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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Promise (originale 2021; edizione 2022)di Damon Galgut
Informazioni sull'operaThe Promise di Damon Galgut (2021)
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The story of a family, as each dies, commitments made, disappointments etc. Didn't really grab me. ( ) The book is set in South Africa and begins in 1986 just as the drive to eliminate apartheid begins. It is the story of the Afrikaner Swart family and their farm located outside Pretoria over 4 decades and 4 deaths. Amor is 13 and the youngest of three children when her mother, Rachael Swart, dies of a long illness. She overhears a promise that her mother extracted from her father shortly before her mother dies: the house in which their long-time Black servant, Salome, lives should be deeded to her. Her mother and father, Manie, have had a 20-year stressful marriage. Rachael, née Cohn, was originally Jewish but gave up that religion when she married. At the end of her life, she decides to return to her Jewish heritage and be buried in the Jewish cemetery instead of in her husband's family plot. This causes much concern and angst among the family members on both sides. Amor has two older siblings, Astrid and Anton, 19, and away in the military at the time of his mother's death. He is given 7 days leave to return home but decides to desert instead. The book is divided into four chapters, one for each death, Ma, Pa, Astrid, and Anton. For each death, the situation and people are described, with Amor asking each time if the promise of the house for Salome will now be honored. Amor leaves home to travel and eventually become a nurse and is in contact with only her sister or brother, but returns for each of the deaths. Not my favorite story or read. It was hard to keep track of who was saying and doing what. This novel took my breath away in so many ways. The promise in the title is presumably the promise of house to Salome, made by the mother on her deathbed. Salome had worked for the family for years and continued to do so as the decades pass and the promise is not fulfilled. But it is also the promise of South Africa, as it shakes off aparteid and has so much promise as a democratic country. In the final chapters we see corruption, crime and power and water outages from its crumbling infrastructure. It is also the promise of the characters. Anton had so many plans and struggles to get beyond drinking. Lukas, Salome's son also had promise that isn't fulfilled. Different female characters become beautiful to the whispering narrator eyes at different times and this suggests promise that then disappears in weight gain and tiredness from working and caring. The family business, a snake and reptile park, and the land, is also full of promise and this shrivels away. There is plenty of sadness in the novel but it doesn't feel a bleak novel and I didn't weep over any of the characters. At the end I was left with a sense of joy and moving on.
Damon Galgut’s stunning new novel charts the decline of a white family during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. It begins in 1986, with the death of Rachel, a 40-year-old Jewish mother of three on a smallholding outside Pretoria. The drama of the novel turns on a promise that her Afrikaner husband, Manie, made to her before she died, overheard by their youngest daughter, Amor: that Manie would give their black maid, Salome, the deeds to the annexe she occupies. Now that Rachel is dead, Manie has apparently forgotten and doesn’t care to be reminded. Nor does his bigoted family, who regard Amor’s stubborn insistence that Salome should own her home as the kind of talk that “now appears to have infected the whole country”. For three decades the South African writer Damon Galgut has been assessing his country through scrutiny of its white people. His prior novels include the Booker Prize finalist “The Good Doctor,” set at a clinic in one of apartheid’s forlorn “homelands,” and “The Impostor,” an account of a poet self-exiled to the lonely countryside. Galgut’s new work, “The Promise,” studies the Swart family, descendants of Voortrekker settlers, clinging to their farm amid tumultuous social and political change — “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” he writes, “holding on, holding out.” Beginning in 1986, the novel moves toward the present, following Ma, Pa and the alliterative trio of Swart children: Anton, a military deserter and failed novelist; Astrid, a narcissistic housewife; and Amor, an introspective loner who eventually becomes a nurse. In scope, seriousness, and experimental ambition, modernist writing like {Virginia} Woolf’s sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental epoch, a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in literature’s regenerative power. Yet Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, “The Promise” (Europa), suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability. (J. M. Coetzee once argued that South African literature is a “literature in bondage,” because a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life.) “The Promise” is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise.” The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the eighties, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s Presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son. È contenuto inPremi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
Una saga familiare moderna dal Sudafrica, scritta dall'autore due volte finalista al Booker Prize, Damon Galgut. Perseguitati da una promessa non mantenuta, dopo la morte della madre i membri della famiglia Swart si perdono di vista. Alla deriva, le vite dei tre figli della donna procedono separatamente lungo le acque inesplorate del Sudafrica: Anton, il ragazzo d'oro amareggiato dal potenziale inespresso che ©· la sua vita; Astrid, il cui potere sta nella bellezza; e la pi©£ giovane, Amor, la cui vita ©· plasmata da un nebuloso senso di colpa. Ritrovandosi per quattro funerali nel corso di tre decenni, la famiglia in declino rispecchia l'atmosfera del paese: un'atmosfera di risentimento, rinnovamento e infine di speranza. La promessa ©· un dramma epico che si dispiega al ritmo dell'incessante marcia della storia nazionale. (Fonte: editore) Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.92Literature English English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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