In A Strange Room (4*)

I'll admit I expected something more explicitly gay than this trio of novellas, linked by a character who shares the name of the Booker Prize-winning author, after the New York Times cited In a Strange Room as an antecedent to the black queer literature now flourishing in Africa.  It's an oblique work, narrated by the same reticent South African man in the first and third persons, sometimes in the same sentence, as he aimlessly roams the world.  But Damon Galgut's piercing insights about travel more than compensate for his book's absence of plot.

Between them there is an excitement made partly from fear, they are committed to a situation of which the outcome is unknown, travel and love have this much in common. 

*  *  *  *  *

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Based on my own writing experience, I'm guessing Galgut kept journals as a young man, and has focused on the key landmarks of his self-discovery.  In neither "The Follower" nor "The Lover" does Galgut consummate his crushes on European companions as white as he but as foreign as the places they visit.  These sections seem to be his personalized take on an idea that Carson McCullers explored so  in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe:

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

While Galgut experiences explores both roles in the book's first two sections, tragic circumstances in last force him to make a choice. With the stakes so much higher, the narrative explodes, and the boy who has been using travel to escape his repressed and mostly chaste life finally becomes a man--a lover--when his best friend and the horrors of the Indian health care system test his commitment to another person.