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The Persistence of Memory

by Tony Eprile

reviewed by Ben Oswest.

From the United States, an unexpected literary challenge has landed on South Africa’s doorstep, in the form of Tony Eprile’s novel, The Persistence of Memory. It was published in 2003 by WW Norton, and here by Double Storey in 2004. Eprile is an expatriate South African who now lives in the US state of Vermont, and it might be said that, as a future writer, he had one of the most auspicious upbringings South Africa could have bestowed: his father was an editor of Drum; he grew up in the company of the roisterous Matshikizas, Thembas and Nakasas; he can tell authentic stories about seeing Nelson Mandela during the furtive “Black Pimpernel” days. His novel’s title is thus something of a double entendre, referring not only to the “poisoned gift” of photographic memory which torments its main character, but also to the feelings of its author for the land of his birth.

Purchase a copy of The Persistence of Memory.

Eprile has lived in the US long enough - he emigrated in the 1980s - to take up two of its strongest literary traditions within this work: the War Novel and the Jewish Novel. Neither of these traditions obtain with any meaningful force in South Africa, a fact which comprises half of the challenge of Persistence to a South African readership. The other half of the challenge lies in the novel’s chief plot device, and the resolution Eprile scripts for it, and is perhaps less easily overcome than the adjustments which the American traditions require. But in sum Persistence is a serious novel written in fine and often very beautiful prose - and is a welcome, energetic augmentation to South Africa’s meandering post-democracy canon.

As Eprile himself acknowledges in the Afterword, much of the novel’s informing spirit is drawn from the same vein as, for instance, Catch-22. It is in its bulk a satire bred of the horrors of war. In Eprile’s case, the war in question is the veiled, late-1980s action in the deserts of Angola and Namibia, where SADF units - nominally governed by a cease-fire - engaged the MPLA as one of the world’s last proxy-Cold War battles ground to a halt.

In his book’s American edition, Eprile states that he believes this war deserves to be “better understood in the United States”. One of his intentions is to forward the Angola war in the mould of Vietnam, and to harness the power which this narrative provides, supplying the world’s largest consumer market for literature with a framework for understanding fiction set in a foreign, and not particularly literary place (notwithstanding the Gordimers, Coetzees and Brinks next door). That the Vietnam framework loses much of its meaning in South Africa does not, fortunately, limit the book’s chances of success here. The subject matter in itself is engrossing enough - the best approach is to give the musty notion of what constitutes South African writing a good airing, and read on.

Eprile’s hero is Paul Sweetbread, a loaded and unlikely name - no Sweetbreads in Cape Town’s White Pages, though you can place a call to the Sweetmans and Sweeloves - which creates an expectation of edgy, humorous surreality from the start. Paul is Jewish, and grows up in the company, and the socio-economic traditions, of fellow South African Jews. Or, rather, his upbringing is South African, but the stories of immigration and itinerancy, of prosperity and precarious assimilation which accompany his coming of age, owe a sizeable debt to Jewish writing in America - where the theorem that Jewish narratives can best portray the full range and colour of national life has arguably been proved by the likes of Bellow and Roth. But if, as with its War Novel underpinnings, the Jewish Novel element in Sweetbread’s story doesn’t sing in a particularly South African pitch, this, again, is no serious hindrance to the novel’s acceptance here. Sweetbread begins to acquire a life of his own, which is the best thing that can happen to a character inhabiting any literary tradition.

Tony Eprile was raised in a Jewish suburb of Johannesburg - Percy Yutar, the prosecutor in Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia Trial, was a neighbour, the proximity of the Eprile and Yutar families nicely encapsulating the larger liberal-conservative tensions within the community - and so is Paul Sweetbread. In high school he is socially ungainly (reads too much), plump (eats too much), and vexed by an unusual talent, the ability to recall any past moment of his life in perfect detail (remembers too much). This problem is perhaps best described in the negative: Sweetbread cannot forget anything, ever. Worse, when memories surface, so too, inextricably, do their original physical symptoms, and he blushes again, or breaks out in hives again, or faints again, and so on. This problem would seem an impassable minefield for a boy in puberty, but Sweetbread learns to cope, and begins to fashion a life for himself.

The formative stages of the plot are hitched to a prose style which is, unfortunately, belaboured. Eprile couldn’t help this. His first audience is American, and Americans don’t know South Africa. Redundant explanations thus abound - South African terms as basic as “rooibos tea” are introduced with quick definitions which, though meant to read seamlessly, more often stick out (one imagines the legion of red flags with which his American editor must have populated his original manuscript). Despite the fact that Double Storey has done some grooming in this area - as well as fixed a few krok Afrikaans phrases - South Africans will still find that Eprile states the obvious a touch too often.

Never mind. We are soon, all of us, in unfamiliar territory, the deep deserts of Namibia and Angola, where details are fresh and the narrative loses its stutter. Conscription disrupts Sweetbread’s life - he considers flight from South Africa, but ultimately acquiesces to the government’s plans for him. After boot camp he is deployed to a far outpost, where his culinary skills land him the job of camp chef - and where his memory, as ever, begins to record.

The pressures that come to bear on soldiers’ minds, during war, are well-documented. War is vivid; normal life is dull. Soldiers feel alive during war, and dead during peace. Not even someone whose every moment remains as vivid and alive as the last - forever - is immune to this effect of war, and it is here, with Sweetbread shuttled between a thick storm of violence and brutality, and the lull of everyday troepie life, that a question mark appears over Eprile’s choice of plot devices. Sweetbread’s fatal flaw, his persistent memory, begins to look superfluous. It becomes clear to the reader that the path of Sweetbread’s life, and the moments that he narrates as most important to him, could have played out in exactly the same way without the extra decoration of his photographic memory.

All our memories are, in fact, persistent - and the notion that Sweetbread, in his hauntedness, is really quite normal by South African standards, threatens to undermine Eprile’s “gift” to him. The photographic memory becomes a contrivance, a distraction, not the key to the novel which its author first proposes. Sweetbread is psychologically maimed by a series of episodes involving a pathological superior of his, which culminate in an illegal massacre of MPLA soldiers returning home after a UN-brokered peace. He suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, gradually recovers, and begins to rebuild his life. This is a compelling story which is beautifully told, and needs no crutch to support it, which, nevertheless, the extraordinary memory provides.

Thankfully, soon after Sweetbread’s rehabilitation, Eprile puts this seeming crutch to ingenious use, which then, if only momentarily, recovers its former supremacy as the novel’s driving force. Sweetbread is set to appear at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where his memory of what happened in the desert will be directly challenged by his sadistic former commander. Leave aside the fact that the TRC did not delve too deeply, in real-life, into the history of Sweetbread’s war. When the shy, funny and hopelessly normal man takes the stand, it is to make as powerful a statement on the random and meaningless violence that war perpetrates as seems possible in fiction. The effect of truth that is produced here, in this fictional TRC moment, is marshalled precisely by Eprile’s perseverance with his main character’s oddity, his fatal flaw. For we know that what Sweetbread remembers is true, by default - and the fate of his truth, more than that of Sweetbread himself, is suddenly what’s most important to us. This is Eprile’s finest moment as a debut novelist.

It is also, no surprise, his novel’s climax. What follows Sweetbread’s testimony remains acutely interesting, but not for the reasons Eprile might wish. The twin American traditions which sustained his narrative until now - the War Novel, the Jewish Novel - dramatically fall away in the final few dozen pages, and with them go the satire, the sense of less-than-perfect situatedness brought about by being Jewish in South Africa, and all need for the “fatal flaw” plot device. In their place? - a new framework, one which is ironically all-too familiar to a South African readership. Sweetbread steps into a mawkish pastiche of New South African idealism, in which, for instance, jolly Afrikaners sponsor rounds of beer for their adventurous African boets in neighbourhood bars. Persistence’s South African audience suddenly has the upper hand on its US counterpart. This storyline, which doubtless seems novel and encouraging there, is wearyingly familiar territory here - and the moments which Eprile chooses to close his book may even, in today’s South Africa, be said to carry an anachronistic tarnish.

The Persistence of Memory won the Koret Jewish Book Award, as well as acclaim in the LA Times, the Washington Post, and - a crowning achievement in the US - the New York Times Book Review. It is, despite a conspiracy between competing readerships, different literary traditions, and a less-than-completely sturdy plot device, a remarkable success of a novel, which clambers into the reader’s memory, and heart, and remains there. It is a work of true grit - of fidelity to art and the author’s privately-held, personal South Africa. It is welcome to stay.