First of all, it should be said that the "promise" of the South African writer Damon Galgut is an excellent book in terms of contemporary world literature.
It is not for nothing that he won the prestigious Booker Prize, and received a long line of rave reviews.
Galgot is a very experienced and reputable writer, and he does demonstrate spectacular technical ability: he manages to balance the bitter morbidity of the story with energetic and vital writing, to engage in death without venting depression, to engage in the bloody politics of South Africa without risking actual politics, to be gloomy yet readable And fun, and on top of all that - he also got an excellent translation by Michal Alfon.
But his ability to bridge the gap between the story itself, which has so much death and despair in it, and the lightness and distance with which it is read - is also linked in my eyes to some ill-fated ills in world literature's expectations of writing about disaster-stricken areas like South Africa.
The book describes the experiences of the white Swart family, who have lived on a farm near Pretoria, for three decades - since 1986, a few years before the end of apartheid.
Immediately upon opening, with the death of the mother of the family from a serious illness, comes the promise that she will pursue the entire book: on her deathbed the father assures his wife that he will fulfill her request that the black maid - the one who nursed the mother throughout her illness - Where she lives, on the edge of the farm area.
It is a small house with no economic value, but after the mother dies it turns out that the father, or the rest of the family, has no intention of keeping the promise.
There is no clear or convincing reason for refusing to keep the promise - after all, the maid lives in the dilapidated house anyway, and no one else needs it.
The refusal to fulfill the promise simply rests on racism - or a lack of motivation to correct it, and change the state of affairs that keeps blacks in a constant position of inferiority.
In the opening of the book, as stated in the period before the abolition of apartheid, racism is overt and self-evident: it is obvious that land cannot be transferred to black ownership, and that is also against the law.
But in the following decades the laws change, apartheid is abolished, and racism becomes more covert.
However, it is still arbitrary and fulfilling, and the refusal to keep the promise remains.
White racism appears here as sweeping, deep and indelible.
Even the characters who are able to occasionally discover other, more sensitive aspects of their attitude toward blacks and their fate - eventually show indifference, at the very least, to the continued denial of rights to blacks.
Even the eldest son of the family's three children, who at the beginning of the book, at the end of the apartheid era, is still tormented by killing a black woman in his military service in the riots in the black town of Katalhong (while those around him do not understand the great excitement). Continue the division of property on the farm as it is.
Galgut is not content with racism.
His white characters commit many other sins: they commit adultery, waste, lie, cheat, abuse;
Some are also anti-Semitic.
The South African equivalent of BBQ, the "healthy", appears here several times as a symbol of the opacity, waste and cruelty that characterize the lives of whites, who consume enormous amounts of bleeding flesh, while calling out to each other: "Take meat, come join all sinners!".
At the behest of this sin-slayer, Galgut lands a series of disasters on the heads of his characters.
The book moves from funeral to funeral, and as long as they are not dead, the characters are doomed to severe torment: illness, drunkenness, humiliation, failures, a life devoid of love, disconnection.
Galgut did not spare the white family he describes.
Of all of them, the only one who reveals a human face and accordingly also suffers a slightly different fate is the youngest of the three children, Amor, who witnessed the promise status between her father and mother, and repeatedly demands that her family members keep it time and time again over the decades since.
But Galgut describes her as living a life of ascetic holiness, and even if she escapes the final punishments he imposes on the other characters - she is cruel to herself to such an extent that her life is in any case filled with copious amounts of suffering.
Galgot has very bitter and amusing diagnoses about the smallness and misery of his characters, but his aggression towards them, and the immense suffering he inflicts on them, gives the impression that he writes them out of self-righteousness rather than curiosity, and perhaps also in response to the Western view of black-life South Africa. White, and expect to see whites severely punished for their privileges.
I think if we had copied this story to "corrected" places in the Western world (and not necessarily less racist), the dose of suffering the characters here would have seemed absurd to us, the moral conception too simplistic and didactic, and the tone of them too joyous and alienating.
But for South Africans it "deserves".
Precisely the name of the book, "The Promise," might have hinted at more interesting and complex political and literary directions.
He might also have referred to the optimism inherent in "The Promised Land" (as Adrian Pen-Dis's compassionate and poignant book on the late apartheid era in South Africa);
He might refer to the hope that the beautiful and resource-rich country will finally succeed, after the end of apartheid, in a real partnership between its inhabitants.
Yet this promise continues to disappoint, and even three decades after the change of government, South Africa continues to suffer from murderous violence, faltering infrastructure and deep governmental corruption, like large parts of the continent.
The disillusionment in the face of the unfulfilled promise — a disillusionment that is not the property of whites alone — deserves less simplistic and less alienating writing, which is not captivated by the idol of "racist and evil to him," and manages to contain the immense victims of blacks and whites alike.
Damon Galgut / The Promise, from English: Michal Alfon, Hargul and Modan, 261 pages
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