The Promise is my first South African Literary work and my only thought while reading this is how did I miss this? To say this is one of the best narratives I have read this year will definitely not be an exaggeration. The Promise is essentially a book about fulfilling a promise, made by the Swart family matriarch before her death. But it's more than that.


Let's talk about the brilliance that is narration. We have a narrator who knows anything and everything about the characters, even ghosts, in this book. This narrator is sneaky, sassy and strikes when no ones expects them to. It was like watching a telenovela with all the characters and the narrator. And when we see the character deceiving us, the narrator is there, hinting to us that they mean it differently.


This narrator seems to have an eerie sense of humour. They quip about how it is convenient for people to forget the dead at the sight of food. In another instance, they moan about how inconvenient it is to die on the finals of WorldCup. The sarcasm of losing oneself in vanity and gluttony, the irony of serving the others while you can't serve yourself, the narrator knows and shows anything and everything.


We have 4 decades, 4 funerals, 4 seasons (as @but_i_thought_ said, it's a South African seasonal quartet) and 4 landmark events form the basic frame of the plot. But you will be lost if you read this book superficially. The beauty of the narration is finding the clues in between the lines. It is not about what is said, it is about what is not said. 


I interpret that the author intends to represent the Swart family house as the nation and the promise made by the Swarts as the politics of the nation. And again by not giving a proper voice to Salome and showing Lukas as the stereotypical black man and the murderer of Astrid as a man of colour, Galgut shows how the voice of the natives and how people are colour are invalidated again and again, even though they are in their own country.


Another thing I loved in this book is the description of human bodies. The inner working of the mind, the need for sexual pleasure even at the darkest times, the fragility of human bodies as they age, is all well captured. One can feel the heat flashes seeping through the pages and wipe their brows. This satirical, omnipresent narration didn't fail to deliver what I expected in a 'Booker Longlisted' title. I am going to real salty if I didn't see it in the shortlist. 


Notes:
While the whole setup of South Africa is exciting to read, I know little to nothing about the political scenario of SA. So I obviously refrained from commenting on it. Also, I didn't talk about the sibling relationships as it feels too personal to talk about. I chose this cover because of the significance lightning plays in the story.