“The Persistence of Memory,” Tony Eprile’s first novel, portrays South Africa in metamorphosis, a country struggling to hold true to the promise of its new name: the rainbow nation. Forming part of an emerging canon of literature on the new South Africa, it adds an intelligent voice to the chorus of young writers wanting to contribute their memory to the developing South African reality.
These writers, already attracting a receptive new readership eager for uncensored accounts of the past decade of change, are relegating the old, done-to-death apartheid narratives to the archives of history.
The novel was the winner of the Koret Foundation’s Jewish Book Awards in fiction. The award will be presented at an invitation-only ceremony 7 p.m. Monday, April 11, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
In “The Persistence of Memory,” Paul Sweetbread, the complex protagonist, attempts to liberate his own personal story from other tendentious truths that threaten to overwrite his own memories.
During the apartheid era, Afrikaners under the National Party manipulated people’s memories through a systematic process of repression, censorship and propaganda.
This is echoed in Paul Sweetbread’s own life, in which his mother attempts to excise all memories of his late father. Paul, holding onto shards of private memories, realizes his father must have killed himself after his affair with their black servant came to light.
“The truth shall set you free” — the mantra of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (the unique legal mechanism devised by Desmond Tutu to liberate the fledgling nation from the hatred and conflicts of the past) becomes the backbone of Paul Sweetbread’s search for his own truth. In the end, his truth merges with the collective cry of thousands of previously unheard personal narratives.
Paul’s Jewishness, relevant to his inherent sense of being an outsider, certainly adds historical poignancy to the tale.
After an unhappy childhood spent in the thrall of the apartheid regime, an overprotective mother and the company of cruel schoolchildren who hound him much as Piggy is tormented in “Lord of the Flies,” Sweetbread gives in to inexorable destiny and finds himself conscripted into the South African army.
No longer tied to his mother’s apron strings, he finds himself in Southwest Africa during the secret war in Angola and Namibia. Noticed by his commanding officer, Capt. Lyddie (an Afrikaner Adonis who wants to disabuse the naive rifleman of his liberal notions), Paul is forced to witness gratuitous violence, including the half-drowning of an African child in front of his parents.
After this incident in a Himba village, Lyddie physically lays into Paul and then abandons him in the scorching Namibian landscape with the words: “I thought you loved the Kaffir like your brother. And you had a rifle with you too. You could have shot me and been a hero to the revolution. No, man, you’re a coward. That’s the real problem.”
Creating this type of everyman character adrift in a hostile landscape is the sort of obvious literary device that could draw criticism. But to be cynical about this book is to overlook its many beauties. The mistakes we make are often our most eloquent truths, and many memorable literary works are remembered precisely because of their flawed execution.
Aware that the search for truth is perhaps the “ultimate vanity,” Eprile attempts to present many truths in this remarkable piece of writing, which includes some passages of exquisitely crafted prose. Flawed, however, by an annoying verbosity bordering on preciousness, a preponderance of footnotes which, apart from belittling the reader’s imagination and intelligence, threaten to reduce parts of the work to academic tracts, and a heavy-handed sprinkling of polysyllabic words whose presence is possibly supposed to be mimetic of the clumsy main character, this book nevertheless has an arresting beauty and naivete that will accord it a place in the new generation of literature about the rainbow nation.
“The Persistence of Memory” by Tony Eprile (288 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., $24.95).