The Persistence of Memory: A Novel - Softcover

Eprile, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327221 ISBN 13: 9780393327229

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

"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." Reading group guide included.

About this title

About the Author:

Tony Eprile is the author of Temporary Sojourner & Other South African Stories, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He grew up in South Africa and lives in Bennington, Vermont.

From Publishers Weekly:

A South African man with an inconvenient near-photographic memory is the protagonist of this gently satirical novel chronicling the injustices of the secret 1980s wars in Namibia and Angola. As a boy, Paul Sweetbread is fat and sensitive, the Jewish son of an exterminator father and temperamental mother. After doing poorly at his local university, Paul enlists in the army. Although he has all manner of comrades, from the scholarly and cynical Roelof to his cocky and demanding semimentor Captain Lyddie, Paul's corpulence often makes him the butt of jokes. He eventually becomes part of an army filming crew, capturing several scandalously violent battle episodes on film. Paul's version of the events he witnesses—most notably the unnecessary massacre of a group of homeward-bound soldiers after a cease-fire has been decreed—is called into question at a trial before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where a psychiatrist from Paul's childhood cartoonishly appears to pronounce his old patient unstable, and Captain Lyddie, too, stands against him. But Paul is a survivor, and he bobs up again, finally embarking on a civilian life that promises to be more placid. Eprile sometimes gets carried away on the tide of his acrobatic, erudite prose, but this is a clever, bitingly human bildungsroman.
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393327221
• ISBN 13: 9780393327229
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304