the South African writer Tony Eprile published his debut novel The Persistence of Memory, a fine piece of writing concerning one man’s recollections of the “slippery and disputed history” of his country.
The Impostor, Damon Galgut’s sixth novel, suggests that a person’s own history can be similarly disputed and slippery. It tells the story of Adam, who moves to a deserted rural house to escape “unfortunate circumstances” (”First he’d lost his job and then he’d lost his house”) and try to become a poet.
He meets an old schoolfriend called Canning, whom he doesn’t remember, but who remembers him with a fondness that borders on obsession. Canning is corruptly planning to convert his recently inherited land into a golfing resort and manages to entangle Adam in his schemes and drive him into a liaison with his wife Baby.
Even Adam comes to recognise that his attempt to become a poet “had been a case of mistaken identity”. The triumph of the novel is that Galgut is able to sustain interest in a credible narrative, in which “trust” is no more than an “unfortunate word”.
He does it initially by asking the reader to trust in the physical world he is describing. Perhaps the novel’s central conceit is that the past is given shape in the land itself: geography as history, as it were.
debut novel,fondness,Novel
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