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    In a Strange Room
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    In a Strange Room
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    In a Strange Room
    Ebook216 pages3 hours

    In a Strange Room

    By Damon Galgut

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A finalist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize

    In this newest novel from South African writer Damon Galgut, a young loner travels across eastern Africa, Europe, and India. Unsure what he's after, and reluctant to return home, he follows the paths of travelers he meets along the way. Treated as a lover, a follower, a guardian, each new encounter—with an enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers, a woman on the verge—leads him closer to confronting his own identity. Traversing the quiet of wilderness and the frenzy of border crossings, every new direction is tinged with surmounting mourning, as he is propelled toward a tragic conclusion.

    In a Strange Room is a brilliant, stylish novel of anger and compassion, longing and thwarted desire, and a hauntingly beautiful evocation of life on the road. First published in The Paris Review in three parts, one of which was selected for a National Magazine Award and another for the O. Henry Prize, In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEuropa Editions
    Release dateOct 13, 2010
    ISBN9781609450199
    Unavailable
    In a Strange Room
    Author

    Damon Galgut

    DAMON GALGUT was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry and The Good Doctor. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Damon Galgut lives in Cape Town.

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    Reviews for In a Strange Room

    3.5/5

    172 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Three connected stories of man, named Damon, who travels with various companions in Africa, and in the last story, in India. I haven't read anyone who brings us into the tensions and turmoils that inhabit the relationships between these tossed about wanderers. This is a book to think about long after it is finished.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful experimental triptych of stories. Good use of shifting perspective and negative space leading to a emotional apex. The writing is so simple, but the effect on the reader is complex.
    • 3/5
      Kindle. On short list for Booker.
    • 4/5
      This is the third Galgut novel I've read. I thoroughly enjoyed The Good Doctor but was disappointed by The Imposter, so this was a pleasing return to form. In a Strange Room feels like three separate novellas all connected by the thread of the narrator's travelling wanderlust. There is some unusual prose construction at work, with Galgut swapping between first and third person narration, sometimes in the same paragraph. At first this feels confusing, but as the novel develops it somehow works in an interesting way, with the narrator juxtaposing himself between being in the middle of the action in the first person and observing from afar as a distant memory in the third person.This is a novel of place more than plot, of edgy travels and the transience of relationships formed with other travellers, intense in their brevity, all-consuming at the time yet ultimately destined to become relegated to distant memories. The sense of place in Africa and India in particular was particularly well evoked, less on the basis of landscapes but more from a successful imparting of the feel of being in a foreign place, the heady mix of the thrill and danger of the unknown, and the strange intensity of human bonds formed which could never survive on home soil. Each of the three sections has it's own sub-plot, with the narrator taking on the role of follower, lover and guardian in each. Sharing his own Christian name, the narrator is clearly more than a touch autobiographical, which only adds to the mystery.There's a clever sense of the foreboding to Galgut's writing - if it was a film there would be constant sinister music playing in the background, and that chill works very well, turning me into a slightly nervous reader cautiously turning the pages. It's an odd thing - his plots aren't really driven to a climax, yet he manages to keep me feeling slightly displaced and jittery throughout.4 stars - an interesting and surprising writer.
    • 5/5
      Great book. Has the form of an inner monologue of someone (seemingly the author) speaking to/about himself in the first and third person interchangeably. Since I do this myself it seemed very natural. Three stores, all recalled from a distance, of times the author traveled and the people he was with. To sum it up, the author seems to have failed in a different way each time, or had an experience that was impossible or went wrong each time. The narrator seems at once daring and indecisive or perhaps you could say restless and prone to overthinking. At any rate, that struck home with me and I venture gets at something central to the human condition.
    • 5/5
      A quirky, but beautiful novel in three parts. Damon Galgut most definitely has a wonderful gift of understanding the human psyche and how people tick. He is most certainly a wordsmith and does not waste a single syllable.Throughout the book, the narrative switches from first to third person. I actually quite liked that as it meant looking at situations from different angles. Yes, it is a sad novel at times, but it is the manner in which Damon handles that sadness and unfulfilled love that makes the story so special.Highly recommended...you will be hooked!
    • 5/5
      I've been a Damon Galgut fan since reading "The Good Doctor" years ago. This book is described in the opening as being a story in three journeys. Linked only by the narrator, these stories explore themes of love, loyalty and obsession. Some of my favourite quotes:"There is no desire to punish her, any more than a means to forgive her.""Even in these conversations, language will never be enough.""Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present."
    • 5/5
      What an odd and amazing little book. Part memoir, part travelogue and part fiction, with some stylistic quirks, but what stands out is the stark emotional honesty. The author/protagonist often appears indecisive or cowardly in his adventures, yet the telling is uncompromisingly brave. Playing around with person (sometimes switching within a sentence) doesn't detract, it actually sets the tone very nicely. Just excellent all around.
    • 4/5
      Loved this. Very much in the style of Camus's Outsider: existential loneliness, South African-style. Beautifully sparse sentences, the kind that made me want to take them apart and hold them up to the light. My favourite of the Booker list for 2010.

      By the way, I would say this definitely works as a novel in three parts, rather than the three short stories collection some people have said it more closely resembles. It definitely felt like a novel to me.
    • 3/5
      Strange and quiet wonderful.
    • 3/5
      A finely-written collection of three short stories about travelling, loneliness, and memory. Unlike in the Booker-winning Sense Of An Ending, Galgut finds an effective and interesting way of toying with the reader, by flipping from the first to third person even within sentences - the narrator too is watching the scenes play out, trying hard to remember (although when it comes to some names and incidents his mind falls short). The final third stood out as the best, and had me wishing the story had a book of its own rather than a measly 60 pages. I was also baffled by how the protagonist could afford all these trips - but it didn't prevent me from enjoying the journey(s).
    • 4/5
      recommended for anyone who appreciates creative and original English language use
    • 5/5
      Intriguing stories, written in a style that seems unpersonal, but is full of tension at the same time. Very much like the style of Galgut's fellow South African writer Coetzee, funny enough. Is it typical of SA writers? At the same time the style reflects the protagonist's attitude towards the world perfectly: he doesn't know how to communicate with other people and the world. The three persons he meets in each of the three stories have their own inhibitions which makes contact even more complicated. The writing is amazing, poetic at times.
    • 3/5
      Oh, I didn't love this as much as I thought I would. He does the thing where the viewpoint character is named Damon; this always strikes me as coy and pretentious and self-consciously artsy. Somewhat reminiscent of Coetzee's Summertime, but I found that book to be much more successful, insightful, and self-aware.

      In this book's favor: it is beautifully written and the final section is quite emotionally wrenching, if a bit of a cliche.
    • 2/5
      This novel was on the Book Club reading list. It probably wouldn't have been one that otherwise I would have pick up. It is more a collection of 3 short stories rather than one book. it covers three journeys that Damon takes into Africa and India. In the first 2 he joins travellers but he is always on the outside never quite able to commit to the relationships. In the third he accompanies Anna a friend who is aiming to commit suicide on the journey. This leaves Damon having to look after Anna in an Indian hospital. Has he changed over the three journeys - I think not but others in the Book Club could identify some changes. It was the discussion that I most enjoyed. The book was quite easy to get through but the technique of changing from 1st to 3rd voice often in the middle of a paragraph I did find jolting.
    • 5/5
      The calibre of this book is astonishing. There's something Coetzee-like about it, and more. It is packed with wonderful observations of life's nauces and details, and every other sentence feels sublime. Coetzee manages to tell his story in three volumes and Galgut has done it magnificently in three parts.Most pages feel noteworthy in this book, and it might be pretentious to quote anything from it because, taken out of context, lines from this book read like forceful proverbs, but, in an impossible effort, here are two bits to show Galgut's mastery:A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory. (123)Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present. And he feels it now, maybe for the first time, everything that went wrong, all the mess and anguish and distaster. Forgive me, my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell. (180)
    • 1/5
      This is not a novel. I am amazed and depressed that this made it onto the Man Booker list.Novels are supposed to be acts of imagination. This is barely papered-over reportage. There are entire pages that seem to exist simply because he couldn't think of anything except what actually happened. (For example, the revelation, in the second story, that tourists profit from poverty.) The stories parade fragmentation and apparent disorder as poetic virtues, when they're clearly just artifacts of memory. It isn't a virtue to present your incomplete memories as the poetically broken experience. Nor is it skill to present skeletal dialogue as profound.And why, exactly, are these three stories separate? They do not make importantly different points; they don't contrast with one another in interesting ways. They're fortuitous; they're the memories Galgut had to hand. The first is an attempt to out-do Beckett or a Scandinavian minimalist, but that has been done hundreds of times. The second is a scattered travel story with very little emotional interest. The third is a supposedly harrowing story of a woman's suicide attempt in India; but desperation and despair have been done so much better by so many, many people. Galgut should read Beckett for his first story, Chatwin for his second, and A.L. Kennedy for his third.And to the people who find this profound, unsettling, and haunting: please. If this is, then so is any twenty-something's story of infinite distances and loneliness. The book is at the level of a television adaptation of some cliché existentialist travel story.
    • 5/5
      Short listed for the 2010 Booker Prize, In a Strange Room is a small novel comprised of three separate travel vignettes. In each (The Follower, The Lover, The Guardian) a South African’s journeys help to reveal his innermost aspirations and fears as he embodies the various roles. Though certainly not uplifting, this novel is nonetheless affirming with its sparse prose and believability. For those who have traveled this will be familiar territory and for those who have always been a tourist this book will make clear the difference.