In today’s LA Times, I review Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, beginning:
The traveler at the center of Damon Galgut’s new novel “In a Strange Room,” a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, is walking down a remote road in Greece when he sees a stranger in the distance. As the road dips and bends, the two draw closer, mirror images of one another. They meet, then continue in opposite directions, but will meet again.
The stranger, dressed all in black, is a handsome German named Reiner. As easy as it is to get a handle on him — self-possessed, focused, a little vain — the first traveler is harder to pin down. We don’t know his history, nor even his name — just that he’s a young man who’s been to a half-dozen countries in half as many months, “traveling around,” he says, “just looking.”
This is his story, and the story bears a resemblance to the author’s. Galgut eventually reveals that his character, like him, is named Damon and from South Africa; more interestingly, he occasionally moves from the distancing “he” to the personal “I,” quietly seeding his fiction with (what seems like) his truth. Early on, he writes, “He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past. Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.”
This shifting point of view, the overlap of the Damon in the book with the Damon we are meant to understand is the author, gives the book an interesting, Geoff Dyer-like resonance. This paired with the novel’s stripped-down language make me understand why it was a finalist for the Booker. It’s far better than the Washington Post would have you believe.
