NUBClub split between mediocre and terrible reviews of this Booker Prize winner. We could see why the book was noticed. Galgut is a good writer who created some great dialogue and clever scenarios, and the people who could stomach the overall style found a number of scenes funny. But all of this was undercut for many of us by the use of perspective. Galgut jumps between the viewpoints of character in the course of the four-part story, but often makes the switch in the middle of a single paragraph or even in two parts of the same sentence. It makes it very hard to follow who you are reading or what is going on. Some of argued that this was purposeful, and reflected the half-built novel that Anton is revealed to have written at the conclusion. We agreed that was a possible take and interesting conceptually, but it didn't make it an interesting or compelling reading experience. More than that, though, the book was extremely predictable. The four part structure organized around deaths in the family made the entire plot obvious, not just in the center of what happened to the family, but what is the real conflict of the story, whether the Swarts will keep their promise to Salome, their Black servant, to give her the property her family resides in. Since it's obvious that Salome won't get the land until the very end of the book, the rest of the book is just about the foibles of the Swart family, which are entertaining in places, but largely a distraction. It just felt like so many things happened in the book that weren't critical or meaningful, and since we didn't like the Swarts siblings, we didn't want to read about them. We realized that the promise to Salome mirrored the 'promise' of a unified South Africa and that the movement through time in the novel was meant to show the way the country's promise to its Black citizens was betrayed every bit as much as the family betrayed its own, but that too was obvious, and so the insights weren't interesting. Galgut is wise enough in his characters to give a good moment at the end where Salome's son calls out Amor, who finally does return the land to Salome (although under the threat of it being repatriated away from all of them, for doing too little too late, but even that is thematically obvious. The idea that the white savior would be challenged didn't feel complex or ambivalent -- it was obvious. And essentially, that's the issue with the novel. It's taking on a compelling and important theme and some of the writing is very good, but the structure is so self-evident from the early pages that the ending lacks any punch and a lot of the novel is just a slog. How much you like this novel depends on how much joy you can get out of the good stuff -- Anton's wit, the funny scenarios -- but none of us would recommend this book as a great work. Try again next year, Man Booker.
