The opening and closing lines of In a Strange Room are like the opposite sides of an entry/exit sign, or like the broken sentence that denies James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake a beginning and an end. They indicate a circular — I don’t want to use the word narrative — experiential economy, a sense that life is something constantly lived, that the trite fact of having to keep living is perhaps the most important thing in the world.
This would be nothing more than an obvious existential point, if it weren’t for the fact that Damon Galgut is more than a writer about personal experience. His novels speak in complex ways to a South African existence, a conversation made richer by the characters that live in between the letters on the pages. Some of these characters are sparely drawn, some are richly illuminated, but they’re always utterly human.
The novel starts with the sentence, ‘It happens like this” and goes on to relate three journeys, entitled ‘The Follower”, ‘The Lover” and ‘The Guardian”. The book ends with, ‘He dries his eyes and picks up a tiny stone from the ground, one like millions of others all around, and slips it into his pocket as he walks towards the gate.” The journey is beginning again, or rather, it hasn’t ended.
There’s a certain matter-of-factness about the prose, a sense (and I note that I’ve used this word already, indicating the allusive nature of the narrative) that the ordinary is bursting with meaning. The stone might have nothing to differentiate it from millions of others, but it does have the singular characteristic of having been chosen. And Galgut the storyteller, as he slips between third person and first person narrative at dissonant moments in his story, chooses ordinary moments of life to tell us about.
The story, an autobiography at one remove, is of a man called Damon Galgut, and his meandering travels through Greece, Southern Africa and India. He meets various people. In Greece a German named Rainer, a man of sullen beauty, with whom he eventually travels in Lesotho, in a sexually charged but awkward relationship. If the novel has a coda, it’s presented to us in Damon’s reflections on Rainer. ‘Maybe when two people meet for the first time all the possible variations on destiny are contained in their separate natures.”
In Zimbabwe he meets a group of French and Swiss travellers, one of whom he follows back to Switzerland, in irresolute search of uncertain love. In India the encounter is more complex, in that Damon meets the darkness inhabiting a friend who accompanies him. She attempts suicide and Damon is forced to deal with the breakdown she courts.
In a Strange Room doesn’t present the reader with a comfortable ending, but there is perhaps comfort in Damon’s meditation on the end of his relationship with Rainer: ‘… at some point he realises that the silence, the suspension, is the only form of resolution this particular story will ever have.”
The epigraph ‘He Has No House” is by Vojislav Jakic, whose work Damon sees on his travels. It’s a gnomic nomadicism that isn’t just about a man aimlessly travelling, but also about a state of being that’s extraordinarily relevant in South Africa today.
Read an extract of the book here.