Only Amor survives to keep the promise and suspense alive. As if this denial were a curse upon the Swarts, Galgut organizes the book around three other Swart funerals-and three more denials-over the next four decades. Though only thirteen, Amor reminds her family of that overheard promise, but she is ignored at her mother’s funeral. Just before the mother of the three Swart children dies in 1986, she makes her husband promise to give Salome a small house, a shack really, on the Swart estate. Salome is the mainspring of the plot and the reason for Galgut’s title. The Swarts also have employed for decades a Black housekeeper Salome who, as Faulkner’s Dilsey says, has “seed de first en de last” of the white family in this tale of tragic and sometimes comic disintegration in a time of national racial integration. But the old guard’s contemporary inheritors are a cynical and self-destructive son named Anton, a composite of Faulkner’s Jason and Quentin Compson a promiscuous and self-indulgent daughter Astrid (Galgut’s Caddy) and-not an “idiot” like Benjy but another daughter, Amor, who was struck by lightning as a child and has always seemed a bit slow and possibly brain damaged to her family.

Galgut’s ironically named Swart family are, like Faulkner’s Compsons, desperate to keep their generations-held property (a farm outside Pretoria) and the sense of power that ownership gives them. Very late in the novel, Galgut quotes “tomorrow and tomorrow,” the words in Macbeth that precede life “is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” Those who have read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury will already have noticed the parallels between Faulkner’s novel about a decaying white family in the American South early in the twentieth century and Galgut’s story about a dying Afrikaner family in South Africa during the last forty years. The book was published in the United States in the Spring and received little attention, but American readers may well have a particular interest in The Promise. Last month the South African writer Damon Galgut won the British Booker Prize for The Promise, a novel set in South Africa.

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