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Damon Galgut is one of South Africa’s most exciting new literary voices. In The Impostor, his first novel since The Good Doctor, Galgut leads his readers into the developing heart of postapartheid South Africa, a landscape being reshaped by new waves of money and power. Adam Napier leaves Johannesburg looking for a fresh start. Jobless and directionless, but with a head full of literary ambitions, he moves into his brother’s dilapidated house on the edge of a backwater town. One day he encounters Canning, a man who claims Adam saved his life in their school days, but whom Adam does not remember at all. But he plays along and, for a time, enjoys all that Canning has: a vast fortune and game preserve inherited from his father, and a beautiful, mysterious younger wife to whom Adam is compulsively, dangerously drawn. A spellbinding achievement from one of the defining members of a new generation of African writers, The Impostor evokes a glittering world in which the moneyed old guard, newly empowered black Africans, and shady foreign businessmen jockey for a piece of the new South African dream.
Apartheid artificially pressurized everyday relationships -- professional, financial, social -- and The Impostor, like much of contemporary South African fiction, reports on the effects as that pressure is released. Its author, Damon Galgut, employs the genre cynicism of noir as a dark lens through which to examine what has actually changed in the new South Africa, a place where even the most mundane acts -- clearing the weeds from a dead garden, having a drink outdoors at dusk -- acquire an illicit tint. The end of apartheid came without the violent revolution augured in Nadine Gordimer s July s People, and instead with negotiations and bureaucratic overhaul, and with Nobel Peace Prizes all around. Galgut s effortlessly absorbing new book makes the case that plenty of darkness still dwells in the human heart, and that even when evil is apparently washed away, it leaves behind a heavy residue of corruption, resentment, and dangerous opportunity.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Sarah Maxwell
reviewed The Impostor on October 02, 2008
The Impostor
The Shallow Intimacy of The Impostor
(Exploring the Vortex with Damon Galgut)
Dear Damon,
When we met in Antwerp, I caught a glimpse of what my life might be like if my dream of literary fame and fortune ever came true. It was not a pretty sight. You had arrived in Belgium on your own, with a couple of interviews and appearances lined up. Then it was off to Amsterdam for a day, to meet with your Dutch publisher, before jetting off to Canada for a book tour (lasting a month, if memory serves). I'm sure this sounds like heaven to some, but the first thought that crossed my little, middle-class mind was: where would I leave the kids? Closely followed by: how would I gift wrap this as a pleasurable experience for my dear wife? So perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings on you when I say you seemed somewhat lost and lonely.
But that was before I read The Impostor, in which I also sensed a spirit of desolation, isolation, emptiness, desperation (delete one or more, as you see fit ). Am I correct in believing that the catalytic incident in the book - the chance meeting between two old schoolmates - derives from your own experiences at home and abroad? I can well imagine that there are times when people treat you like a hero and as if they know you intimately, whereas you don't have the foggiest notion who they are. This sense of "shallow intimacy" is shared by almost all the characters in your book, exacerbating each of their personal flaws and ethical shortcomings. As if all relationships are merely pragmatic transactions, in which emotion is an obstacle rather than a driving force - a terrifying, almost biological take on human interaction.
I am sure some will see this as a drawback, but to readers like myself - who expect to be challenged and provoked by what they read - this sense of utter desolation and desperation, that prevails both within the characters and the world they inhabit, is testimony to the power of your writing. Even now, as I reflect upon your book, I feel a black hole opening up at my core, the vortex gradually growing, leaving me ever emptier, until I turn my mind to other things.
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