Damon Galgut, "The Lover"

A South African guy travels though Africa and hangs out with Europeans.

(from The Paris Review, #187)

In a few ways, this reminded me of another Damon Galgut story, “The Follower,” published in The Paris Review in 2005. (I wrote about it here.) Both stories concerned relatively wealthy white South African men traveling around with no set schedule and sparking up befuddling relationships with European men. Both, also, perform an interesting literary trick, switching between first person and third, sometimes mid-sentence, without making me wanna barf a scarf. Galgut’s got skills, and while I didn’t care much for his rare deviations into abstraction, I found myself pleased that the journey and the story kept going, page after page, country after country, in a decidedly imperfect arc. Which was perfect.
You can read a little bit of this story here.

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