The Persistence of Memory - Tony Eprile

The Persistence of Memory - Tony Eprile - Double Storey - 2004 - 288pp - paperback shows slight shelf wear 

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.

Growing up white in the Johannesburg suburbs, Paul Sweetbread knows he is a typical liberal bystander who hates the apartheid atrocity but does nothing. He's busy with his own bildungsroman, and his wry narrative is as hilarious and anguished about himself as a fat Jewish sissy failure as he is about the political absurdity and racist monstrosity in public life. His period of army basic training in Namibia on the Angolan border comes close to farce--until the bumbling recruit not only witnesses a massacre but also unwittingly takes part in the killings. American readers may not get all the jokes, but the strangeness of bigotry, both crude and paternalistic, is universal, and Eprile's sly footnotes give context and history, including the fact that the U.S. was secretly involved in that border war. The riveting climax of the story is Paul's testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Is he just suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as his commander says? Is the revelation of horror "healing"? Does memory do more harm than good? Readers won't forget. Hazel Rochman