 |
| Damon Galgut photographed near his home in Cape Town, August 2021. Photograph: Chris de Beer-Procter |
Interview
Damon Galgut: ‘The Booker pulls a nasty little trick on you’
The South African novelist on making a pilgrimage to Cormac McCarthy’s home, his youth in apartheid-era Pretoria and being shortlisted twice for the Booker prize
Analysis / The 2021 Booker shortlist tunes in to the worries of our age
Nadifa Mohamed is sole British writer to make Booker prize shortlist
Booker Prize 2021 shortlist unveiled as race for £50,000 prize hots up
Saturday4 September 2021
N
ovelist and playwright Damon Galgut, 57, grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era. He wrote his first novel aged 17 and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker prize. His latest, The Promise, spans four tumultuous decades as it traces the afterlife of a white matriarch’s dying wish to bequeath property to her black servant. The novel is heavily tipped to land him a place on this year’s shortlist when it’s announced on 14 September. He lives in Cape Town.
 |
| Damon Galgut |
How did The Promise originate?
Books tend to build up out of clusters of ideas or themes that you carry around for a while and worry at. The specific form of this book crystallised around a series of anecdotes that a friend told me when we had a semi-drunken lunch, about four family funerals he’d attended. It occurred to me that would be quite an interesting way to tell the story of one particular family. The promise itself also arrived from a friend, who was telling me how his mother had asked the family to give a certain piece of land to the black woman who had looked after her through her last illness, as it happens in the book.
Why set it in Pretoria?
It was a way to exorcise some of my upbringing. Pretoria in the 1960s, 70s and 80s was not a great place for anyone to grow up in, even by South African standards. It was very much the nerve centre of the whole apartheid machine and it had a correspondingly conservative Christian mindset, along with a kind of underlying violence that was very memorable.
Are the Swarts, the family in The Promise, based on your own?
Not specifically, although little anecdotes are jumbled up in there, and there’s a Jewish side to my family, an Afrikaner Calvinist side. You can’t really conjure up characters without drawing on some aspect of yourself, so all of it in some way is a reflection of my own nature.
The novel has a distinctive narrative style. How did that evolve?
I made a start and wasn’t happy and then got involved in writing a film script, which actually had a formative effect, because when I came back to the book it seemed very staid. I saw a way to bring in some of the narrative logic of film. The personality of the narrator moves around as well – it’s one element that I hope slightly wrong-foots the reader into asking the question: who is telling the story? And the fact that that question is raised might be its only point.
What made you a writer?
There’s a strong legal strain in my family and there was a fair amount of pressure to go that way when I was younger, but this is pretty much what I’ve always wanted to do. I had lymphoma as a small child, and in that time a lot of relations read to me, and I learned to associate books and stories with a certain kind of attention and comfort. Books can still lift me into some other place altogether, which is really the point of them, I think.
How have you negotiated the expectations of political engagement that come with being a South African writer?
Critics of my early work took the tone that I was a child of privilege and had the luxury of ignoring where South Africa was at. I remember being very stung by that line of observation, because in some way I knew it was true. The attractions of fiction for me are not just that it illuminates history, but that it can tell you how it feels to be a human being inside history, so it’s a challenge to try to aim the work at the right place.
Do you have a strict writing routine?
I’m hopeless, I’m a mess. I need to reach the stage where I’m sufficiently obsessed that it calls to me first thing and won’t let me go. I do get there, eventually, but it takes a long time, and with a first draft and everything murky – I have the feel of a shape in mud, which I’m trying to pull up – I would rather do almost anything than write. It tends to be very good for household tasks.
I hear you write longhand.
I’ve a bit of a fetish around stationery. I have a particular fountain pen I’ve worked with since I was about 20 – it’s a Parker, tortoiseshell. And then I really like these red notebooks that are standard fare in India. They, for whatever reason, excite my stationery sensibility, so I fill them up with mostly useless beginnings and then occasionally an idea catches fire. It’s only after two entire drafts that I sit down to put it into the computer.
What is the most pleasurable aspect of writing?
Sometimes, you do have the feeling that you’ve opened a door and a story is there, if you can just follow it sentence by sentence, but most of the time, the real pleasure only comes towards the end, when you’re pulling everything together and there’s gathering clarity.
How has being a two-time Booker prize finalist affected your career?
It really did change my prospects in a way that almost nothing else could have done. Having said that, prize lists are problematic in all sorts of ways and there’s such a frenzy surrounding this particular prize that one feels almost guilty benefiting from it. I don’t cope that well with big public events or too much attention, so both shortlistings probably shaved a few years off my life.
Might it be easier third time round?
It’s all a lottery. However, if the lottery favoured me again, I think maybe one does get a bit more thick-skinned and philosophical. The Booker pulls a nasty little trick on you right at the very end: for a few weeks, you’re one of six winners, then all that attention gets sucked away and very, very suddenly, there’s only one winner, the rest of you are losers.
What’s the last really great book you read?
George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo is the last book that really made me feel as if it had lifted me out of my trousers. I just thought it was so unusual and radical in its inspiration. Who would think up a book like that?
Which living writers do you most admire?
I once made a pilgrimage to Cormac McCarthy’s then house in El Paso. It was before All the Pretty Horses struck and he was that un-famous not even the ladies in the El Paso public library knew who he was. I didn’t have the courage to knock on his door. I did fight with myself but I thought, would I rather have the memory of sitting outside Cormac McCarthy’s house or the memory of being chased away from his front door by him?
No comments:
Post a Comment