Memory and passivity are two interlinking themes in South African-born Tony Eprile’s award-winning first novel The Persistence of Memory (Double Storey). The narrator-protagonist, Paul Sweetbread – a rather awkward, stout, food-loving Johannesburg-born Jewish South African – is blessed (and cursed) with a near-perfect memory – a skill that lands him in trouble on some occasions at school, but which also helps him testify years later at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Paul’s great weakness is that he is a passive observer rather than an active participant in life – he drifts through his school career, drifts into conscripted national service as a cook on a South African Defence Force military base in Namibia, and then to university. He hates being drafted, dislikes apartheid passionately, but something blocks his ability to take a stand on anything.
“My novel is an attempt to see how this kind of person – essentially passive, an observer rather than a doer – has to try to break out and take responsibility for his life,” says Eprile.
Unlike Paul’s life, Eprile’s has been varied and highly eventful. Born in Johannesburg in the 1950s, the son of the founding editor of The Golden City Post, Eprile’s childhood brought him into contact with many distinguished journalists and writers. “I met some really great people, like Nat Nakasa.”
In 1967 Eprile’s family left South Africa and settled in Britain, where he attended high school. “Now that was a quite an experience! My school was a typically British mixture of tradition – school tie, formality, school spirit, the lot – and a celebration of left-wing, dissident ideas.” After school, Eprile moved to the United States, where he studied anthropology and then did a master’s in creative writing at Brown University.
“The result,” he says, “was that I embarked on a career as a journalist and teacher of English and creative writing.”
He also taught in an adult education programme at a maximum-security prison. “I worked with many men who were considered dangerous criminals, but who – in their writing – displayed a depth and sensitivity that amazed me. I got to see the human beings behind the criminals, and it confirmed my belief in restorative rather than retributive justice.”
This interest in restorative justice brought him back to South Africa as a journalist, to cover the transition to democracy and later observe the TRC.
“During my work in South Africa, I developed an interest in talking to South African soldiers – on both sides of the conflict – and to draft-resisters. I found myself asking, if I had been called up in the terrible 1980s, what would I have done?” This drew him to write The Persistence of Memory. Many of his maximum-security prisoners had been Vietnam vets “and their experiences were frequently similar to those told me by South African veterans”.
These connections are subtly brought out in the novel. Although the story is set in South Africa and Namibia, and the protagonist is a South African, there are frequent subtle references to the US – and occasional Americanisms. Eprile uses a quote from a speech made by Robert F Kennedy in 1966 at the University of Cape Town as en epigraph.
So how does he see himself as a writer? “Ah, that’s a tricky one. Am I a South African American writer, or an American South African? Quite honestly I’m not sure. Either. Or both. A few critics have even seen me as a Jewish writer.”
What is clear is that Eprile’s book has been well-received in the US and won the 2005 Kora Prize for fiction in Israel, beating stiff competition from the likes of Phillip Roth and Cynthia Ozick – no mean feat for a first novel.
Being a South African Jew – an insider yet an outsider in white South Africa – is another underlying theme in the novel. Paul’s liberalism is subtly traced back to family experience of anti-Semitism. “I think that’s a theme many Jews in South Africa are trying to deal with,” said Eprile. “How to be Jewish and yet claim one’s South African-, and Africanness.”
Still, this is not an entirely “heavy” book. Its title is borrowed from a Salvador Dali painting: “I see Dali’s work as filled with humour,” says Eprile, “and I would hope that, though my subject is serious, it also has a strong element of humour.”