The Persistence of Memory

by Tony Eprile

"Throws all its chips in the air like a dazzling Nabokovian trick."—Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

In this humane yet savagely witty portrait of apartheid South Africa in its waning years, Tony Eprile renders his homeland's turbulent past with striking clarity. The Baltimore Sun declared Eprile's "horrifying yet heartrendingly beautiful" prose to be "comparable to his fellow authors of Apartheid Andre Brink and Nadine Gordimer." As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion, the protagonist, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee with astonishing results. Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee calls The Persistence of Memory "a story of coming to maturity in South Africa in the bad old days. Always warm-hearted, sometimes comic, ultimately damning."

Genres: Fiction, South Africa, Africa, Novels, Historical

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2004

Reviews

[Colleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it through, but couldn't really get into it. I don't know much about South Africa, and the book could have explained it a bit more. Although he did include footnotes, it didn't really help me much. It was overall okay, but certainly can't say I "liked" it, therefore the 2 star rating. Good thing it wasn't too long!

Dr. Vish, why do psychiatrists always answer a question with a question?
Why do you want to know?

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Final chapters made this book for me.

[Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

An accounting of a period during apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s in South Africa when a war broke out between South Africans (the SADF-the South African Defense Force) and SWAPO, the South West Africa People's Organization, for control over South West Africa involving Nambia and Angola. Because these areas were rich in oil and minerals, the war drew in the CIA and the soviets, especially the Cubans. It is a complicated story that is difficult to follow. It all ends in the withdrawal of the CIA after Congress learned of their involvement, the end of apartheid, and a negotiated peace by the UN, all followed by a truth and reconciliation commission after the end of apartheid. I might have done better to read a straight up accounting of the conflict than a novel about a soldier fulfilling his military obligation caught up in the conflict who has his own emotional turmoil. It was a lot to keep up with and I just keep thinking wait what is happening? To who? Why? So if I were South African maybe or a scholar of the history I would have done much better with this book. As it stands, I should probably read a different book just about the war.

It reminded me in some ways of Heinrich Boll's The Clown in that the main character can only tell the truth and is cursed with perfect recall of what happened to him and around and is unable to justify the war or forget it. In Boll's case it was Germany and World War II so more famliar background material. The protagonist in The Clown is destroyed by his inability to conform to post war forgetfulness and mock repentance. Eprile's protagonist Paul is actually helped by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in some ways and is able to cobble a life together for himself so a more upbeat ending.

What this book does best is examine the culture of south africans from the englishers to the afrikaners to the tribal people -- how they interact and how they define themselves. That was the most successful part.

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bleh, I don't even feel like writing a
review on this one. Didn't care for the writing style at all
(self-inflated, pedantic) but there was a time or two that I related to the
story. Part of it is set in Namibia. But if you haven't been to Namibia or
think you'll ever go, don't bother. Actually, just don't bother.

[Goodwell Mateyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book. A funny satire but don't be fooled. Underneath the parody is a critical and excellent examination of white society in Apartheid Soith Africa. It pulls no punches yet making you laugh to stitches at the same time. A fine work, written in good style.

[Leslie Boren · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book. Very slow and boring. I wanted to like it and read about half before moving on to something more enjoyable.

[Leah McNaughton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting a deep thoughtfull book from the description and then a friend of mine said she read it and it was hilarious I may have to read again.

[David]

novel on South Africa, good NYT review, borrow from Mom and Dad

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some novels we remember fondly. Sometimes when we return to them they don't seem as grand as our previous experiences with them. This is my reaction to The Persistence of Memory. Though I found what I was looking for, a portrait of the new South Africa, the novel also seemed more war story and bildungsroman than I'd remembered and so interested me less. The protagonist Paul Sweetbread certainly exists in the new South Africa, every surface of which Eprile seems to touch: the new multiethnicity, the rising crime rate, the Afrikaans past, the Afrikaner present, townships, the white enclaves, the bullying white attitudes, poverty, AIDS, and more. The novel concerns itself with South African society from the viewpoint of Sweetbread's growing up white and Jewish in the years spanning the transition from apartheid to the time of Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions trying to examine the past and find forgiveness where needed. Eprile emphasizes the novel as war story in an Afterword which tries to make sense of the long war in Angola and Namibia, but the hinge the novel swings on, an investigation of crimes committed there by Sweetbread's commanding officer, is never resolved. The reader is left with the bildungsroman and Eprile trying to complete it with a ritual involving an ancient African woman/divine who Sweetbread enlists to exorcize the past in a ceremony involving chickens and blood. By all this I thought he was attempting to show acceptance of the country's African past as well as symbolically joining all elements of a varied society. I'm afraid it's all a little tenuous and unsatisfactory. It's an ambitious novel but not quite muscular enough to bring together all the ideas inherent in South African history and societies as they've tumbled together here at the beginning of a new century. As the name suggests, Paul Sweetbread is a gentle and kind man, and he's trying to embrace the positive and the diverse he sees in the new South Africa to offset the horrors he saw in the northern deserts. But I'm afraid because we're never shown the resolution of the crimes of Sweetbread's superior, the past continues to hang in the air of the novel like noxious fumes. Because the past won't go away, memory in its persistence becomes just as noxious.

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Bildungsroman about growing up in apartheid South Africa -- a white boy at school, then an army conscript, and afterwards.

I would like to be able to say that this book "tells it like it was" in the same way that Andre Brink's A Dry White Season does, but two things make me hesitate to say that. One is that I never served in the army, so I cannot say that the middle section, which deals with that, is accurate. Secondly, there are several inaccuracies about known things in the book, which cast doubt upon the accuracy of some of the other parts,

The inaccuracties bothered me. One of the most egregious errors is a reference to the Australian national rugby team as the All Blacks, Another was a reference to a Xhosa chief, Makhana, which goes on to say that Makhana wasn't his real name, but a reference to his left-handedness. There is a footnote to the effect that his real name was Nxele. But it is Nxele, and not Mahkana, which is a referwence to left-handedness.

At first sight these errors (and there are several more) are not about matters central to the plot, and one might attribute them to careless writing and editing. But on second thoughts, they relate to something that iscentral to the plot and is embodied in the very title of the book. The protagonist, we are told, has an excellent mewmory, and at one point, when he testifies before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the reliability of his memory is both demonstrated and brought into question.

If the protagonist's memory is crucial to the plot, then perhaps these errors scattered through the book (told in the first persion) are intended as hints that the protagonist's memory was not as good as he claimed it was, and therefore, far from "telling it like it is", the book is a kind of bizarre fantasy, reminiscient of Jean Genet's The Balcony.

So though I wanted to give it four or five stars, in the end I gave it only three.

[lee lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me longer to read this than I intended. It isn't, or at least for me wasn't, a page-turner. Instead, it's a thoughtful and often painful look at a subject I know very little about. The narrator is hovers at a state between sympathetic and pathetic, probably the best example of an unreliable narrator who no one would call 'unreliable.' Early on, I liked him, and by the end of the book I knew I would miss him. The narrator (and, by extension Eprile) is a gifted storyteller. The fact that I didn't want to hear too much of his story in one night is, in this case anyway, a complement. Man, I have a lot to learn...

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A browsing-the-library-shelves find that explored the secret war in Namibia by the South African Defense Forces through the eyes of a Jewish conscripted soldier with total recall. I especially liked the main character's experiences with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end. The author's overly complicated vocabulary got on my nerves a bit. It seemed like he was trying to be overly literary, and I thought it distracted from the narrative. A solid three stars.

[Troy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the perspective on South Afica, the changes during Apartheid and its undoing, the Cold War setting (i.e., Namibia client state, Angolan war, etc.), being Jewish in an Afrikaaner regime. The writing is good and sometimes very good, and the character gifted with perfect memory bears witness to a twisted time and place. Lacked enough punch or sauce to be great

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to read this again because I read it so fast before I can't remember it very well. But roughly, it's about the war that gets called "South Africa's Vietnam," and it's a very good story with good writing. And, they do spell "persistence" correctly in the book, just not in this good reads thing.

[missy jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so fascinated by this book: by its subject matter (Apartheid-era South Africa and the war in Namibia), by the memorable and interesting characters, and by the incredibly unique writing style. A great read.

[Elissa Levan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, evocative, and absorbing. A sort of coming-of-age story for a young man who does so a little later, perhaps, than most, and in a context, the last gasps of apartheid, that provided a test of character of a sort most never face.

[Beverley Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

The coming of age of lapsed Jew Paul Sweetbread. I didn't particularly like Paul but I stayed with him through awkward adolescence into maturity. His army life on the Angolan border and his testimony to the TRC added depth to the story and his character.

[Renée Heaton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate to say it but I didn't like this book at all. And I'm sure that says more about me than the book. Must be my mind set or a consequence of other things going on but, to put it simply, I just couldn't get in to it. I forced myself to finish it though, and perhaps that was a mistake.

[Paul Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Generally very good, about apartheid era south Africa, I liked the view of race relations from an innocent white kid.

[Peggy]

Although this book had good reviews, I tried several times to finish reading it and just couldn't stay interested.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

[Alan]

About a South African youth with eidetic memory. South African Defense Force (SWAPO), Angola a Namibia. Very well written, interesting concept and intriguing times.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story about the last days of Apartheid, it's well done. But I just didn't love the story.

Lots of Afrikaans thrown in, which gives the book a nice flavor of language.