It is wiser to judge a book by its epigraph than its cover. Damon Galgut’s for his beautiful novel, In a Strange Room, is the title of a painter’s book — ’He Has No House.’ As economical and haunting as that thought is, so it is with the novel. At the beginning, our gentle, lost, lonely narrator tells us this of himself in the third person: “He is intensely happy, which is possible for him when he is walking and alone.” Then, over three separate but organically united stories, set in three different parts of the world, he demonstrates to us the facets of this self-deception. He is validated by the relationships he strikes on the road, and is broken by them. But to stay still would be worse. And so he keeps moving, never searching, simply moving. Galgut’s words are spare, introspective and in the present tense like his great compatriot Coetzee. His voice is softer, like a whispered confession, his meditations on living, losing and dying just as valuable. It is a book of travel that is much finer, much more affecting, than that can ever sound.
Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the Ondaatje Prize-winning The Sly Company of People Who Care.