrika tijdens en na de apartheid over vier decennia invoelbaar maakt.

For there is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don't believe it then listen to us speak. We sound no different from the other voices, we sound the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in. Something rusted and rain-stained and dented in the soul, and it comes through in the voice. But don't say we never change! Because guess who else is there in the front pew, an honorary kinswoman today. See how far we've come in this country, there's the black nanny, sitting with the family!

De belofte uit de titel is de belofte die de vader doet aan het sterfbed van de moeder, dat hun (zwarte) hulp het eigendom zal krijgen over het huisje waar ze al jaren in woont. Die belofte wordt in de komende decennia steeds weer niet ingewilligd, om diverse smoezen en redenen. De jongste dochter hoort (denk te hebben gehoord?) en lijkt de enige die zich hier druk over maakt.

Anton can see a black man in the next bed, bandaged up like a mummy. Verwoerd must be spinning in his grave, can't believe they haven't changed the name of the hospital yet. The man groans aloud from inside his wrappings, not quite a word, unless it's in a foreign language, the language of pain. Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out.

Aanrader!

This won the Booker prize so it's fine for me not to be a fan. I've argued with some people about it to try and understand why it's liked, and I just can't get there.

Everyone acts like the narrative style is new but it's such a clear comparison with Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, a comparison that does nothing but harm to this book.

You would think the point of constantly switching to show different characters inner lives is to show the complexity of being human and interacting with others, how people appear on the outside vs their inner thoughts, but I genuinely think you could write this book with literally no internal monologue from anyone and you would still know everything about each character. This narrative style didn't actually add anything which makes me wonder if the point was just to...be......different?

Nice to read something so South African, that's something.

In structure and style, in the uncompromising & occasionally sardonic immediacy with which the narrative voice observes/inhabits the moral corruption and guilt of a white South African family from the 1980s to the present, in the way it evokes and wholly envelopes a reader in the particularities of a landscape and a history, “The Promise” reminded me of my favorite Faulkner novels. And I can really offer no higher praise than that.

A woman dies, and a husband remains with a promise, that gets passed on throughout the decades, while South Africa experiences violent and revolutionary changes. The family slowly crumbles, and the unkept promise is the bad taste that remains.

And not even when it's finally kept, you get much satisfaction from it, as it's too little too late.