![]() This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized. ![]() The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts. To praise the novel in its particulars-for its seriousness for its balance of formal freedom and elegance for its humor, its precision, its human truth-seems inadequate and partial. ![]() Indeed, the novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce, including, from the former, an almost rushing fluidity of narrative consciousness, and from the latter, a direct allusion to The Dead in its final pages, when a torrential rain is unleashed upon the veld. He has, however, and mercifully, a sense of humor, even an occasional playfulness, which leavens that stringency. Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company like Coetzee, he is stringent, pure. A surprising number of novelists are very good few are extraordinary. ![]()
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