Damon Galgut recounts three journeyings he went on at different times during his adult life in In a Strange Room - and they’re all mostly kinda meh!
The first one sees a young Damon meeting a handsome young German chap while hiking in Greece. They decide to meet up again and attempt a much longer, more arduous hike in Lesotho - but will their tenuous friendship (and possible romance) survive the gauntlet?
The second one is about Damon wandering around the Zambia/Zimbabwe/Malawi regions with a group of international travellers. He doesn’t get on with the more entitled ones and fancies the cute Swiss guy - will they/won’t they?
The third and final travelogue is set in western India where Damon’s severely mentally-ill friend Anna accompanies him on the trip, ostensibly to get well, but things go from bad to worse as her substance abuse spirals out of control.
I say travelogue as these feel like memoirs of the author’s past experiences although this is labelled as fiction. As memoirs/travelogues, they’re not especially compelling, and as works of fiction I’m not sure what Galgut’s driving at. The throughline seems to be Galgut being unable to connect with others - whether it’s becoming potential boyfriends with the German and Swiss fellas, making friends with the other travellers, or maintaining his friendship with his sick friend (the latter definitely isn’t his fault - she’s actively trying to off herself).
Is that the point of why he’s travelling - to connect with others - and he’s not achieving this? Is the “strange room” of the title, his body/self - not feeling comfortable with himself and/or with others, and that’s why his various attempts at relationships don’t really happen? No idea.
The first part was faintly interesting in seeing his friendship with the German slowly disintegrate over the course of their gruelling hike. The second part didn’t go anywhere and was the least interesting section of the book. The third part was morbidly fascinating in seeing someone so completely self-destructive try to end it all, with poor Damon trying to help her/deal with the fallout of her actions.
Besides a couple of the travelogues being sporadically interesting with the occasional dramatic scene, I was mostly disengaged from the book. Too much of it is made up of passive descriptive passages where nothing was happening. Galgut’s prose is fine - readable, competent, if unremarkable - but the stories he imparted weren’t that striking and I found In a Strange Room quite consistently unimpressive.
No comments:
Post a Comment