In a Strange Room

by Damon Galgut

In a Strange Room [Hardcover] Damon Galgut

Genres: Fiction, Africa, Travel, South Africa, Literary Fiction, Literature, Contemporary

180 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2010

About the author

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry, The Good Doctor and The Impostor. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Dublin/IMPAC Award. The Imposter was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He lives in Cape Town.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a Strange Room is a tale of the modern day Wandering Jew, a man without roots.

He watches, but what he sees isn’t real to him. Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through.

I consider Damon Galgut a real discovery – he is a very original writer with his own vivid vision of life and unique approach the psychology of a loner.

He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn’t like to leave what’s known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you’re moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more…

And in the end In a Strange Room feels like a new fine breed of existential novel.

He’s aware that he’s engaged again in that most squalid of activities, using up time, but the journey hasn’t ended where he wanted it to, it has frayed out instead into endless ambiguities and nuances, like a path that divides and divides endlessly, growing fainter all the time.

Any life is a garden of forking paths.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE STRANGER INSIDE ME


André Thijssen

I libri sono viaggi (ma perché solo i libri, non lo è l’Arte in genere?) e questo romanzo di Galgut, composto da tre racconti lunghi usciti sulla Paris Review con lo stesso protagonista in tre fasi diverse della vita, è in apparenza un libro di viaggio: tre continenti, Africa (in lungo e in largo, Sudafrica, Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Marocco…), Europa (Grecia, Svizzera, Londra, Parigi…), Asia (India).

Ma non è un libro che appartenga alla letteratura di viaggio.
Perché i luoghi sono solo sfondi descritti soprattutto come paesaggi interiori.
Perché le condizioni umane sociali e politiche dei posti attraversati sono meno che fondali, sono pressoché inesistenti.


MD’O

E infatti i titoli dei tre racconti non dicono nulla sul viaggio, molto di più sul viaggiatore (il seguace, l’amante, il guardiano – e cioè, il potere, l’amore, la cura degli altri): dentro di lui qualcosa è già andato avanti verso il luogo successivo, lui non va mai verso niente e al contrario si allontana sempre.

Damon, il protagonista, viaggia per irrequietezza.
Per cercare se stesso.
E anche per fuggire da se stesso.
Per placare un’ansia divorante.
Per plasmare un disagio.
Attraversa, percorre, si sposta e s’immerge con coraggio nei paesaggi più arditi, profondi e remoti dell’animo umano.


Top of the Lake season 2

E ovunque, si porta dietro la sua solitudine, intensa e spessa, che si misura nello spazio infinito tra due esseri umani a confronto e nella loro impossibilità d’incontro, vicinissimi, ma senza riuscire a toccarsi, neppure fisicamente: nei primi due capitoli, si tratta di due coetanei conosciuti in viaggio che innescano l’eros, che però rimane represso - nell’ultimo è invece un’amica consumata dal desiderio di morte,

È molto bello, e spiazzante, come Galgut passi dalla terza alla prima persona, come lo scrittore da narratore eterodiegetico diventi narratore omodiegetico: è un effetto che inebria come il primo sorso di un grande champagne.
Sottolinea una scissione dello sguardo, allo stesso tempo, intimo e distaccato: come se in certi momenti la memoria fosse così prepotente da non poterne prendere le distanze.


Angelina, Girl Interrupted, walks away.

Ma per quanto il personaggio principale sia esplicitamente autobiografico (ha perfino lo stesso nome di battesimo di Galgut, Damon), a me pare che lo scrittore tenti senza successo di penetrare dentro il suo personaggio: e infatti, il titolo è riferito a una stanza sconosciuta, che è quella che racchiude l’alter ego, l’io che vaga e viaggia per il mondo.
Che è il nostro inconscio.
Che è una parte di noi.
Che siamo noi.

Galgut usa una scrittura pulita, nitida, rarefatta, intensa, emozionante - usa gli spazi nella pagina come fa anche un altro grande scrittore sudafricano, Coetzee - alterna la terza alla prima persona, rinuncia alle virgolette, misura la punteggiatura, mescola e confonde le voci, un monologo interiore può essere anche dialogo oppure descrizione.



Uno di quei libri che mette voglia di leggerne molti altri.
A cominciare dagli altri dello stesso Damon Galgut.

Varcare una frontiera gli ha sempre fatto paura, non gli piace lasciare una cosa nota e sicura per lo spazio vuoto di un dopo in cui può succedere di tutto. Nei momenti di transizione tutto assume un potere e un peso simbolico. Ma lui viaggia anche per questo. Il mondo in cui ci si muove trabocca in un altro mondo, interno, niente resta più diviso, questo rappresenta quello, il tempo atmosferico rappresenta l’umore, il paesaggio i sentimenti, per ogni oggetto esiste un gesto interiore corrispondente, tutto si trasforma in metafora. Il confine è una linea tracciata su una carta geografica, ma anche dentro di lui.

[Jaidee · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 "existential, melancholy, profound" stars !!!

2017 Silver Award (Tie) (2nd Favorite Read)

This is the perfect night to write this review. Gloomy, rainy and cold as I walked the neighborhood earlier while listening to Nick Cave.

I read this book over our recent vacation late at night on our balcony while watching the moon overlook the Mediterranean Sea. This book is my first read by South African Writer Damon Galgut.
This book was shortlisted for both the Booker and Ondaatje literary prizes in 2010.

I got goosebumps reading these three short novellas or rather interludes that almost appeared semi-autobiographical (although I am not certain of this). They take place in Greece, Lesotho, India, South Africa, Switzerland. A man yearning for deeper connection yet avoidant and unable to grasp what he most desires...symbiosis with another.

Here is a sample of writing that evoked such sweet melancholy deep into my soul where I would both sigh and shiver and tear up.

He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's know and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're travelling through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border is a line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere....

and so sadly,

By imperceptible degrees, then, he accepts the notion that journey is over and he's back where he started. The story of Jerome is one he's lived through before, it is the story of what never happened, the story of travelling a long way while standing still.

and tearing me apart is this

Jerome, if I can't make you live in words, if you are only the dim evocation of a face under a fringe of fear, and the others too, Alice and Christian and Roderigo, if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life.

He sits in the empty room, crying

I loved all three interludes and they all evoked such a sublime depth of feeling that this will be among the most treasured reads of my life.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of Damon, a young man adrift in life. Damon is South African and at the start of the novel it has been three years since Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Damon, who is saturated by the idea of death, has found something of an outlet in travel.

In part one he’s in Greece where he meets Reiner. The two men see each other coming from a long way off on a hilly country road. When they pass they exchange a friendly greeting. Damon finds Reiner beautiful.

That night Damon returns to his hostel to find Reiner waiting. There is an erotic charge between them. They clearly find one another temptating. Later they decide to walk Lesotho.

In the midst of their perambulation, Reiner turns increasingly uncooperative and the two men fall out. Damon returns to South Africa. It’s not known where Reiner is. Some months pass. Then a friend calls to say Reiner is at his place, thin, tired, and looking physically degraded.

Reiner, and to an extent Damon, are exponents of a kind of physically challenging way of life. After Damon‘s leaves him in the mountains of Lesotho the suggestion is that Reiner pushed himself too hard. Was his destructive exposure a response to Damon‘s exit?

For Damon travel is always in part about the hope of love. Which he is incapable of expressing. No doubt why he’s a wretched solitary. He returns to South Africa but he’s restless, settling down is clearly not for him.

In part two he begins to travel again. He meets a young man and woman, siblings. Jerome, an ephebic beauty, and his sister take Damon in. They traipse from South Africa to Tanzania to Malawi’s great freshwater lake to Mombasa.

Damon lusts after Jerome, but they rarely speak since Damon has no French, Jerome no English. Or at any rate the possibility of them conversing is prohibited by the presence of an older man who insists on translating.

Eventually Jerome finds a moment to haltingly make his admiration known: “Do you want to come in Switzerland?” he asks. Damon does, but this is another relationship suffering a mutual lack of candor. Except for much wordless lusting nothing happens between the two.

The reader wants to cry: “For God’s sake, kiss him!” But it never happens. And it’s not like they’re hindered. Damon after all sleeps in Jerome’s room every night where he most emphatically does not come in Switzerland. I’m reminded of Anita Brookner’s characters and their sad inability to live meaningful lives.

As Damon is about to leave Switzerland Jerome begs him not to go. Jerome has so far been unemphatic, but now he’s pleading. But Damon, understandably frustrated, as much with himself as with Jerome, says he must return to South Africa. Months later he writes to Jerome. Within a week his letter is returned inside another. A friend of Jerome‘s family briefly explains his death in a motorcycle accident.

The third and last part reminds me of Claire Vaye Watkins’s superb I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. In Watkins’s novel the enlivening madness is postpartum depression. Here it’s manic depression.

When Damon meets his friend Anna at the airport – they’re traveling to Bombay – she looks like a punk rocker, not her style at all. She’s usually a high functioning corporate type.

She has many medications she must take at precise times. Her fully realized mania hits just as they arrive in Goa. She needs institutionalization. A lesbian, she takes up with a strange American man, who later sees the writing on the wall — she’s insane! —and vanishes.

She finds another man, a pale complected fellow. To Anna he quickly becomes the end-all and be-all of her existence. She wants to have his child. She wants to move with him to France. One problem: he refuses to be intimate with her. He also flees.

She is a vile creature off her meds. Naturally she tries to kill herself. While she is unconscious from an overdose and Damon is dragging her from hospital to hospital in India, she becomes incontinent. It’s his duty to empty and clean her bed pan. The reader wants Anna to die because he wants Damon to be free. But Anna doesn’t die.

I don’t know, perhaps Damon views it as some challenge to his manhood, but he will not call her people back in South Africa where she has scads of family and friends. Is it that he revels in his suffering? That would suggest some Christian bent but religion is never mentioned. My God. An absolutely harrowing read.

Oddments: Damon narrates in both first and third person. It’s overwhelmingly third person until every now and then the “I” voice creeps in. Of course many books bounce from third to first and back again. But to have a narrator who speaks almost simultaneously in both is unusual. The author also uses this device to a more limited extent in his 2021 Booker Prize-winning The Promise, which is excellent.

This book is also excellent. Like The Promise it is both beautiful and an emotional trial for the reader. But that’s fine. Just my cup of tea really. :-)

[Ron Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm weary of dreary.

I know it's an act of book reviewing apostasy, but I've had it with the exquisitely crafted sighs of depressed men. And that's not just the eggnog talking. Honestly, how many times do we have to praise the stark story of a wandering, alienated man that Hemingway perfected in "The Sun Also Rises" way back in 1926?

Every year adds two or three "haunting masterpieces" to this respected subgenre. This year's top entries included Joshua Ferris's grave "The Unnamed," Dinaw Mengestu's somber "How to Read the Air" and now Damon Galgut's "In a Strange Room," which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. The lyrics differ - a little - but the melody of these dirges doesn't change: existential angst gliding along one spare, cool paragraph after another, like a Giacometti statue strutting out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I've put in my time with these narrators, and I've praised their harrowing stories and stylistic elegance, but Galgut, a South African novelist and playwright, has finally worn me out.

"In a Strange Room" is a collection of three autobiographical travel tales that have won praise since they were first published in the Paris Review and now come to us bound together as a novel. In each of these stories, "he goes on somewhere else. And somewhere else again . . . He feels no connection with anything around him, he's constantly afraid of dying."

In the first story, "The Follower," our shell-shocked narrator is drifting through Greece when he bumps into Reiner, a strikingly handsome German dressed all in black. "He has a sullen sort of beauty," Galgut tells us, "with long silky hair that falls around his shoulders." They end up in the same hostel, where they engage in Brief Conversations Fraught With Tension:

"How long are you here for.

"I'm also going in the morning.

"Are you going to Athens.

"No. The other way. To Sparta.

"So you've seen Mycenae already.

"I've been here two days.

"Ah."

Damon can't shake the German or engage him in any real intimacy or use a question mark. "He is worn down by the constant presence, like some kind of dark attendant angel, ironic and brooding, his face almost petulant."

The hunky German walks around with his shirt off, sits on the edge of Damon's bed, daring him to make the first move. It's a scene of homoerotic passive aggression straight from a British prep school memoir of the 1930s. Except this is the 21st century, and there's no way to explain why these two modern, unattached adults imagine their relationship should be so burdened with the threat of transgression. They keep up this dance of denial for 70 pages, leading each other on a cruel walking challenge across Greece. "Was what happened between him and Reiner love or hate," the narrator asks, "or something else with another name." But we dare speak its name nowadays, Mr. Galgut, and it's not so shocking or titillating as you suggest.

Admittedly, it is highly atmospheric, and the sense of menace can be exciting, as in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," but there's no escaping the artificiality of this performance. The story's creepiness and ambiguity are a substitute for the emotional profundity it makes a claim to. Vacillating erratically between first and third person, the tale is all poses grasping after Cormac McCarthy and J.M. Coetzee.

The second story, "The Lover," offers us more of the same: "the same state of nothingness, the drifting from place to place." Galgut explains that "he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. . . . In this state travel isn't celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself." But I would argue that he's in exactly the opposite state: He luxuriates in his self, whipping his lust and ennui into shiny peaks of spun sugar like this: "His loneliness resounds in him with a high thin note, like the lingering sound of a bell. . . . A thin column of grief rises in him like mercury."

This time he's in Africa on another of his "aimless and awful walks," when he meets three European tourists. "The younger man has from up close a beauty that is almost shocking, red lips and high cheek-bones and a long fringe of hair." Jerome - with the lips - barely speaks English, which cuts down on the awkward conversation, so for some 50 pages Damon and he stare at each other with enough unconsummated desire to melt everything but their own bashfulness. "As he settles himself for the night he rolls his eyes up and finds Jerome in exactly the same position, looking back, and for a long arrested moment they hold each other's gaze before they both look away and try to sleep." I just wanted to grab this sad-sack narrator by the shoulders and shout, "Get a job, man, or a boyfriend or a Chia pet or anything!"

And to a large extent, he takes that advice in the third and final story, which is genuinely compelling. In "The Guardian," our peripatetic narrator is wandering through India, but this time he's escorting a friend, an actual friend, "somebody he loves and who makes him laugh. Somebody he wants to protect": Anna is a manic-depressive woman who requires a complicated regimen of psychotropic medications to keep herself from slipping into obsessive behavior and suicidal madness. He's taking her along with him to give her "a couple of months away from home, a chance for Anna to find herself and stabilize." Almost immediately he realizes just how self-destructive she is and how wholly unprepared he is to control her.

What follows is a terrifying experience of torn affections and Third World medical care (Note: Don't get sick in India). After so many static pages of vague despair, it's doubly shocking to be hurled through this ordeal as Damon races to save a friend so set on destroying herself. Here, finally, we see what Galgut can do - what he did in "The Good Doctor" - when he wrenches himself out of his head, when his story is rooted in the details of specific people enduring actual challenges.

Plenty of sophisticated, sensitive readers have praised these stories, and I don't doubt their insight or their critical acumen. But how much you enjoy this novel will depend largely on how moved you are by oracular pronouncements such as: "A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there." At this stage of my life, this seems like a small room rather than a strange one, and I'm tired of sharing it with men who have nothing more to tell me than how dispirited they are.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

[·Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unobtrusive words, nothing fancy or overworked, no backflips or showiness. The effect however is heart wrenching. Damon Galgut surgically cuts to the vital. And leaves you gasping for air.

There was some discussion when this book made the Booker shortlist in 2010. Is it a novel? Not in any conventional sense, no. Three accounts of journeys undertaken by a character called Damon, referred to in the third person mostly. Galgut is ready to admit that this is indeed himself, and that the events depicted did actually take place and that the narrating 'I' occasionally looks back on his former self and cannot quite recall what he was wearing or what he dreamt of that night. So surely that would make it memoir or travelogue? But experience has been recast into story, beaten and burnished until it rings clear, a shimmering quiver of remorse, of pain, of longing. He flees the networks of home that enmesh, seeking the clean emptiness of the unknown, and finds himself enmeshed once more. Haunting.

Damon Galgut talks to Claire Armitstead about In A Strange Room:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio...

[Helle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

A young South-African man travels through Greece, Africa and India. Three journeys, three continents, different people intersecting his life. The journeys take place years apart, with him as the only connecting thread. In the three stories he is alternately a follower, a lover and a guardian, and we hear the stories from the man he would become, who is looking at him years hence, reliving the three journeys from a distant future. He is nameless for the first 104 pages (out of 180). Then we find out that his name is Damon, and so we assume it is, partly at least, the author (and he has admitted the book is based on real events, selected and retold as seen through the prism of memory). The narrator admits as much:

Memory is patchy and intermittent again, why are certain vistas, certain stretches of a path, so deeply impressed in recollection, so vividly evoked, and others disappear without a trace…

and

But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.

As seen in this last example, it is mostly written in the 3rd person, yet sometimes a sentence in the 1st person breaks a paragraph, making it appear almost like a travel-memoir, or another work of autofiction. The dialogue, too, is embedded into the rest without quotation marks, but it never feels like gimmickry. There’s something about Galgut’s spare, controlled, but emotional style that makes it deeply authentic. I was haunted by this book during and after the reading of it, surprised at finding myself so overwhelmed by the bleak beauty of it, warming to this man who was, it appeared, suffering from a kind of travel mania, fleeing from South Africa and from himself, yet hoping to find what? – company? solace? meaning? himself? – in the process.

Damon Galgut is full of a quiet wisdom. I could mention at least twenty memorable quotes from this novel. Here are but a few in addition to the ones already mentioned:

But this is also one of the most compelling elements in travel, the feeling of dread underneath everything, it makes sensations heightened and acute, the world is charged with a power it doesn’t have in ordinary life.

(…) in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn’t do than what you did. Actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

In this state travel isn’t a celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself.

I relived the travels of my youth, in Asia, in this book, back when I carried a backpack with a grubby Danish flag on it and lived on 15 $ a day including accommodation; the way we constantly met new people, travelled with them for a while; how we felt we interacted with all nations; how we lost weight and gained indelible memories; how some, like us, travelled to see and explore the world out of a sense of curiosity and how others travelled to escape whatever awaited them back home, sometimes making a more permanent home of wherever they happened to be, postponing the day when they had to decide what to do with their lives; the uncomfortable, inevitable gulf between the lucky, wealthy travelers (and if you’ve managed to pay for a plane ticket to India, or Malaysia, or wherever, you are among the wealthy 1% of the world’s population who can actually make the choice to travel away from things from time to time) and the native populations we met. I hadn’t thought about much of this for years, but Galgut’s novel brought a lot of it back to me:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed.

As regards the title, I wonder if it this is a valid hypothesis: knowing that Damon Galgut has also written Arctic Summer – which is about E. M. Forster – we know he has read Forster’s body of work. Forster’s A Room with a View is a novel about travelling though really it is about finding yourself in a sea of strangers, finding your place in the world – even when there isn’t room for your outlook, or sexuality, in it; even if you have a view for which there is no room, as in Forster’s time. There is room for it today, in Galgut’s time, but that doesn’t rule out a man’s soul searching through the interaction with others: it may still be a strange and wondrous room.

A strange and deeply moving reading experience, this book simply, slowly, seeped into me. Highly recommended for travellers and other searchers.

[Semjon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dies ist ein Buch, welches wie ein großer Gong auf mich wirkte beim Lesen und auch danach weiter hallt. So etwas hatte ich lange nicht mehr. Ich bin schlichtweg begeistert von diesen drei kurzen Reisenovellen, in dem wir den jungen Südafrikaner Damon auf seinen Reisen in Griechenland, Afrika und Indien begleiten. Die Namensgleichheit zwischen Autor und Protagonist ist kein Zufall, denn beide Figuren verschmelzen in der Erzählung oft ineinander, wenn der Autor sogar im selben Satz zwischen Dritter und erster Person springt.

Damon ist ein Sucher auf seinen Reisen. Er sucht aber weniger nach visuellen Eindrücken und Sehenswürdigkeiten, sondern nach zwischenmenschlichen Bindungen. Da steckt so viel Sehnsucht in der knappen Art, wie der Autor seine Sätze formt, dass weniger die Geschichte bewegt als das Gefühl, welches beim Lesen entsteht. Klingt vielleicht wenig greifbar, ist aber auch schwer in Worte zu fassen. Ich empfand das Buch als sehr philosophisch und nach dem Lebenssinn suchend. Welche Bedeutung hat das eigene Sein auf der Welt? Was passiert, wenn man einen Ort verlässt, den man bereist hat? Niemand erinnert sich, das man je dort war. Alles verbleibt in unseren Erinnerungen. Damon denkt nie an die Zukunft, sondern lebt nur im Jetzt und in der Vergangenheit. Das hat mich vom Lesegefühl unheimlich an Milan Kundera und die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Seins erinnert.

Das viele Reisen hat ihn zu einem ortlosen Subjekt gemacht, er steht außerhalb von allem, Geschichte ereignet sich woanders, hat nichts mit ihm zu tun. Er ist auf der Durchreise. […] Dabei ist er keineswegs zum Reisen geboren, die Umstände haben ihn gezwungen. Wenn er unterwegs ist, leidet er zumeist unter akuter Angst, die alles plastischer und lebendiger erscheinen läßt. Das Leben wird zu einer Kette ständiger Bedrohungen, er fühlt sich von allem abgeschnitten, hat ständig Angst vorm Sterben. Folglich ist er dort, wo er sich aufhält, selten glücklich, irgendetwas in ihm drängt immer schon zum nächsten Ort, und doch bewegt er sich nie auf etwas zu, sondern stets fort, fort. Dieser Charakterfehler hat das Reisen zur Krankheit werden lassen.

Und da er immer weiterreisen muss, kann er keine echten Beziehungen aufbauen. Doch jedesmal, wenn er sich diesem Umstand bewusst wird, ist es zu spät und die Beziehung kann nicht mehr hergestellt werden. Dies zieht sich als roter Faden durch alle drei Erzählungen. Ein tolles Buch und zurecht auf der Shortlist des Booker-Prizes im Jahr 2010.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I seem to be just gulping down everything Damon Galgut has ever written. This is wonderful. It calls itself a novel, but the character's name is Damon, and it feels very autobiographical in the way that real life will meander and not really have any resolutions. Damon, the central character relates three journeys and experiences he's had in his life, from a distant future point. As with The Promise he slips between first and third person naturally, gracefully. There is very little dialogue, and a lot of wandering around, but for all that there is so much tension, so much anxiety for the reader. In the first journey Damon walks in Lesotho with a German he doesn't know very well and discovers he doesn't really like. In the second he meets a group of Swiss friends and travels with them through Africa, always on the edge of something that is never quite achieved. And in the third he travels to India with a self-destructive woman whom he finds he cannot handle. Magnificent.

[Fionnuala]

I read this while travelling,and the unfamiliar surroundings, the new vistas, the waking up in a strange room added an extra dimension to this already challenging reading experience. Galgut steps outside the conventions. Not for him the adherence to a plot or the limiting of himself to details related to that plot. He writes life as she is lived. The three interlinked accounts in this novel seem as aimless as the journeys undertaken by the main character, who is mostly referred to simply as 'he', but occasionally, and at significant moments, referred to as 'I' and once briefly, as 'Damon'. There is no point here in asking why things happen, why such and such a character has been introduced or whether he will appear again. There is no point in questioning the characters' motives. The reader must simply relax into Galgut's world and enjoy the perfect balance and simplicity of the writing.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know if it's something in me or something in the book that makes me think of its title as "In a Dark Room," which is not like me at all, as I'm a stickler for exact titles. There is much darkness here, but the work is focused on the 'strange' (not familiar) 'rooms' (not literal) the writer/character finds himself in as he travels excessively and obsessively, it sometimes seems.

This is a hybrid sort of book. It's listed as fiction, but the author names his character Damon and uses both 'I' and 'he' to describe himself, depending on whether he is referring to himself as he looks at himself from a distance or is writing about the moment, in the moment, as best he remembers. Sometimes it reads as a type of travel-memoir, but then again only at rare times does the actual place seem to be important. Generally, the place is not the point, though the moving on is, especially in the first two sections.

What is more the point, I think, is how he views himself, through three different individuals he travels with, and how he is changed by these extended encounters. As a young man, these encounters are accidental, and painful at times. They seem to change him, but perhaps he is at that stage of life where anyone he meets could change him. As a middle-aged man, the travel experience with a friend is purposeful, perhaps naive, and even more painful. I found it hard to read about, but at the same time I did not want to stop, as Galgut's prose, seemingly simple, had me in its spell.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Galgut can do no wrong. In a Strange Room is a thoughtful meditation on the power of solitude. Being alone in an alien environment is the motif of this novel which takes place across three trips taken by the central character, Damon. Through these disparate experiences, Galgut explores the power of solitude and alienation to help us to understand ourselves and the complexity of human connection, to see the world in different ways, and to illustrate the challenge of finding your place in the world. All this makes it sound like a peppy, Eat, Pray, Love kind of story but it’s far from it. This is a novel about difficult, confronting experiences in a world that defies human mastery. Galgut’s prose is incisive as always. A delight to read.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Space Between the Lines

Open any page of Galgut's 2010 novel, and you will see that, instead of being set close together as is the usual practice, there is a full line of white space between paragraphs, giving a curiously open look to the page. And where the page consists mostly of dialogue, without even quotation marks or the "he said, she said" indicators, the effect is both striking and curiously unsettling, as though there is nothing to root the book in reality or link its parts together. Were this a cheap publication, I might put this down to poor typography, but not so with Europa books, who are always meticulous about presentation. It is as though Galgut, whose most recent book is Arctic Summer, a biographical novel about E. M. Forster, had taken Forster's famous exhortation "Only connect," and resolutely denied it.

Yes, but it is only his starting point for doing something much deeply personal that is ultimately profoundly moving. The novel, which is subtitled "Three Journeys," features a South African writer called Damon, who is and is not the author; he refers to him in both the first and the third person, and even occasionally the second, as though an avatar of himself that he barely understands:

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.

The three parts show him in distant places away from his home in Cape Town, accompanying three different figures who also remain somewhat distant. In the first, called "The Follower," he accompanies an enigmatic German man on a grueling walking tour of Lesotho. In the second, "The Lover," he travels north-east as far as Kenya, and eventually to Europe, out of friendship with a trio of French-Swiss backpackers and his possible feeling for one of them. In the third, "The Guardian," he accompanies a suicidal woman (the lover of a close friend) to Goa and Southern India. Each story is complete in itself, but what makes this a novel rather than a trio of novellas is the growth of the central figure as (in the words of the book jacket) "he comes closer to confronting his own identity." The space between the lines in the printed book echoes the space between the lines in the story, as we see the central figure gain dimension, not so much from his interactions with others as from acknowledging the distances between them.

The novel opens in Greece, near Mycenae. Walking in almost deserted country, the Damon character sees a distant figure coming towards him, walking in the opposite direction. When they meet, they have a brief insignificant conversation.

Then they part again with a nod and draw slowly away from each other on the narrow white road, looking back now and then, until they are two tiny and separate points again, rising and falling with the undulations of the land.

It is an uncannily powerful passage, and also quite disturbing, as it sets up what will turn out to be a nightmare tour in Lesotho, and also the equally fraught journeys of the other two parts. Reading this after Galgut's portrait of Forster and his difficulties in connecting emotionally with others, I began to see why he had chosen the older author as his subject. For both are loners in much the same way, and both are gay. The sexual tension in many of the scenes here is palpable, but the spaces are more important still, whatever it is that stops a pair of people from asking, finding, or granting what they most need in each other. It is a sad book, but a powerful one.

One thing that surprised me, though, was how marvelous Galgut is in his physical descriptions. He never writes mere travelogues, and for the most part this is far from tourist Africa, Switzerland, or India. And yet I found I was getting a real appreciation for the countries he was passing through, especially the long trip north through Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya. It was a novel that sent me often to Google maps and images, a sporadic joy to illuminate the long journey of the soul.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are certain writers one discovers, whose works one reads, consumes, as if they were writing directly to you, for you. Damon Galgut is such an author for me. This is the fourth novel (a trio of novellas, actually) I've read by him, and it's the most intensely personal, and (perhaps along with 'The Good Doctor,') the most beautiful and harrowing.
You can find other reviews to tell you plot, etc. I'll say simply that Galgut is one of the most authentic and significant novelists writing today. His writing matters.
Like Coetzee in 'Boyhood,' Galgut writes about himself in the third person. However, he also slips into first now and then. I didn't/don't try to make sense of this. I trust him. His sense of the novel, of fiction, prose is singular.
Galgut writes of inner and outer landscapes. In these novellas, he journeys with another in Lesotho, Zambia, Zanzibar, Europe, India. It's the other that matters here: each novella centers on an extraordinary individual with whom the younger Galgut's life is entwined. He writes so well about these 'others,' and himself, the shifting terrain of the relationship. He is nothing if not brutally honest. But he is also deeply compassionate. He shows us what it means to be human, humane.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novel in three parts, each recounting a journey by protagonist Damon – one to Greece, one to southern Africa, and one to India. In the first part, which begins in Greece in 1993, Damon meets Reiner, a German, and they eventually reconnect and journey through Lesotho together. In the second, Damon follows a group of tourists as they backpack through Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya. In the third, Damon travels to Switzerland to visit his friend Jerome, then travels with his troubled friend, Anna, to India. Though Damon has the best of intentions, each journey ends in misfortune.

It is unusual in its voice, regularly switching between first person and third, and present and past tense. I assume that it is intended to convey the tone of a memoir, with the narrator looking back on his younger self, as indicated in this passage from the first section:

“He gets to the ruins in the middle of the afernoon. I can’t even remember now what they are, the remains of some big but obscure building, there was a fence that had to be climbed, there was a fear of dogs but no dogs appeared, he stumbles around among rocks and pillars and ledges, he tries to imagine how it was but history resists imagining. 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’m 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.”

To me it reads as a journey of self-discovery, where lessons are learned on what not to do in the future. It seems full of missed opportunities to form deeper connections with others. I first read this author’s The Promise, which won the Booker Prize in 2021. I really enjoyed this one and plan to seek out more of his work.

[Sunil · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you sit down and write a review for a book that deep down you know not just speaks for you but in its own strange way represents you ? Yes! represents you, or whatever that is you. You don't, you can't. You sit and close your eyes and let all the thoughts the book evoked within you turn inside your head, one after another like waves crashing on the shore. Some day when the stirring has settled, I will write. I know I will.

For now, all I can say is just that this book has been written makes me somehow feel less weird. That this book exists in its form and content brings a certain peace. This book shouldn't have ended.


Here's an extract:

Jerome, if I can't make you live in words, if you're only the dim evocation of a face under a fringe of hair, and others too, Alice and Christian and Roderigo, if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it is for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life.

He sits in the empty room, crying.

[George Ilsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written, and as Galgut perfectly sums up himself on page 111 — this is the story of what never happened. As marvellous as this may be, it can be tedious for the reader. This resulted in a conundrum for me, a beautiful text but wasn't very engaging.

It is of course also debatable whether these three separate pieces constitute a novel. I read this with a book club and the debate was quite passionate on this topic!

Something striking, and commendable, is the constant switching between third person and first person. He becomes I and I becomes he sometimes all in a sentence or in a paragraph.

Also striking, and quite unusual, is the complete lack of question marks in the entire text. This raises the question: do we even need question marks. Ever. Who knows. What do you think.

An earlier work from an author whose books continue to impress.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.”

That tile is not a coincidence, because in profound ways, parts of the narrator feel as if they’re gasping for air. Damon Galgut’s hauntingly conceived and elegantly written book is about the fluidity of identity. In three interwoven sections – The Follower, The Lover and the Guardian – the narrator, whose name is Damon, attempts to form a connection with a pivotal “other”; a relationship that always ends badly.

In the first—The Follower – Damon opts in to a particularly punishing hike across Lesotho with a man named Reiner, of whom he knows next to nothing. A sort of doppelganger, Reiner, in reality, is Damon’s opposite: stoical, preening, cold and vain. Through that journey, we learn more about Damon than Reiner: “The truth is that he is not a traveler by nature, it is a state that has been forced on him by circumstances…He is also never going towards something, but always away, away. This is a defect in his nature that travel has turned into a condition.”

Yet in The Lover, we see Damon taking his first steps towards that “something”…the potential of love with a young backpacker named Jerome. Almost despite himself, he cajoles African officials to let him into the country and pursue Jerome after spending days together. Yet, “The story of Jerome is one he’s lived through before, it is the story of what never happened, the story of travelling a long way while standing still.”

In the final story, the one that begins to feel intensely personal, Damon accompanies a recently diagnosed manic, psychotic friend with a death wish, Anna, on a journey to India. He engages in a harrowing and futile attempt to save her, eventually recognizing that “There’s no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear sky one morning and take away everything you’ve built…”

Damon Gulgut organically weaves from third person to first person narrative (here’s an example: “At this remove, his thoughts are lost to me now, and yet I can explain him better than my present self, he is buried under my skin.”) It’s an effective way of displaying his remove from his own persona and his alienation from self.

I do not know how much of the real Damon Galgut is contained in his character Damon (J.M. Coetzee uses a similar rhetorical delivery in his book Summertime). I would be surprised if these journeys were entirely fictional. Either way, it’s a “must read” book.

[Skrivena stranica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah, u redu. Cijela knjiga zapravo pripovijeda o usamljenosti i nemogućnosti glavnoga lika da se i s kim zapravo poveže. Tri dijela knjige imenovana su ulogama koje on poprima, ali one su tek glumljenje uloga i nema stvarne povezanosti. Ljudi ulaze u njegov život i izlaze gotovo jednako neprimjetno. Glavni junak je bijelac iz Južne Afrike i možda je to mjesto njegova nepripadanja. Očiti je potomak Europljana, ali kada stupi u kontakt s njima, svako poznanstvo se prije ili kasnije raspadne jer ne pripada toj kulturi. To su ljudi koji putuju iz različitih pobuda, a on zapravo ne dijeli ni jednu od njih. S ljudima koji stvarno žive u bilo kojoj od tih zemalja on nema doticaja stvarnoga, i oni svi ispadaju samo oni koji će od njega na neki način izvući novac za neke usluge.
On stalno bježi, on je stalo u potrazi. Od čega, za čime, ni sam ne zna. Glavni junak gleda na svoju prošlost i pripovijeda čudnom kombinacijom prvog i trećeg lica, prošlog i sadašnjeg vremena. Pripovijedanje je bilo uistinu zanimljivo ostvareno i donosi određenu invenciju, jer pripovjedač u pravilu ne govori o sebi u trećem licu kada govori o svojoj prošlosti.
U redu, nisam osjećala ništa dok sam čitala. Pratilo me mrtvilo i dosada i ne mogu reći da sam osjetila išta od one euforije koju obećavaju preporučitelji na zadnjoj korici.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a novel that's really made up of three disconcerting novellas. The stories are not dependent on each other but they are very consistent and stubborn in theme: Isolation, chance encounters and the inability to strike meaningful, lasting relationships, pointless journeys that resolve nothing, of being out of place.

The prose is wonderful: Elegant, tight and minimalist. There's nothing awkward or ungainly to be found here. It reminds me a lot of Coetzee at his best. Throughout the novel Galgut shifts to and fro between third person and first (and sometimes second). This could be gimmicky but it turns out to be very effective; in one respect it promotes a very personal, authentic feel to the stories - much of it is clearly auto-biographical - but when the switch comes it allows the reader to question the veracity or trustworthiness of what's being expressed. It lingers somewhere in between a memoir and a work of fiction and it does nothing but enhance the reading experience.

The book is infused with a certain amount of hopelessness; the quality of nothing being of much importance or seriousness:

"A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return."

It is no co-incidence the title is taken from a passage in William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying": ”Then he sits in the sun, listening to the water, reading. In a strange room, you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. The words come to him from a long way off.”

The first two novellas are stronger than the (admittedly harrowing) concluding story. Possibly because they are more ambiguous, with the vagueness adding tension and tautness to the narrative. A feeling of melancholy and tenderness - and also timelessness - permeates the telling and the quiet desperation this often yields is very compelling.

[Hanneke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dit boek stond op de shortlist voor de Booker Prize, maar heeft niet gewonnen. Volgens mij onterecht, want het is een van die boeken die zo’n impact heeft dat je er nog dagen van bij moet komen. En dat gebeurt alleen als je echt geraakt wordt. Als de gebeurtenissen, de menselijke interactie of gebrek daaraan, je pijnlijk bekend voorkomen.

Het boek beschrijft drie reizen van de hoofdpersoon, een jonge Zuidafrikaan, die Damon heet. Of de verhalen autobiografisch zijn, kan niet met zekerheid vastgesteld worden, maar ik vermoed dat het grotendeels Galgut’s eigen belevenissen zijn. De hoofdpersoon in de eerste twee reizen, die zich afspelen in Griekenland en Afrika, is een einzelgänger die zoekt naar aansluiting, zielsverwantschap, vriendschap of liefde. Maar hij is niet in staat de cruciale laatste stap te zetten of die ene zin te uiten, die zijn leven een andere wending zou kunnen geven. Dit citaat beschrijft het goed: Would it make any difference to what follows, perhaps it would, perhaps everything comes down to one silence too many. Ik ga hier niet de gebeurtenissen tijdens de reizen door Griekenland, Afrika en Zwitserland beschrijven. In tegenstelling tot de eerste twee verhalen, gaat het laatste verhaal niet zo zeer over de verteller zelf, maar over zijn belevenissen in India met een manisch-depressieve vriendin, die eindigen in een absolute catastrofe. Horror in paradise.

Het boek is beslist geen reisverhalenboek. Het beschrijft de belevenissen van de hoofdpersoon tijdens reizen. Wel vond ik het heel interessant om de diverse landen beschreven te zien vanuit het oogpunt van een rondtrekkende toerist. Desolate gebieden, paradijselijke oorden, omkooppraktijken bij grensovergangen, de giechelende vrouwen in het Indiase ziekenhuis. Groots boek, kan het alleen maar zeer aanbevelen!

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Germaine Greer on a review programme that was looking at the Booker short listed novels complained that in this book there is little about the countries visited, even though it is a kind of travel book, more about the state of the mind of its main protagonist, a figure that slips from third person to first, sometimes in the course of a sentence, and is called 'Damon'. What struck her is its solipsism. She has a point. Often it is the gaps between destinations, the ennui of this type of travel (A large part of travelling consists purely in waiting...departure halls of airports, bus stations, lonely kerbsides in the heat) that comes over rather more strongly than the sights and sounds of the countries visited. 'Damon' is a loner always just missing in relationships, gay but not sure or strong about it, and, yes, self absorbed, but trying not to be: In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much... In this state travel isn't celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself. He travels because he is bored by the anguish of staying still.

So don't expect a lot of laughs. However I think Greer is wrong, you do get a 'flavour' of the places he visits, the long lakes of Malawi, the mountains of rural Lesotho, the beaches and plumbing of Goa, the customs offices and trains, the heat everywhere and the dust, or alternatively the primeval lightening.

Beautifully written all the way through, with overtones of Beckett - the following is dialogue (none of your boring punctuation though):

In one of your letters.
Yes.
You said you were looking forward to seeing me again.
Yes.
What did you mean by that.
...I don't know what I meant.
You don't know what you meant.
I was looking forward to seeing you.
Nothing else.
Not that I can think of.

The first two parts are more comtemplative, at arm's length (still absorbing), often just about walking:
They walk and walk, all the motion latent in the vast curves of the earth somehow contracted into the dynamics of this movement, one leg swinging past the other, each foot planted and uprooted in turn, the whole surface of the world has been trodden down just like this over time. But the third part maybe involves the reader more because 'Damon' is a guardian to a mentally unstable woman who attempts suicide and a lot of the plot is caught up in his attempts to save her life, the messy bloody shitty details of her treatment and stay in the Indian hospital and the relationships he is forced to forge with others to keep her alive and himself sane.

Altogether a satisfying book, even if this bloke is definitely a 'half empty' sort:
In fact he doesn't sleep much, the boat is lurching and the deck is hard and uncomfortable. Dangling above them is a huge metal hook on a crane and all his latent uneasiness becomes focused on this hook, what if it falls, he keeps waking from jagged dreams to see that dark shape punched out on the sky. The night is starry and huge, depsite this one concentration of dread at the very centre of it, above him.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up

I've definitely found a new favourite in Damon Galgut. Initially a tiny bit hesitant to round up because I didn't love it quite as much as The Good Doctor, but that's a poor excuse; this has less plot which is often something that bothers me but the third (and final) section more than made up for that. I'm finding it hard to put my finger on quite what made me like this so much. Perhaps the palpable alienation and solitude experienced by 'Damon' and the perfectly evoked places he travels to. One -- like The Good Doctor -- to revisit in the future. Now time to get my hands on everything else he's written...

[Kimbofo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damon Gadget’s In a Strange Room is a lush, hypnotic novel that explores longing and desire through the prism of travel.

Divided into three seemingly unrelated parts — The Follower, The Lover and The Guardian — it merges in the reader’s mind to form a seamless whole.

If you’ve ever gone travelling/backpacking, felt alienated or not known what you want from life, it will resonate.

To read my review in full, please visit my blog.

[Brian Murray · Rating 1 out of 5]

Emotionally stunted South African male travels the world and has frustrating, horrible and pointless experiences. Pretty much a waste of 180 pages of perfectly good paper.

[Deea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three journeys. All of them strange. All of them very different from one another. The first one conveys the dynamics of power between two individuals. The second a strange, but very personal love story. And the third… well, the third is the strangest of them all and even though it is very gripping and keeps one reading to see what is going to happen in the end, it is the one I liked the least.

The title “conjures what’s at the heart of the book which is being away from home, somewhere strange”, in strange rooms (to quote Galgut). The author “borrowed” the idea from Faulkner’s “When I Lay Dying”. There is a persisting sense of alienation throughout the whole book. The author who tells the stories (“the he”) is the same with the main character of the stories (“the I”), but is he really? The point of view is constantly switched between the two adding even more to the sense of alienation: is our present sense of self the same as our past ones?

Is this a novel? Is it a memoir? Or is it a travelogue? I think it can be all of them at once and maybe none as well. The book defies categorization. These three journeys took place in real life and the author realized while writing these three parts later on in life that his work was not only about the journeys as he had intended at first, but rather about memory and its quirks. When telling a story that has actually happened, we choose what to emphasize and what to omit, we are telling everything from a certain point of view, while the others are left out. “All memory is” therefore “a way of reconstructing the past. The act of narrating a memory is an act of creating a fiction.” (Galgut again).

I liked the writing in this book and its ideas very much. Especially in the second story. I however had the constant feeling (just like with “The Promise”) that everything was very dry and so detached. And that permeating feeling of alienation… was really getting to me. Well, I think the dryness might be a kind of signature for Galgut’s works. I am yet to find out if this is true or not when reading other books of his.

[Ben Winch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book and Damon Galgut is a brave, committed writer. Committed? It takes commitment to lay yourself bare, without self-pity, without shame, without apology. Nothing is wasted here; there is no wallowing. Perhaps owing to the simple innovation of the form (a trilogy - or better, triptych - of short novellas, each recounting a journey), there is little need for scene-setting or backstory. Galgut's alter-ego/protagonist exists only when he's traveling, never sinking into routine for long, never far from drama or life-changing occurrence. Nor does this seem shallow; taken together the three episodes suggest a trajectory that extends far in either direction of what is told. True, it's a balancing act, and at times he seems about to fall. In the third story especially, the distance that has leant perspective to the other pieces almost collapses, as Galgut describes an experience so harrowing, so singular, so detailed that it must be autobiographical. (Probably the whole of the book is autobiographical, yet somehow it is not a memoir.) Galgut seems aware of this battle to maintain perspective, and frames each piece with a third-person point of view that gives way at points, as if instinctually, to the first-person. Whether this is systematic or not I don't know, but by the third piece we are almost in the realm of memoir, the beauty of the descriptions all but gone, replaced with a simple transcript of unrelenting anguish in an Indian hospital. But what a pay-off! This is brutal, real, powerful. And because of the balancing effect of the other two pieces, it is transmuted - just - into something like fiction.

In a Strange Room is not political, not overtly, but in examining the interaction of various Caucasian peoples in Africa and India it inevitably touches on politics. At one point, a Chilean man tells Galgut of an experience in South Africa, where a young American, a recent friend of the Chilean's, 'full of sentiment and goodwill about the country, talking... about racial harmony and the healing of the past' was stabbed in the back in Johannesburg for his watch and forty rand. Galgut writes: 'Why he tells this story I don't know, but there seems to be some kind of accusation in it.' Galgut neither defends nor criticises his country, but his alienation - familiar to me as an Australian but magnified in him beyond anything I have known - is surely, at least partly, that of all white South Africans, that of a transplanted culture. How are we to live in a place we have no claim to, or at least not the extravagant claim of our ancestors, but which is the only home we know? Galgut's response is asceticism. He acts, like a child in a stranger's house, afraid to touch anything - or anyone - lest it reveal him for the trespasser he is. Often bewildered, tortured, at times transfigured by guilt, he hurls himself out on his journeys as if to force himself to live, to render his alienation so acute that he must interact. And without having to spell it out, he suggests much about what it is to be a member of the so-called 'First World', and about the respect we owe our less-fortunate neighbours.

Plotless but never frustratingly so, and so focussed on its subject of who we reach out to in times of transformation that by the end its shape seems inevitable, this is a raw and confronting work that lays bare the motives behind a self-imposed rootlessness. With his conscious mind, Galgut knows it already, but on each journey some desperate, shadowed side of him seeks, against hope, to disprove it.

Wayfarer, there is no way -
Only foam trails in the sea.

(Antonio Machado)

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Part travelogue, part psychologically deconstructive journey, In A Strange Room kept me at arm’s length for almost the entirety of its 180 pages. Structured as three mid-length stories strung together loosely as a novella, the most pressing thought I’m left with is that the book lacked focus—both on a macro and micro level, as none of the tales, independent of the whole, came together with any level of clarity beyond the objective curiosity they first inspire.

The three sections—“The Follower,” “The Lovers,” and “The Guardian”—take the main character, Damon, on journeys through Africa, India and parts of Europe, but at no point do the destinations have life breathed into them beyond the most basic clinical descriptions. The same could be said for the manner in which dialogue and interaction of any kind is handled—surgical, detached, and lacking all emotion.

I’ve been stewing over this review for days now, as I really don’t know what to say. I didn’t hate the book by any stretch, but neither would I recommend it to anyone. What is described as a journey not only through a series of exotic, sometimes treacherous, sometimes serene, landscapes, but also as an adventure as one man experiences a series of encounters that would change his life, feels like a limp, disaffected series of uncomfortable conversations from a man that seemingly wants and does not want to connect with the world around him at the same time.

The narrative choice of switching back and forth from third person to first, sometimes within the same paragraph, did not have the intended effect—I did not feel, at those moments of first person narration, an increased attachment or intimacy with Damon’s thoughts. Instead, it felt clumsy, as if I were reading the work of a writer who could neither decide to be here nor there with his thoughts.

As a purely psychological experience, there is a lot that could be dissected from Galgut’s writing style and affectations. But is it an enjoyable, intriguing, mystifying read? Not in the slightest. He approaches intrigue only with the last story, “The Guardian”, in which he takes charge over a severely bi-polar friend. In those final pages, glimpses of his humanity sparkle in and amongst some rather laborious literary choices, but never do they shine bright enough to provide you with an entry point into the young narrator’s heart.

[Larry H]

Damon, the narrator of Damon Galgut's beautiful yet spare In a Strange Room, can't seem to settle down. Every time he finds himself settling into a place, he is struck by the somewhat inexplicable need to roam. Perhaps this quote says it best: "There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it's a long way from home."



The book follows Damon on three separate journies, which are three separate chapters. In the first, he meets up with German hiker Reiner, and they wander through parts of Greece, and later, take several circles through Lesotho. On his second journey, Damon travels through Nigeria, Tanzania and Malawi, and he meets (and often encounters) several people, including Swiss siblings Jerome and Alice. And on the third journey, Damon is caring for his friend Anna, who is suffering from significant mental illness. Each journey is characterized by Damon's near connections, which never quite turn out the way he hopes. Each journey sends Damon deeper into himself, his motivations and fears. And each journey leaves him wondering, what if?



Galgut's writing style was very interesting. He doesn't use quotation marks or question marks, but simply sets quotes off as separate sentences. And at times, the narrator is referred to as "I," and other times, "he" or "him." I thought the story was tremendously compelling, but much like those with which Damon came into contact, I found myself longing for connections. Too often the story led you to believe something would happen, only to be thwarted by Damon's conscience, anxiety, fears or lack of direction. The last two chapters each had heartbreaking notes but much was unsaid, even to the readers, so filling in the blanks wasn't always easy or satisfying. Ultimately, this book was, in Damon's own words, "the story of what never happened, the story of travelling a long way while standing still." Very interesting.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Was I completely mad? How could I have thought to buy a book just like that – in such a frivilous, impetuous way – without checking to see that at least thirty of my Goodreads friends had given it the thumbs up?’


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