Forster’s first trip to India, in 1912, out of which came Forster’s masterpiece, “ A Passage to India.” Like a number of early-twentieth-century novels (“Howards End” and “Brideshead Revisited” come to mind, along with “To the Lighthouse”), “The Promise” turns on the question of a house and its land (in this case, the Swart family farm), and who will live in it, inherit it, redeem it. Galgut’s work has often demonstrated an appreciation of modernist techniques and emphases his previous novel, “ Arctic Summer” (2014), gently fictionalized E. M.

Coetzee once argued that South African literature is a “literature in bondage,” because a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life.) “The Promise” is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise.” The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the eighties, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s Presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability. Yet Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, “ The Promise” (Europa), suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. In scope, seriousness, and experimental ambition, modernist writing like Woolf’s sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental epoch, a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in literature’s regenerative power. The house has come to represent a country and an era, and the novelist, who has become nothing less than time itself, rides the winds of history.

Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane”) and gravely allegorical: the First World War sends out its tremors, characters die offstage, the sea boils with blood, the house almost falls but is finally saved. The writing is both domestically meticulous (“The swallows nested in the drawing-room. . . . In its famous middle section, “Time Passes,” Woolf describes how a decade elapses in an uninhabited country house, as the wallpaper peels away, the books rot, and the animals come to stay. Dalloway” appeared in 1925 two years later, in “ To the Lighthouse,” Woolf would slice through her characters and even more flagrantly stand outside them and look on. It’s an even better description of how Woolf writes-how she passes between and beyond her characters, their anima and ghost, immanent and posthumous at once. Dalloway thinks of herself, early in Virginia Woolf’s novel. She sliced like a knife through everything at the same time was outside, looking on.” This is how Mrs.

“She felt very young at the same time unspeakably aged.

Damon galgut the promise