In a strange room

‘In a strange room’ written by Damon Galgut was written in 2003 and was a finalist for the man booker prize. The book is divided into three sections, “The Follower”, “The Lover” and “The Guardian”.

The protagonist of the book is Damon, the narrator, who refers to himself in the first and third person at his own whim, and sometimes simultaneously makes for an interesting writing style.

“But memory has its own distance, in part he is me, in part he is a stranger I am watching”

“Happy and unhappy, he falls asleep in the end, and dreams about, no, I don’t remember his dreams.”

It may also be the reason why the author decided to shun all the question and quotation marks. The first story is set in 1993, and the last one just a few years ago, and as we go from the first story to the last, the presence of “I’ increases ; the memories are clearer than of the first story, or as a review stated “the person describing experiencing the events is closer to the person recalling them”.

The title of each section defines the role Damon needs to play in that part of the story. In the first section “The Follower”, we are introduced to our protagonist Damon, a trekker in Greece from South Africa. During one of his trek, he runs into a German by the name of Reiner. Though not heading in the same direction, when they meet, Damon follows Reiner to Lesotho, where he is headed for climbing. The German is bold and proud sometimes but is uncordial others “He will not speak either, but in him silence is power. Unlike me, unlike me.” Although both of them are travelling for totally different reasons, one for more existential reasons and the other wants to make some life decisions, Damon perceives a charge of eroticism between them. The eloquent prose employed here has an undertow of homo-eroticism between the two men in their conversation.

“Would you like some, he says, holding out an apple, I found this in my bag. The two of them pass it between them, solemnly biting and chewing, the one lying propped up on an elbow, the other sitting with his knees drawn up, all it will take is a tiny movement from one of them, a hand extended, or the edge of the sleeping bag lifted, would you like to get in, but neither makes the move, one is too scared and the other too proud...”

Damon recalls a line from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that is possible the inspiration for the name of the novel

“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.”

In the very next line he sums up what all these journeys are about for Damon with all the different roles and alternative prose.

“I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.”

In the second story “The lover” he casts doubt over his ability to love things or places or people or most of all the person, place and thing that he is. He agrees to the fact that “Without love nothing has value,nothing can be made to matter very much”. As he travels across Africa he meets disparate group of people while he explores themes of remorse and hypocrisy of the Western tourist. It is in this story he meets a fellow traveler Jerome, who holds a fascination for Damon, the two of them not sharing a common language communicating by the means of looks. Although the story is titles “The Lover”, it is much more about how far these two people, Damon and Jerome are, and how they are still able to form a connection, rather than a physical union. For me this was a very interesting [art of the book for the fact when Damon reflects upon the fine line that separates memory and portrayal.

“Jerome, if I can’t make you live in words … 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.”

The third story “The Guardian” entails Damon travelling to India and taking care of her friend Anna. Damon describes Anna as person with “a future full of impressive possibilities” but is plagued by depression and personality disorder which results in her “losing the plot, living in fast motion, speeding along.” The story is about how Damon struggles in dealing with “this thing that’s taken up station inside her, driving along with so much fury and power”. Continuing in this story is the trend of Damon not having full control of the situation from the outset. Anna drinks when she has vowed to avoid it, she talks about betraying her lover and she is continuously testing Damon’s vow to look after her.

“It's begun to feel as if a stranger has taken up residence in her, somebody dark and restless that he doesn't trust, who wants to consume Anna completely. This stranger is still cautious, still biding her time. Meanwhile the person that he knows is visible, and sometimes in the ascendant...But the dark stranger always appears again, peering slyly over her shoulder...”

Each story in the book is kind of insight into a different kind of relationship and how in each case Damon is unable to satisfy the role but also that both parties fail to connect properly.