The Persistence of Memory

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In The Persistence of Memory, Tony Eprile fuses political and cultural satire with a coming-of-age story to render South Africa's turbulent past." "The novel opens in the early 1970s. Its hero, Paul Sweetbread, a young boy in Johannesburg's northern suburbs, discovers that he is endowed with the "poisoned gift" of a perfect memory. This is a dangerous thing to have in a society where the official story is everything. His teachers spout the government's sanitized version of history, and most of the white population seek safety in what Paul describes as the "national dysmnesia, the art of the rose-colored recall." By remembering, Paul finds himself unwittingly revealing the cruelties that underlie the pleasant blandness of suburban life in a time of political upheaval, the difficulties of being Jewish under Afrikaner nationalism, and the dark secret behind his father's tragic death. He is soon at odds with his authoritarian teachers, his schoolfellows, and even his doting mother, a character seemingly plucked out of a Checkhov story." "Following the completion of high school, Paul is conscripted into the South African army, and is soon plunged into the secret wars in the deserts between Namibia and Angola. Paul encounters the full range of human cruelty and discovers his own complicity in the political system he abhors. The brutal ramifications of his actions continue to haunt him, and, in one of the novel's most astonishing twists, Paul appears before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to reconcile his harrowing past and uncertain future." The novel provides a portrait of apartheid in its waning years. We see a South Africa that casts a dark reflection on the American heart that cannot be ignored.

FROM THE CRITICS

Frances Taliaferro - The Washington Post

Persistence is a richly imagined novel of growing up, its political revelations leavened by absurdist humor and social satire. Readers need not fear a political manifesto or a didactic experience: Like Candide, this novel records the natural shocks of a good-hearted youth as he learns the way of the world, but Persistence is no chilly fable. Even the cruelest or most ridiculous situations are tinged with the author's sympathy as he explores the absurdities of coming of age in a repressive society.

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. Agent, Faith Childs. (June) Forecast: Comparisons to Catch-22 are apt, and suggest the antic, if erratic, appeal of the novel, which lends itself neatly to handselling. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In his first novel, Eprile (Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories) recounts a young man's perceptions of his country, his family, and his life in turbulent South Africa. Paul Sweetbread is an agreeable but geeky kid who is blessed-or perhaps cursed-with a photographic memory that brings him only grief as he remembers traumatic events best forgotten. He comes of age during apartheid and has difficulty juxtaposing the elitist attitudes of his teachers and classmates with the poverty and oppression he sees in the black community. After graduating from high school, he joins the army, an experience filled with abuse, loneliness, and suffering (he is forced to participate in a horrific massacre as part of a secret war). Told with wry humor and heavy irony, this haunting story by a native South African details a young man's maturation in a difficult time and place, but it leaves the reader hoping that he will find happiness someday. For larger public libraries.-Kellie Gillespie, City of Mesa Lib., AZ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews