The Promise

A woman dies, and a husband remains with a promise, that gets passed on throughout the decades, while South Africa experiences violent and revolutionary changes. The family slowly crumbles, and the unkept promise is the bad taste that remains.

And not even when it's finally kept, you get much satisfaction from it, as it's too little too late.

This won the Booker prize so it's fine for me not to be a fan. I've argued with some people about it to try and understand why it's liked, and I just can't get there.

Everyone acts like the narrative style is new but it's such a clear comparison with Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, a comparison that does nothing but harm to this book.

You would think the point of constantly switching to show different characters inner lives is to show the complexity of being human and interacting with others, how people appear on the outside vs their inner thoughts, but I genuinely think you could write this book with literally no internal monologue from anyone and you would still know everything about each character. This narrative style didn't actually add anything which makes me wonder if the point was just to...be......different?

Nice to read something so South African, that's something.