A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way - including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge - he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man's best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his whole life. A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, "In a Strange Room" is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man's search for love, and a place to call home.
In a Strange Room
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. There's a lot of travel in Booker Prize finalist Galgut's (The Good Doctor) new novel, but he's more interested in depicting the randomness, heightened sensitivity, dread, and possibility that come from unfamiliar places than in seeing the sights. A South African man travels in Greece, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, and India, forming the complicated, tenuous relationships that provide the book's three sections titles (Follower; Lover; Guardian). This character, who bears the author's name and seems to share his history, is both "he" and "I." Though these shifts can occur in the space of a sentence, they're surprisingly easy to accept, and attentive readers will get a subtle, frank depiction of some of the problems of writing; "he" seems to be Galgut, but often experiences himself as divided, uncertain, and blurry as a fictional character evading his creator, "I" often steps in to remind us of the limits of memory and the artificiality of genre distinctions. At its best Galgut's tale has the feel of arriving in a destination you'd never planned to go. It's not always pleasant, but it's strangely fascinating.
--This text refers to the
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Review
"The most intense and passionate novel to date from Man Booker-shortlisted author Damon Galgut: 'the bold, fresh voice of South African fiction' (Observer). 'This is a novel about a country's transition and its moral effects, and it is absolutely brilliant.' The Times 'A great pleasure... Damon Galgut's book is the best I have read to come out of the new South Africa.' Allan Massie, Scotsman 'Outstanding... [Galgut is] a major writer worthy to be referred to as a kindred spirit of the great Coetzee... The Impostor, with its bleak balancing of boyhood hopes and adult regret, is a great novel.' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times"
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44 of 47 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
In a Strange Room is a curious book to describe. It could well be described as both a novel or three stories/novellas. The narrator is the same throughout the stories, and they're heavily connected through theme. None of the other characters or events transcend their sections, but it still felt like a novel to me. Regardless of its structural semantics, it's ultimately the tale of a South African man who travels the world (Africa, Europe and India) forming bonds with his fellow wanderers.
Galgut's writing captured me from the beginning of this novel. When he writes dialogue, he doesn't use quotation marks. Instead, he adds a blank line in between each speaker. He doesn't use question marks either, which brings a poignancy and nuance to many of the conversational statements that can work as both questions and statements. Using quotation marks and question marks yields fewer meanings, but Galgut avoids them and creates a concise prose with the beautiful vagueness of poetry. He often uses commas to string together multiple sentences. His commandeering of punctuation was as mesmerizing as the musings of his characters:
"Myth always has some fact in it. And what is the face here. I don't know, this place exists, for a long time people thoughts it didn't, that's a fact to start with."
Galgut seems to play with the reader too. The narrator jumps between first-person and third-person and offers glimpses of the future. Initially, I couldn't tell if the narrator was the main character. Galgut revealed it by jumping between first and third-person narrative within the same sentence, a trick he used several times. This switching alters the story in its own way as well. The reader and the narrator feel closer to the story at some times than others. Galgut's prose seems simple and straightforward, but he packs a remarkable amount of punch into it. Some statements even extend beyond double entendres: "This seems to mean one thing, but may mean another."
As much as I enjoyed Galgut's use of language and beautiful characterizations of people, the musings of a frequent traveler shined for me the most:
"He watches, but what he sees isn't real to him. Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through. Maybe horror is felt more easily from home. This is both a redemption and an affliction, he doesn't carry any abstract moral burdens but their absence is represented for him by the succession of flyblown and featureless rooms he sleeps in, night after night, always changing but somehow always the same room."
"Something in him has changed, he can't seem to connect properly with the world. He feels this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in himself, he would like to change it but doesn't know how. In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much. In this state travel isn't celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself. He moves around from one place to another, not driven by curiosity but by the bored anguish of staying still."
Traveling and the modern nomadic lifestyle are themes that resonate strongly with me. I'm one who is fascinated by the stories of those anonymous faces who pass by me and wonders if their presence is relevant to my life and vice versa. Galgut has a much more poetic take on those whose paths cross ours: "Or perhaps he wants to see it like this, it's only human, after all, to look for a hint of destiny where love or longing is concerned."
Part of my appreciation of this book was seeing world travel through eyes so different than mine and reading it filtered through a character I don't think I would like to travel with. It was a curious dichotomy. I was fascinated by this actions and ideas, but I had no desire to actually engage in a conversation with this fictional character. Ultimately, I found myself raving intellectually more than emotionally about this book. I loved Galgut's writing, and I liked the story, but there was an emotional connection missing for me. I happen to believe that is Galgut's intent to illustrate the narrator's lack of emotional connection with people and places. Even this idea of intention makes me appreciate the writing more. For me to fully, emotionally engage as a reader, I need a connection. I'm a nomadic traveler who finds connections to people and places everywhere. I wander for joy.
Although it read like a novel to me, I was far more engaged during the first two sections. I was not terribly enchanted with the third section, which has me pondering if the order of these fractured stories matters. The journey of reading a novel is sometimes difficult as one who chronicles her thoughts on books. I find myself writing reviews in my head while I read, but I also often find my mind changing as the book goes on. Ultimately, my disaffection with the third section didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the book as a whole, but it did somewhat underwhelm.
Galgut's writing captured me from the beginning of this novel. When he writes dialogue, he doesn't use quotation marks. Instead, he adds a blank line in between each speaker. He doesn't use question marks either, which brings a poignancy and nuance to many of the conversational statements that can work as both questions and statements. Using quotation marks and question marks yields fewer meanings, but Galgut avoids them and creates a concise prose with the beautiful vagueness of poetry. He often uses commas to string together multiple sentences. His commandeering of punctuation was as mesmerizing as the musings of his characters:
"Myth always has some fact in it. And what is the face here. I don't know, this place exists, for a long time people thoughts it didn't, that's a fact to start with."
Galgut seems to play with the reader too. The narrator jumps between first-person and third-person and offers glimpses of the future. Initially, I couldn't tell if the narrator was the main character. Galgut revealed it by jumping between first and third-person narrative within the same sentence, a trick he used several times. This switching alters the story in its own way as well. The reader and the narrator feel closer to the story at some times than others. Galgut's prose seems simple and straightforward, but he packs a remarkable amount of punch into it. Some statements even extend beyond double entendres: "This seems to mean one thing, but may mean another."
As much as I enjoyed Galgut's use of language and beautiful characterizations of people, the musings of a frequent traveler shined for me the most:
"He watches, but what he sees isn't real to him. Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through. Maybe horror is felt more easily from home. This is both a redemption and an affliction, he doesn't carry any abstract moral burdens but their absence is represented for him by the succession of flyblown and featureless rooms he sleeps in, night after night, always changing but somehow always the same room."
"Something in him has changed, he can't seem to connect properly with the world. He feels this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in himself, he would like to change it but doesn't know how. In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much. In this state travel isn't celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself. He moves around from one place to another, not driven by curiosity but by the bored anguish of staying still."
Traveling and the modern nomadic lifestyle are themes that resonate strongly with me. I'm one who is fascinated by the stories of those anonymous faces who pass by me and wonders if their presence is relevant to my life and vice versa. Galgut has a much more poetic take on those whose paths cross ours: "Or perhaps he wants to see it like this, it's only human, after all, to look for a hint of destiny where love or longing is concerned."
Part of my appreciation of this book was seeing world travel through eyes so different than mine and reading it filtered through a character I don't think I would like to travel with. It was a curious dichotomy. I was fascinated by this actions and ideas, but I had no desire to actually engage in a conversation with this fictional character. Ultimately, I found myself raving intellectually more than emotionally about this book. I loved Galgut's writing, and I liked the story, but there was an emotional connection missing for me. I happen to believe that is Galgut's intent to illustrate the narrator's lack of emotional connection with people and places. Even this idea of intention makes me appreciate the writing more. For me to fully, emotionally engage as a reader, I need a connection. I'm a nomadic traveler who finds connections to people and places everywhere. I wander for joy.
Although it read like a novel to me, I was far more engaged during the first two sections. I was not terribly enchanted with the third section, which has me pondering if the order of these fractured stories matters. The journey of reading a novel is sometimes difficult as one who chronicles her thoughts on books. I find myself writing reviews in my head while I read, but I also often find my mind changing as the book goes on. Ultimately, my disaffection with the third section didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the book as a whole, but it did somewhat underwhelm.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
By a reader
Format:Hardcover
You will know whether you like this book or not within about 5 pages. I read it because it's on the Man Booker longlist, and I'm glad I persevered, though it is way outside my comfort zone. It's a stripped-down narrative told in first- and third-person (and sometimes even second), often within the same sentence: "he" becomes "I" and can occasionally even be the all-encompassing "you." And this main character is named Damon, like the author.
If you can get past that, it actually pays off. We follow Damon, a South African from Capetown, through 3 widely-spaced journeys -- Greece, Africa, and India -- and get the impression that the time between these journeys is also spent traveling, continuously pulling up stakes, putting things in storage, bunking with friends, etc. You just have to put aside thoughts of how this man manages to make a living (trust fund?), what inspired him to travel in the first place, whether or not he's ever had a romantic relationship, and how he manages to have friends everywhere despite demonstrating real problems making human connections. In fact, this last issue you can't put aside. It's probably the heart of the entire novel, though I notice that other reviewers have focused on other issues.
In the first of the 3 sections, he becomes the traveling companion of a ghastly German named Reiner. There are vague sexual overtones to initiate the relationship, but these quickly give way to Reiner's competitive and controlling nature, which eventually drive the narrator to part company with him on a remote mountain in Africa. In the second section, he teams up with a group of 3 Europeans (one Frenchman and a set of Swiss twins) and again has intimations of a connection with Jerome, one of the twins, which leads him to agonize over visiting them and renewing the connection. And in the third section, he undertakes a foolhardy trip to India with a psychotic friend just out of a mental clinic who has no intention of taking her meds, restricting her intake of alcohol and drugs, or otherwise making life bearable for her traveling companion. Hilarity does NOT ensue.
That's the bare-bones outline. But even though Damon is always traveling, anyone looking for local color or even the sense of the process of crossing borders and living on the road will be disappointed. The heart of the novel lies elsewhere, in the absence of Damon's sense of self. (Ah! A reason for those constantly shifting pronouns!) He knows he can't make the connections he wants to, or that, having made them, he can't follow through or keep the intimacy of the moment for any length of time at all. You wonder if he's traveling to find this ability, or to avoid having to deal with the built-in intimacy of routine. The people he DOES make contact with are either repellent (Reiner), unable to communicate (Jerome, whose English is weak and whose nature is shy), or deeply disturbed in ways that make spending any length of time together almost unbearable (Anna, off her meds). He stymies himself at every turn, and ends up -- where?
This novel is thought-provoking and has, despite its playing around with form and narrative a bit, an air of honesty, as if events couldn't have happened any other way. For these reasons alone, it's refreshing and worth reading.
If you can get past that, it actually pays off. We follow Damon, a South African from Capetown, through 3 widely-spaced journeys -- Greece, Africa, and India -- and get the impression that the time between these journeys is also spent traveling, continuously pulling up stakes, putting things in storage, bunking with friends, etc. You just have to put aside thoughts of how this man manages to make a living (trust fund?), what inspired him to travel in the first place, whether or not he's ever had a romantic relationship, and how he manages to have friends everywhere despite demonstrating real problems making human connections. In fact, this last issue you can't put aside. It's probably the heart of the entire novel, though I notice that other reviewers have focused on other issues.
In the first of the 3 sections, he becomes the traveling companion of a ghastly German named Reiner. There are vague sexual overtones to initiate the relationship, but these quickly give way to Reiner's competitive and controlling nature, which eventually drive the narrator to part company with him on a remote mountain in Africa. In the second section, he teams up with a group of 3 Europeans (one Frenchman and a set of Swiss twins) and again has intimations of a connection with Jerome, one of the twins, which leads him to agonize over visiting them and renewing the connection. And in the third section, he undertakes a foolhardy trip to India with a psychotic friend just out of a mental clinic who has no intention of taking her meds, restricting her intake of alcohol and drugs, or otherwise making life bearable for her traveling companion. Hilarity does NOT ensue.
That's the bare-bones outline. But even though Damon is always traveling, anyone looking for local color or even the sense of the process of crossing borders and living on the road will be disappointed. The heart of the novel lies elsewhere, in the absence of Damon's sense of self. (Ah! A reason for those constantly shifting pronouns!) He knows he can't make the connections he wants to, or that, having made them, he can't follow through or keep the intimacy of the moment for any length of time at all. You wonder if he's traveling to find this ability, or to avoid having to deal with the built-in intimacy of routine. The people he DOES make contact with are either repellent (Reiner), unable to communicate (Jerome, whose English is weak and whose nature is shy), or deeply disturbed in ways that make spending any length of time together almost unbearable (Anna, off her meds). He stymies himself at every turn, and ends up -- where?
This novel is thought-provoking and has, despite its playing around with form and narrative a bit, an air of honesty, as if events couldn't have happened any other way. For these reasons alone, it's refreshing and worth reading.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
"In a Strange Room," by the South African writer Damon Galgut, appears on this year's (2010) Man Booker long list and is a very interesting novel--actually three novellas, each chronicling a journey and each also chronicling a failed human relationship. The narrator, who leaves his home in Capetown to wander from place to place for reasons he can scarcely articulate, usually speaks in the third person, but at times the novel shifts to first person as he moves out of each story to reflect on its meaning. Has experience made the first person speaker wiser or happier? It is impossible to say.
Each story is quite different. The first, set in Greece and Lesotho, involves the narrator's attraction to a self-contained German man who is seemingly able to live happily without forming deep ties with others. The second, set in Africa and in Europe, is about a longing between the narrator and another man, neither of whom can articulate his feelings. The third, set mostly in India, examines the relationship between the narrator and a female friend whose mental illness reconfigures their relationship.
The narration in this novel is spare; there is just enough detail to establish a setting. Galgut also uses only a comma (instead of a semi-colon) to link together related clauses, and the effect is almost like a stutter. It helps to establish the traveler's inability to articulate his deepest feelings and thoughts to others; he is able only to commit them to paper and ink. With the reader (also a kind of traveler), the narrator establishes the sympathy and connection that he cannot find in his travels in life.
M. Feldman
Each story is quite different. The first, set in Greece and Lesotho, involves the narrator's attraction to a self-contained German man who is seemingly able to live happily without forming deep ties with others. The second, set in Africa and in Europe, is about a longing between the narrator and another man, neither of whom can articulate his feelings. The third, set mostly in India, examines the relationship between the narrator and a female friend whose mental illness reconfigures their relationship.
The narration in this novel is spare; there is just enough detail to establish a setting. Galgut also uses only a comma (instead of a semi-colon) to link together related clauses, and the effect is almost like a stutter. It helps to establish the traveler's inability to articulate his deepest feelings and thoughts to others; he is able only to commit them to paper and ink. With the reader (also a kind of traveler), the narrator establishes the sympathy and connection that he cannot find in his travels in life.
M. Feldman
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The strange room in a strange place called Life
This is a quietly bleak, haunting journey, which snags and ellipses its themes. The book is a spider's web, easily trapping the reader by its simple, pared back prose. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Lady Fancifull
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very satisfying, though emotionally intense, book!
Damon Galgut has written a book that, for me, was a very hard one to read. This is not because of his writing style, rather because of the frequency with which I found myself... Read more
Published 4 months ago by A. Berke
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Strange story in a Strange room
It was chosen by my book club. I only got to 50% and could not read any further. The style was monotonous except for a few excellent descriptions of the scenery. Read more
Published 5 months ago by John A. Carver
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding
Probably the best book I've read this year, a story of queer (but not sexual) relationships that develop while traveling. Almost everything in it is vivid and compelling. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Deranged Reader
4.0 out of 5 stars
A sometimes irritating but ultimately beautifully written novel about...
At the November 2012 meeting, the Book Discussion Group met at The LGBT Center in NYC to discuss this three-part novel by Galgut. Read more
Published 6 months ago by HWilliams
3.0 out of 5 stars
An unlikeable character, but a good read
In this autobiographical novel, Damon recollects three journeys in a life of travelling. The first two are in his youth and the last in middle age. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Acorn
4.0 out of 5 stars
There is a moment when any journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you...
Damon, the narrator of Damon Galgut's beautiful yet spare In a Strange Room, can't seem to settle down. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Larry Hoffer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous - should have won last year's Booker prize
Damon Galgut's "In A Strange Room (IASR)" is simply fabulous - strange, stark, spare and a rare thing of beauty. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Reader from Singapore
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange relatioships too
We read this book in our book club and there were a few who really liked it, a few who were neutral, and one member of the club who didn't like it at all. Read more
Published 20 months ago by C. B Collins Jr.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A strange book
Loved this book although I found the first and third person changes a bit difficult to start with. Certainly i couldn't put the book down and would recommend it.
Published 23 months ago by Soozie3201
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