The Persistence of Memory: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tony Eprile (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004

"I WAS ENTHRALLED by [Tony Eprile's] gorgeous prose, his genius for transforming pain into art, and not least, by the fiercely comic gift of his unforgettable, and unforgetting, narrator," writes Margot Livesey about this long-awaited first novel. Eprile fuses a searing political and cultural satire with a haunting coming-of-age story to render South Africa's turbulent past with striking clarity. Paul Sweetbread--cursed with a perfect memory in a country where amnesia is endemic--reflects on his traumatic past: a doting mother plucked from a Chekhov play, authoritarian schoolteachers who spouted the government's version of history, and the violence lurking beneath the civilized Jewish world of Johannesburg in the twilight of apartheid. As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion. Sweetbread, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with astonishing results.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A South African man with an inconvenient near-photographic memory is the protagonist of this gently satirical novel chronicling the injustices of the secret 1980s wars in Namibia and Angola. As a boy, Paul Sweetbread is fat and sensitive, the Jewish son of an exterminator father and temperamental mother. After doing poorly at his local university, Paul enlists in the army. Although he has all manner of comrades, from the scholarly and cynical Roelof to his cocky and demanding semimentor Captain Lyddie, Paul's corpulence often makes him the butt of jokes. He eventually becomes part of an army filming crew, capturing several scandalously violent battle episodes on film. Paul's version of the events he witnesses—most notably the unnecessary massacre of a group of homeward-bound soldiers after a cease-fire has been decreed—is called into question at a trial before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where a psychiatrist from Paul's childhood cartoonishly appears to pronounce his old patient unstable, and Captain Lyddie, too, stands against him. But Paul is a survivor, and he bobs up again, finally embarking on a civilian life that promises to be more placid. Eprile sometimes gets carried away on the tide of his acrobatic, erudite prose, but this is a clever, bitingly human bildungsroman.
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From Booklist

Growing up white in the Johannesburg suburbs, Paul Sweetbread knows he is a typical liberal bystander who hates the apartheid atrocity but does nothing. He's busy with his own bildungsroman, and his wry narrative is as hilarious and anguished about himself as a fat Jewish sissy failure as he is about the political absurdity and racist monstrosity in public life. His period of army basic training in Namibia on the Angolan border comes close to farce--until the bumbling recruit not only witnesses a massacre but also unwittingly takes part in the killings. American readers may not get all the jokes, but the strangeness of bigotry, both crude and paternalistic, is universal, and Eprile's sly footnotes give context and history, including the fact that the U.S. was secretly involved in that border war. The riveting climax of the story is Paul's testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Is he just suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as his commander says? Is the revelation of horror "healing"? Does memory do more harm than good? Readers won't forget. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393058883
• ISBN-13: 978-0393058888
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,231,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow., July 9, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Persistence of Memory: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tony Eprile has constructed an impressive novel of a changing South Africa that is both warm and bitingly funny, even as it exposes a heart - and a country - torn to shreds. Narrator Paul is a Jew, neither Afrikaner nor Englishman, whose love for food and unblinking memory makes him the butt of schoolyard jokes from students and teachers alike. When he is later sent into Namibia to a war his homeland doesn't officially recognize, he finds that he is as much a misfit there as he was in school, although here the stakes are much higher. What Paul sees, for he can never forget the smallest details of anything, stays within him, tormenting him, crippling him, but never destroying his lugubrious sense of humor.

What marks this novel as an exceptional literary work is not its plot, or even its lovable protagonist, but the detail and wit the author uses to dismantle the many facets of a complicated country. Through Paul's story, Eprile shows the changing political climate, the ethnic divisions (not only between blacks and whites), the suburbs and cities, the schools, the national consciousness, and the tensions that continue to exist despite an eventual end to apartheid. Although Eprile occasionally gets carried away with his often complicated prose, it's usually for comic effect, as in this description of a fly: "It sits in my palm, this winged myrmidon that was around to torment the first land mammals scurrying to avoid the attention of the giant saurians, rubbing its hands together like a surgeon scrubbing up."

This novel, a debut after a collection of stories, is a compelling, sharp portrait of a nation as seen through the eyes of a misfit. Eprile manages to pull off his prose pyrotechnics without sacrificing an honest, emotional engagement with his subject matter. I cannot find enough superlatives to describe this wonderful novel, one of the best I've read this year.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cautionary and Prophetic Novel for South Africa, October 12, 2004

By 

Daniel J. Baxter "AIDS Physician" (Botswana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Persistence of Memory: A Novel (Hardcover)

Why is Tony Eprile's powerful and highly literary novel about his growing up in apartheid South Africa nowhere to be found in the popular chain bookstores in the prosperous shopping malls in Johannesburg and Cape Town? Probably for the same reason that most white South Africans, save the unrehabilitated right-wing Africaners, deny having anything to do with the horrors of Apartheid. Raising the unpleasantness of the inhumanities of this state-sponsored policy at a dinner party in South Africa is considered poor taste, much as discussion of the camps was eschewed by polite German society of the 1950's and 1960's. The past is just that, so reason so many white South Africans, who drive their Mercedes and BMW's past vast squatter shanty towns bordering the verdant suburbs, where affluent, largely white communities appear to thrive amid the sea of need that contains so many of the country's black citizens. In one such Cape Town suburb an office of Sotheby's International Real Estate is located directly across the road from a particularly miserable shanty town. "Memory is itself a subversive act," writes Eprile, and the absence of memory destines so many whites in South Africa to luxurate in total denial of the active volcano they live atop. The future of South Africa is a matter of great importance, if only for the great human suffering which would occur if the country were to implode as Zimbabwe has. Tony Eprile's novel would merit serious attention for its articulate, literary style alone. But as a cautionary and prophetic view of South Africa's past and future, it is a mirror for anyone who cares about injustice and its peaceful resolution, both in Africa and in western countries which are still struggling with racism and the inhumanities thereof.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "What will become of us all?", January 4, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Persistence of Memory: A Novel (Hardcover)

South Africa from 1968 - 2000 is revealed in all its cultural variety and internal stresses through the life story of Paul Sweetbread, an overweight Jewish boy who is an outsider to everyone. Neither a Boer nor an Englishman, he is also not really a Jew, since his family has never been observant, leaving him without any common roots that connect him to his Caucasian countrymen. A person with a photographic memory, he is, from the outset, a victim of his memory. Because he can quote from his schoolbooks exactly, teachers think he cheats; his fellow students torment him.

As he sets the scene and creates a fully drawn personality for Paul, the author recreates his early school and home life, his relationships with black servants, and his family history, including the death of his father. The action intensifies when Paul, having finished school in 1987, joins the South African Defense Force for two years, instead of going to college. South Africa is nervously protecting its borders against what it believes are communist insurgents, while also facing threats from within. Apartheid has been challenged, the British and Boers are at odds, and African nationalism is growing.

Paul's wartime experiences, recreated in stunning detail, further develop his character as he observes Captain Lyddie, "The perfect specimen of South African manhood," engaging in racial brutality, described in passages of great power which embed themselves in Paul's perfect memory and in the reader's. The battle for survival of South Africa and the changes which will be necessary as the country changes from white to black rule are ever at the forefront of the novel. Paul's empathy for the Bushmen, whom the SADF uses as trackers, is palpable, while his fear, engendered during a photo assignment in a black township, reflects his awareness of the dangers from within.

Thoughtful and challenging but filled with wry humor, Eprile's novel presents events from Paul Sweetbread's life slowly, sometimes deliberately omitting important information in order to maintain suspense and let the reader come to know Paul through his life and actions, rather than through background information. He creates a sympathetic picture of an extremely sensitive young man who finds himself in impossible situations which mark him for life. His philosophical musings near the end of the book about memory and metaphor raise important questions about society and national "memory," how a country constructs its memories of the past in order to make it acceptable, and careful readers will savor the language and sheer intelligence of Eprile's observations. Mary Whipple