The Quarry [Paperback]

Damon Galgut (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2004

Damon Galgut established himself as a writer of international caliber with the publication of The Good Doctor, which was sold in sixteen countries and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the African region. The Quarry, written ten years ago but never published outside of South Africa, is another stark, intense, and crystalline novel in which human nature betrays itself against the desolate backdrop of rural South Africa. On a lonely stretch of road a man picks up a hitchhiker. The driver is a minister on his way to a new rural congregation; the passenger is a fugitive. When the minister realizes this, the fugitive kills him. He assumes his vestments and identity, only to discover that one of his first duties as the new minister is to preside over his victim's funeral. As the fugitive and the local police chief play a tense game of cat and mouse, culminating in a pursuit across the desolate veldt, Damon Galgut gives us a spare, devastating combat for man's most prized attribute: freedom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a bleak morality tale about a fugitive from justice, Galgut (The Good Doctor) again demonstrates his flair for charting the vicissitudes of human despair in modern-day South Africa. After the unnamed, near-starving protagonist is picked up by a minister traveling to his next church post, he repays the holy man's generosity by murdering him. The desperado quietly slips into the minister's role and tries to assimilate into mainstream society, but his misdeeds continue to dog his every move. If Galgut's concise prose is nearly leached of emotion, it certainly sets the scene: "There was a film of dust on everything in the car as though it had been standing there for years. He stared ahead through the windscreen. There were the corpses of beetles shattered on the glass and their legs and feelers were composed in attitudes of violent expiry." With increasingly stomach-tightening intensity, Galgut chronicles his troubled protagonist's struggles to evade capture under the ever-watchful eye of the authorities in his new town. The suspenseful narrative never strays from the dreary force of its understated character development ("He reached out with his filthy, his bloody hands and began to eat without looking at them"). As the story builds to a climax, Galgut heightens the book's emotional power with tense one-page chapters until justice—cosmic justice, in this case—comes to call.
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From Booklist

The quarry is a place and a person, a pit and a fugitive, in this spare, intense story of rural South Africa. And the fugitive is murderer, victim, accused, minister, policeman, and judge. They all change roles, each one becomes the other, or seems to. In each stark vignette, it takes a few sentences to know whom he refers to, and it is easy to make a mistake. But that is the point. There is lots of action, including murders, a church fire, a court drama, a circus act, even an eclipse in the universe. But what holds the reader are the faint silhouettes on the road. As in Galgut's The Good Doctor (2003), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, his clear, elemental prose is never generic. First published in South Africa 10 years ago, this story is rooted in the veldt. But the fugitive who sits on the rocks "as if waiting for something" could be anywhere on the edge. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat; 1st edition (December 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141617
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141613
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The hearts and minds of South Africans haven't changed, April 12, 2006

By 

HORAK (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Quarry (Paperback)

In this stunning novel, Mr Galgut tells the story of a fugitive from justice hitchhiking in the desolate backdrop of South Africa and who is picked up by a driver, a minister on his way to a remote parish. When the minister discovers that the hitchhiker is a fugitive and confronts him in a disused quarry, the response is lethal.
This novel is a masterpiece featuring a story and characters utterly compelling. The author shows that even the quietest spots on earth can seethe with repressed violence. A blunt and tense read about guilt and evasion of truth. Justly enough, Mr Galgut has been compared to the greatest South African writers like Andr? Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great stuff - Good Doctor with pace, December 2, 2006

By 

wbjonesjr1 (São Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Quarry (Paperback)

I had read The Good Doctor and enjoyed it plenty for great characters, great writing and a slow-building, relentless tension. The Quarry has the same great characterization and prose, but nothing at all slow about it. The beginning of the story is enthralling, both the introduction to the main character and the first incident at the quarry (best not read liner notes etc more max effect). What continues seems a combination of Greene's "Power and Glory" (in terms of "feel") and Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" (in terms of suspense and pace). A fantastic aspect is the power of the not explicitly stated (e.g. main character's real name never revealed, ). And the construction and build-up to the denoument is something Tolstoy - like. The Quarry is clearly another example of the spectacular literature of South Africa.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stark, uncompromising narrative Post Apartheid South Africa, March 31, 2011

By 

Kiwifunlad (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Quarry (Paperback)

This book is written by Damon Galgut and not what is showing up on Amazon. Published in 1995, I enjoyed this novel far more than Coetzee's Disgrace which I found misogynistic and very much written by a white South African with little sensitivity to the changing South Africa. The Quarry follows the life of a nameless white man on the run from the law who is walking Northwards on an unspecified and largely unpopulated part of South Africa's western coast. He meets a black minister who the man without premeditation kills when the minister tries to grope him. The man then takes over the minister's identity since the minister had been travelling to start a new job as a missionary in a small town. The quarry is just outside this town and this is where the minister is buried. This short novel follows the man's descent into a dark harrowing abyss, mirrored by the two black brothers, Valentine and Small, who rob his car of all the minister's possession on his first night in the town. Galgut's policeman character is especially intriguing from the policeman's obsession with his red motorbike to his handling of the theft and murder. This finely written novel explores identity, law and religion in a South Africa without any specific time or political reference.