Syntax of the Self in Damon Galgut’s In a Strange

Abstract

Reviewers of Damon Galgut’s novel, In a Strange Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, are in agreement about its most distinctive quality. Toby Lichtig describes it as a narrative which “radiates alienation” (21); Philip Womack characterises Galgut as “a master of isolation and intensity;” while Eileen Battersby defines the theme of the novel as “loneliness and the search for love,” adding that Galgut “invariably describes psychological suffering and emotional alienation with the accuracy of a punch dispatched hard and deep to the stomach.” Jan Morris lists a number of “preferred Galgutian words” that convey the quality of In a Strange Room: “placelessness, free-fall, centreless, inertia, unweighted, substanceless” (41). And Maria Russo begins her review by saying of the novel’s protagonist that “he moves from place to place and country to country ‘in acute anxiety,’ like a fever running its course.”