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In a Strange Room Hardcover – January 1, 2010
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAtlantic Books
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2010
- Dimensions5.71 x 0.75 x 8.78 inches
- ISBN-109781848873223
- ISBN-13978-1848873223
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Product details
- ASIN : 1848873220
- Publisher : Atlantic Books; First Edition (January 1, 2010)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 9781848873223
- ISBN-13 : 978-1848873223
- Item Weight : 11.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.71 x 0.75 x 8.78 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #835,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,793 in Fiction Urban Life
- #8,990 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #40,354 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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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.
The first story, The Follower, describes Damon's meeting in Greece with Reiner, a German on the road trying to decide whether to marry a woman back home. Reiner is dressed all in black, with a black haversack, and is obsessive about his appearance. He is largely silent and has an air of disdain about the world and other people. You know the type: the cool dude with the Hamlet look and attitude. Gullible Damon is infatuated with him and when Reiner later visits Damon in South Africa, they decide to take a long journey on foot in Lesotho. Damon makes the error of not taking any money, so Reiner is in control from the outset. Things begin well but as the trek continues and becomes more arduous, they fall out and Damon returns home. They spot each other twice back in South Africa, but do not speak, then Reiner is never heard of again. I breathed a sigh of relief.
At one point in The Follower, Damon wonders where Reiner gets all his money for travelling, and I was wondering the same thing about Damon, but if he expects others to be revealing, Damon himself is tight lipped.
In The Lover, Damon is adrift in Zimbabwe and joins a group of younger backpackers travelling to Malawi. He enjoys some time with them but eventually tires of their lack of respect for local people and the environment. He finds the poverty in the villages confronting - not that this changes his behaviour at all. He then meets a trio of French-speaking travellers and becomes enamoured with Jerome, even though they have no language in common and are unable to communicate in any meaningful way. All conversation is mediated through another in the group who is able to speak English. At this point I was wondering how stupid Damon could get, but the farce continues as he tries to enter Tanzania without a visa and fails to read the obvious signal from the border guard that he wants a bribe to let Damon through. They continue to Kenya but Damon turns down an offer to go to Europe. He heads home then later visits Switzerland to see Jerome. The reunion is formal and unsatisfactory so Damon leaves, realising perhaps that he is no lover after all.
The third story, The Guardian, sees Damon taking a friend Anna on a trip to India. Anna has serious psychological problems and is on multiple medications - the ideal travelling companion? It seems that the transition to middle age has done nothing to improve Damon's standing in the idiocy stakes. Anna begins behaving badly as soon as they are on the plane and it gets worse as the days rattle along. In India, Anna attempts suicide. Damon doesn't cope well but order is restored by Caroline, an English nurse on an extended stay. They get Anna to some hospitals and she slowly recovers, but the police are on her trail (attempted suicide is a crime in India). With help they manage to get her out of the country. Caroline and Damon are both emotionally drained and Caroline tells Damon about the death of her husband in Morocco some years before, the memory rekindled by Anna's ordeal. Damon continues on his travels, hears that Anna has died back in South Africa, but sticks to the road and avoids her funeral.
There is nothing to like about Damon. It is clear that he travels in order to escape emotional involvement. At times he is described as very lonely and sits weeping to himself. In the final pages he visits the grave of Caroline's husband in Morocco and again is moved to tears, if only for a short time (he has a taxi to catch). You realise he is never really crying for anyone else, only himself and the waste of a life without commitment or depth. He's been a hopeless follower, a blind fool of a lover and a tragic guardian. His tending Anna after her suicide attempt is the only time that Damon appears to show any concern for others, but you get the impression it is driven by panic and managed by Caroline rather than being a wilful choice.
An alternative is possible: at the end of The Lover he looks after a house outside Cape Town belonging to friends who are away. He loses his desire to travel, takes local walks, falls into a routine and feels a degree of contentment. But in the end the inner demons drive him on and you get the feeling that as long as the money is there he will be flitting off here and there, forever detached and unattached.
If you travel a lot you encounter four types on a journey: the tourist, the backpacker, the worker and the traveller. The first three have some purpose to their wanderings and a reasonably clear timeframe. For the traveller it is all about the endless journey. As with Damon, the source of funds is often vague and the anecdotes, at first exotic and attractive, quickly become repetitive and self-serving. Greater wealth and cheap travel have allowed these people to propagate their misery and selfishness in (mainly poor) countries all over the globe.
There is a cruel joke about these lost souls: that the sole purpose of their lives is to act as a warning to others. Damon's life is a bit like that. Do the opposite of most things he does and your life should go reasonably well. At least you'll be human.
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Delle tre storie quella centrale è la più bella e la più sentita. L'Africa come meta di viaggi è descritta in modo magistrale.
La prima è ossessiva e molto amara. La terza per me praticamente illeggibile.
Nel complesso posso dire che per fortuna Galgut è cresciuto artisticamente molto negli anni
But is he really only "passing through"? Galgut's central character, also named Damon, travels widely and extensively: First, we meet him in Greece, then back home in South Africa, from where he embarks on a demanding hiking tour in Lesotho with an enigmatic German he met in Greece. Later his planned short visit to Zimbabwe morphs into a lengthy meandering journey through several East African countries all the way to Kenya. He meets, among others, an intriguing to him, group of three Europeans, and attaches himself to them and they encourage him along, especially one of them... In yet another journey a few years later, he spends several months in India, caught up in a drama that reveals another facet of his character.
From the early pages I was intrigued, initially by the way Galgut writes about landscapes, depicting people...(I have travelled to some of the places) However, it dawned on me very quickly that Damon is nothing like your usual young adventurer who loves discovering new places for their own sake... Instead he is on an ongoing journey, searching for something more profound. What? Companionship, friendship, love, home? Maybe all of these in some way. He is not an easygoing traveller but often rather torn between anxiety and excitement. For him travel is "away" from somewhere not towards a place. "In memory more than anywhere else travelling is like free-fall, or flight."
It is interesting to note as an aside that while the novel is composed of three distinct sections: FOLLOWER, LOVER, GUIDE (they were originally published in a series) the parts are not only linked through Damon's voice and his travel accounts over time. The author applies a highly original technique to bring his protagonist closer to the reader and also closer to himself. He introduces a second, first person voice: Damon looking back on himself with the wisdom of time. The switch between third and first person voice is so subtle and gracefully done that it feels naturally after a short while. It enhanced my own appreciation of the persona that is Damon. Primarily, it allows an intimate recounting of certain experiences, even a dialog between the two: "he murmurs sardonically into his ear, you see where you have landed yourself".
Memory and how it affects Damon becomes both a theme and a tool in the novel. "But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching." Later, In fact, after finishing the novel, I revisited selected passages for further reflection and these brought me to another, deeper, even more profound layer in the story that works its way quietly through the novel and connects scenarios that initially look unconnected. Galgut's novel is at that level a meditation not only on travel, the strange loneliness of the traveller, but about his emotional identity. " Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present." With each travel his relationships to his companion(s) change and their presence leads to him changing also in some way or other. The reader becomes an intimate observer Damon's anxieties and the depth of his conflicting emotions, despite his frequent reluctance or inability to find the right words in which to express himself.
All this has compounded my great appreciation of Galgut's refined exquisite writing. His language is precise and assured, his evocation of the diverse landscapes and its peoples visual and visceral. His understanding of Damon is deep and profoundly explored. While we can follow him as he discovers new places and landscapes, it is evident that his moving from place to place is not his primary motivation but a result of a deeply felt inner unrest.
The book's title "In a strange room..." is taken from a William Faulkner quote. "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were..." For the traveller who changes rooms and beds every night, they feel like "always changing but somehow always the same room". [Friederike Knabe]
Das eine, was mich fasziniert hat, ist die innere Unruhe, die die Hauptperson spürt, und die auch ein gelegentlich auftauchender und für mich omimös gebliebener Ich-Erzähler nicht erklären kann; das andere ist die Abwesenheit von Schönreden; eine dürre Landschaft bleibt einfach öde, oder eine anstrengende Wanderung bringt den Reisenden über sein Limit hinaus; wenn sich eine neue Bekanntschaft nicht viel zu sagen hat, wird die Stille ausgehalten und nicht darüber hinweg geplappert. Viele Sätze sind Perlen, die noch lange glänzen.
Eine Songzeile fällt mir zu diesem Langzeitreisenden ein, ich glaube sie stammt von Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "You, who are on the road, must have a coat, that you can live by ..." Dieses lange Unterwegssein, offen sein, sich auf etwas Unerwartetes einlassen und gleichzeitig seinen eigen Rhythmus finden - das muss jemand erst einmal so intensiv wie hier beschrieben tatsächlich leben können, mit allen Auf's und Ab's, und sich sogar von Katastrophen anderer berühren zu lassen. Nicht ganz trivial.
Wirklich anteilnehmend wird die Hauptperson beim Geschick einer Reisegefährtin, wo er keine Verantwortung übernehmen möchte (und das klar reflektiert), aber gleichzeitig sich der Situation, auch unter großer persönlicher Herausforderung, nicht entzieht.
Ein schönes Buch, das anrührt, das kein Happy-End sucht und auch nicht vorgibt, auf alle Fragen eine Antwort parat zu haben, beispielsweise woher die Unruhe stammt, die ihn über Jahre in die Ferne treibt. Das fehlende Zuhause (wieso schafft er es sich nicht?); die fehlende Fähigkeit, der ausbleibende Entschluss zur Liebe etwa??
Although it's a bit confusing in the beginning as he changes the narrator and uses pronouns as he pleases, one gets used to it quickly. The stories are all rather sad, but you can feel that he lived them all and they're nor made up, nor any cliche wannabe travel guide.










