Which is why, I think, in Apartheid times, the government so very strongly tried to control writers through censorship or banning.

I mean, there was a time, let’s say, in the era of maybe Nadine Gordimer or André Brink, where a writer was supposed to be a moral signpost, you could say, to show people how to think and where their values should be. I suppose that role has changed because South Africa has changed. Are you expected to be a soothsayer of sorts who explains the past or shows the way forward?īook jacket of ‘The Promise’ by Damon Galgut (Chatto and Windus, 304 pages, Rs 699) I want to ask you about the perils of being a writer in a country like South Africa that has a chequered past. But the idea that writers write books that have absolutely nothing to do with their personalities or their lives, I think, is false. So each of these characters reflect some aspect of me, often exaggerated sometimes in an almost cartoonish way. The truth is, you can’t write characters in a novel without drawing on yourself in some ways. You draw on various memories and you reshape them, but there’s nothing direct. We used to spend weekends there when I was little. But it was like the farm in the book, not much of a farm, but a kind of a patchwork of smallholdings just outside Krugersdorp. My mother grew up on a - well, you know, we used to call it a farm. I did do two years in the military, although I was in the Air Force and working in an office. But I did grow up in Pretoria, which is a place not much like any other places, especially back in those days. Does The Promise draw from your own experiences of your time growing up in Pretoria during the Apartheid? Most novelists draw something from their own lives for their stories. It only came to me as a secondary idea that you could also convey something about the background of the country at the same time. So I suddenly thought, well, you could tell a story like that, just by focusing on the funerals - it’s an interesting structure. He’s a funny person and he managed to make various anecdotes about family and how people were behaving about inheritance - just the family dynamics - very, very funny. But he was telling me the story of the four family funerals that he’d been to and making me laugh. He lost his parents and his brother and sister.

In fact, it was a friend I was speaking to - he’s older than me and he’s the only person left of his family. The first idea that came to me was the unusual structure of being able to tell a family story through four funerals.

Synopsis of the promise damon galgut