The Persistence of Memory

"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.".