The Quarry

By Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut stepped prominently onto the international stage with the publication of The Good Doctor He has been compared to J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad, but his voice is truly his own. .The Quarry written ten years ago but never before published outside South Africa, is a stark, intense, and crystalline novel in which human nature is set against the desolate backdrop of rural South Africa.

On a lonely stretch of road a man picks up a hitchhiker. The driver is a minister on his way to a new congregation in an isolated village and the passenger is a nameless fugitive from justice. When the minister realizes this, and confronts his passenger as they are overlooking an empty quarry, the fugitive kills him and assumes his vestments and identity, only to discover that one of his first duties as the new minister is to bury the body of his victim. Despite hints that two local petty criminals may be responsible, the local police chief is watching the new minister, and as the two play a tense game of cat and mouse,culminating in a desperate pursuit across the veldt, Damon Galgut gives us a spare, devastating combat for man’s most prized attribute: freedom.,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781551994512

Damon Galgut

DAMON GALGUT was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry and The Good Doctor. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Damon Galgut lives in Cape Town.

Reviews for The Quarry

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Written in a minimalist style that's somewhat reminiscent of Hemingway, this is a quiet tale that, at the same time, carries with it an urgency and a weight. Even now, I'm finding it hard to know what to say about it. On one hand, I feel unfinished--though the story is done and the ending chapter was gorgeous, and finishing, I still want to know more of what the characters were thinking, feeling, experiencing, and where they'd come from. I want to know what was going on between the lines, between the chapters, and more of what drove the inertia that seemed so inevitable, and so incredibly simple, though it was anything but the last. At the same time, much of the beauty of this small book comes in Galgut's paring down of a world to moments and to small decisions and interactions, and in his careful language, simple and straightforward and minimalist as it is.I'll read more by Galgut. I may re-read this one, even.

[tinwara · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the strangest book by Damon Galgut that I have read so far. It is strong in its atmosphere of oppression, fear, strangeness. But I found the story hard to grasp and I can't really figure out what Galgut wants to say with it. Then again, I love the way Galgut uses the English language, the beautiful sentences and the images the novel evokes.

[herschelian · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really couldn't get the hang of this book, it was weird and I wasn't sure what the author was trying to say, but I think it is meant to be a parable. Basically, it is about a nameless man who kills a religious minister who had been on his way to take up a new post in a nearby town. The nameless man puts on his victim's clothes and steals his identity. His first task as the new minister is to conduct a burial for a body that has been discovered close to a disused quarry.

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Damon Galgut's genius is stunningly developed and on full display in rich and complex novels like The Imposter and The Good Doctor. In these books he creates compelling drama by placing a protagonist, whose moral compass drifts as circumstances change, into a situation that is morally ambiguous to start with and becomes more so as the story progresses. The Quarry is similar but the characters and situations remain sketchy throughout. The novel begins with an unnamed man wandering along a road in a harsh, unforgiving landscape. Whatever quest he is on is left unspecified, though we learn before too long that he is a criminal on the run from the authorities. When he encounters a minister who is driving to a town to take up a new post, we can almost predict what is going to happen. He murders the minister, buries the body in a disused quarry and assumes the man's identity (and ministry). From this point the story mostly concerns itself with retribution, and when events conspire to expose him, the man once again goes on the run. The primary weakness of this book is glaring. Galgut never attempts to place his characters in a broader emotional context. The outpost town where the central action takes place is filled with loners and misfits, all of whom remain shadowy and emotionally distant from the reader. The only hints of human empathy arise between Valentine and Small, two petty thieves who are brothers. If the novel is compelling at all, it is because of the terse language that Galgut employs to effectively evoke a uniquely desolate South African landscape. That said, even a second tier novel by Damon Galgut is more interesting than most other writer's successful novels. The Quarry, impeccably written and maddeningly enigmatic, is a confident work by a writer who knows how to use story and language in painterly fashion to create the effect he wants. The problem is that in this case the effect he wants is one that will leave some readers cold.