The Quarry

November 29, 2004
In a bleak morality tale about a fugitive from justice, Galgut (The Good Doctor
) again demonstrates his flair for charting the vicissitudes of human despair in modern-day South Africa. After the unnamed, near-starving protagonist is picked up by a minister traveling to his next church post, he repays the holy man's generosity by murdering him. The desperado quietly slips into the minister's role and tries to assimilate into mainstream society, but his misdeeds continue to dog his every move. If Galgut's concise prose is nearly leached of emotion, it certainly sets the scene: "There was a film of dust on everything in the car as though it had been standing there for years. He stared ahead through the windscreen. There were the corpses of beetles shattered on the glass and their legs and feelers were composed in attitudes of violent expiry." With increasingly stomach-tightening intensity, Galgut chronicles his troubled protagonist's struggles to evade capture under the ever-watchful eye of the authorities in his new town. The suspenseful narrative never strays from the dreary force of its understated character development ("He reached out with his filthy, his bloody hands and began to eat without looking at them"). As the story builds to a climax, Galgut heightens the book's emotional power with tense one-page chapters until justice—cosmic justice, in this case—comes to call. Agent, Ira Silverberg, at Donadio & Olson.

February 1, 2005
Galgut's 2003 novel, The Good Doctor, was short listed for the Man Booker prize. This novella, originally published ten years ago in South Africa, is a minimalist, almost allegorical story of a man traversing a desolate, apocalyptic landscape. Apparently a fugitive wandering an unnamed landscape, the man meets up with a minister, murders him, and assumes his identity. The stark prose reflects the bleak countryside and sense of hopelessness that pervades the book and the dusty village where the man now resides. A rock quarry outside the village serves as a metaphor for moral and spiritual emptiness. It's also a pun, as the man becomes the prey of the local policeman who at first suspects and then relentlessly pursues him. Readers will be grateful for the novel's brevity, as its tension is nearly unbearable. Recommended for literary collections.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2004
The quarry is a place and a person, a pit and a fugitive, in this spare, intense story of rural South Africa. And the fugitive is murderer, victim, accused, minister, policeman, and judge. They all change roles, each one becomes the other, or seems to. In each stark vignette, it takes a few sentences to know whom " he "refers to, and it is easy to make a mistake. But that is the point. There is lots of action, including murders, a church fire, a court drama, a circus act, even an eclipse in the universe. But what holds the reader are the faint silhouettes on the road. As in Galgut's " The Good Doctor "(2003), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, his clear, elemental prose is never generic. First published in South Africa 10 years ago, this story is rooted in the veldt. But the fugitive who sits on the rocks "as if waiting for something" could be anywhere on the edge.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)