Customer Reviews

Impostor

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When one thinks things can't get any worse, they do. "The Impostor" is a story set in modern South Africa, telling of Adam. Losing his job and his home, he tries to start anew in a beat down shack on the edge of town. An old childhood acquaintance soon appears, Canning, who has the exact opposite of Adam's luck. The ensuing story between the two will alter the course of both of their lives forever. "The Impostor" is a thoroughly entertaining story, a strong choice for personal fiction collections.

This book was received through minibookexpo.com

"The Impostor" is the story of Adam Napier, a lost soul who was recently fired and forced to leave his house. He takes residence in a country house that his brother purchased years earlier but has since been vacant. He seeks to reconnect with his inner poet, and spends much of his time alone in the quiet community in a rural part of South Africa. After a chance encounter with a childhood acquaintance named Canning, Adam's quiet existence begins to take on new meaning. It does not take long however, for Adam's involvement with Canning and his wife Baby, to become complicated and dangerous.

It comes as no surprise to me that Damon Galgut has received much recognition and praise for his writing, as his words and imagery were incredibly powerful throughout the novel. I felt Adam's intense loneliness, as if it were a tangible presence, with the turn of every page. That is exactly why I have contradictory feelings about this book. On the one hand, Galgut's writing transported me into the novel and I couldn't help but read on to see how he would continue to convey such raw emotion. And yet, it is those same beautiful that left me with a gloomy feeling that was hard to shake.

It's not that I only like books with happy endings or light material, but the bleakness of this book was striking. In that respect, saying that I enjoyed reading the book would be incorrect. Rather, I was in awe of the beauty of the writing and just how much I internalized Adam's conflicts. I recommend this book because it is wonderfully written, even though the writing itself evokes some difficult emotions.

http://bookopolis.blogspot.com

Adam Napier is a white man in his mid-forties in post-apartheid South Africa. He had been replaced in his job in Johannesburg by a young black man. The part of town in which he had lived had deteriorated badly: he could neither sell or rent out his house to pay his debts, and the bank took his house and most of his possessions. He didn't want to work for his younger brother Gavin, a property tycoon whose prosperity was based on what Adam considered unethical practices; instead he took up Gavin's offer of a derelict house Gavin owned just outside a tiny dorp on the arid Karoo eight hours drive out of Johannesburg. There is just one other house next to his, inhabited by a mysterious man he thinks of as the Blue Man on account of the blue overalls he always wears. On the strength of a volume of lyrical poetry about the grassy bushveldt he had had published twenty years earlier, Adam thought he would write poetry about the wide open spaces. But inspiration would not come. Loneliness, depression and inertia set in.

Then, in a parking lot, he is accosted by Kenneth Canning, an old fellow pupil who remembers him warmly, but whom Adam does not remember at all, though he is too embarrassed to say so. He now becomes involved with Canning's life and that of his mysterious black wife, in a bizarre setting that could not be more different from where Adam has just come from. Adam accepts the friendship and hospitality offered by the wealthy but seedy and rather pathetic Canning; he loves the setting, is fascinated by Canning's wife, and spends every weekend there. It liberates his poetic imagination.

Then Canning tells him of plans which Adam regards as a betrayal; and soon Adam is pulled into his own betrayal. The plot thickens into complexities; the sense of danger grows and envelops them all. And then it is a question of "sauve qui peut", and they all have a different answer to this, depending on their moral character.

There is, initially as a background note but more and more insistently as the book progresses, the new South Africa, where some people, both black and white, are becoming very rich and very corrupt, while other blacks still live in their old servitude, and where some whites who have committed atrocities during the apartheid period have tried to change their identities and are in fear of their lives.

The book is beautifully written and totally gripping, the prose simple but expressive. One can see that when Galgut writes about poetry, he knows what he is talking about. Though this is in no way a ghost story, there hangs about it at times, especially in the first half, an air of mystery, of something slightly supernatural, which Adam perceives on the edge of things. And the book will certainly haunt this reader.

This book is effective in evoking the slow-moving, hot landscape of the karoo, and pushes various ideas regarding alienation and human interaction that seem to be recurrent themes in modern South African literature. It had some things in common with Coetzee's writing: a passivity that many readers might consider boring. However, I found it very engaging almost despite myself, and read it over the course of a day. Those who can tolerate Gabriel Garcia Marquez might find this an interesting window onto a very unfamiliar landscape.

This is one of those books that a reader might fail to appreciate while working through it. However, the story (a young man seeking to find himself in the remotest part of South Africa) and the images Galgut draws will stay with a reader for a long time. There was something so quietly "off" about the world the author creates that I have not stopped thinking about the book since finishing it.